Clawing the air with Halloween-orange fingernails and smearing her face with lipstick, she creates an ugly caricature of the Wicked Witch of the West. The movie spells out its Wizard of Oz allusions in neon-in a fantasy sequence, Ladd's Marietta literally rides a broomstick. Lynch is more interesting when he does not show his hand so clearly. Wild at Heart has an intricate plot, which leaves its ragged threads in a squalid Texas town called Big Tuna. And it has a redemptive ending that could have been hatched on Hollywood Boulevard. But the movie's power lies in its cryptic, episodic nature. Lynch deals out scenes and characters like tarot cards, with comedy and horror changing faces in a flash. The story sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. But the narrative is just a device to trigger the images, which have a rhapsodic beauty-their inexplicable magic is the real substance of Lynch's film-making.

Lynch, who has an art-school background, brings a level of abstraction to the screen that sets him apart from most American film-makers. Although he patronizes his characters-Sailor and Lula's love is a brainless passion-his actors speak of him with reverence. "He is very much like a painter or a sculptor with his directing," said Cage. "He mixes the absurd, the scary and the pure." Wearing a chunky skull-ring and a maroon silk jacket with a matching hat when he spoke to Maclean's, Cage appeared as outrageous as Sailor himself. In fact, the snakeskin jacket worn by his character came from the actor's own wardrobe. And like Sailor, Cage chainsmokes. Despite the horror that Lynch brings to the screen, the director creates a lighthearted atmosphere on the set, according to Cage. "He's one of the only directors I know how can say, the later and colder it gets, `Hey guys, let's have more fun.'" Added Cage: "He's extremely positive, and light on his feet-he floats. He's very spontaneous. A script at the beginning of the day will look different at the end." Dern spoke with similar enthusiasm. "David makes every movie experience Disneyland," she said. "Everyone has a blast. It's a family doing its work together-David never exploits." Even Dern's mother, who seems so humiliated in Wild at Heart, is lavish in her praise of the director. Ladd said that Lynch, aware that she did not like Blue Velvet, sent her the Wild at Heart script via Dern with the message "You tell your mother this will play hot and sexy." Working with the director was "a great experience," she added. "He does not betray trust. He never raised his voice on the set. I never heard him utter a curse word." Considering the extreme profanity of the script, that is remarkable.

For his part, Lynch draws a fastidious line between life and art. "For me, films are not real," he said. "They are like reality set apart. You go into a dark room to have an experience that you get nowhere else." However, he added, he bases his art on the "absurdity, darkness and confusion" of human behavior. Lynch still works on the margins of Hollywood-no major studio dared to back Wild at Heart, which was made on a relatively modest $10-million budget. But, in his own fashion, Lynch has created a funhouse-mirror image of the Hollywood formula. As Dern pointed out, "It has sex, violence, music, family, buddies, and it's a road picture-hell, it's got it all." Indeed, Lynch claims to be more typical of mainstream America than he might seem. "The American public is surreal and they understand it," he said. "The idea that they don't is absurd."

In many respects, Lynch could be considered the new Andy Warhol. Like the American prince of pop art, who died in 1987, he explores the lurid and the sensational with voyeuristic detachment. Like Warhol, he is an artistic revolutionary with the political outlook of a conservative. Like Warhol, he makes a perverse fetish of the normal. And he has even created a nerd-like mystique for himself-the press kit for Wild at Heart offers just one line of biography under the name David Lynch: "Eagle Scout, Missoula, Montana."

There is one scene in the movie where Lula, lamenting the state of the ozone layer, says, "One day, the sun's going to come up and drive a hole clean through the planet like an electrical X-ray." Lynch's lens is a little like that sun, burning through the white skin of middle-class American culture with a beautiful, dangerous heat. Whether Wild at Heart's voodoo is the work of a shaman or a shamartist, it amazes and disturbs with stunning effect. If Lynch's aim is effect for effect's sake, the ultimate joke may be on those trying to figure him out. It is an engrossing game-for now. But if David Lynch is going to go the distance, he will, like the Wizard of Oz, have to step out from behind the wildness and show some heart.