"But trying to make sense of the movie’s [Wild At Heart] story as a mystery, or even as a plot in any ordinary sense, is ultimately to play a fool’s game. Lynch uses Gifford’s novel (with kinky additions) chiefly as an armature and a come-on for a series of lurid imaginings, an anthology of shocks and conceits that is tied to a plot only in the sense that a boat is moored to a dock."