I always found it funny that the one Lynch film that won a Palme d'Or is the least easy to view.
I would but I'm a little wary of starting a thread that leads to conjecture about 'what DL thinks about gays', which isn't where I meant to go. Just more of a gripe I've wanted to express about this particular film. But we can steer it there if anyone else is roused to discussion on the topic.
My experience with Tulpa so far is that everyone's civil, so I wouldn't be afraid to bring up the potentially incendiary. I've made a few posts that I was afraid could spin out into something heated, and likely would have elsewhere, but everyone is open-minded here seems to me. Maybe a more general thread about WAH's qualities would be more apropos?
Anyway, I guess I'm roused (so feel free mods to spin this off into a thread). I'm gay myself and have never felt there to be anything overtly, negatively homophobic in WAH, not that I'm the grand marshal of what is or isn't offensive, but my tolerance for what I take as outright homophobia is pretty low. I think there's a stark difference between a film itself being homophobic versus having homophobic characters, and I don't see anything wrong with the latter.
As for WAH, is it just the slur to the punks at the end? I always took that as a weird bit of character development because Sailor, after his epiphany, apologizes immediately and uses the more correct 'homosexual.' You could argue it remains, even post-epiphany, un-PC, as it frames the accusation or state of being no matter the terms as itself offensive, but I'm not sure I'd say that isn't itself without self-conscious irony, or that even if it were a band of gays that Sailor wouldn't in some like fashion treat them with epiphany-induced wholesomeness, the same way Cooper (against some expectation) took Denise in stride.
I'd argue Wild at Heart hasn't aged poorly, and it's more like it had already been in poor taste at the time; contemporary reviews reacted negatively to the opening, brutal murder being a black man at the hands of a white man, for instance. As a director, if you were conscious (or cared at all) even to a fraction of a degree of what might read as implicit racism, that's the last way you would start your film. But I think WAH is intentionally unhinged and stacked with abhorrent characters foregrounding an erratic backdrop of crazed society. In that case, I think it's aged into itself. I watched it last year and related to it more than ever, all the tone of confusion of everyone and everything. Sailor & Lula strike me as incredibly ordinary even today; I have relatives that say worse things than anything they might say and, just like them, I wouldn't chalk it up to them being mere bad eggs.