"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."
The dialogue first emits from the mouth of a child, in Wild Palms, installment 3; and concludes the chapter as a button from the hapless protagonist and father of the same kid.
"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."
The child is running a fever when he says it. The father is having a panic attack as his life collapses into weirdness.
Bruce Wagner is The Weirdest. He's been an influence on my life longer than David Lynch, possibly, if one discounts Dune. I first encountered Wild Palms in the back of Details magazine, reading it in the hair salon my aunt Edwina (remember her?) used to attend every Saturday. I fell in love with the art immediately-- not least for its "adult" content. There was a perverse thrill to reading about sex around all these adults spending most of their time pretending sex doesn't exist. That Wild Palms had an absurdist, grotesque fascination with violence didn't hurt, either.
And then Twin Peaks happened, and Details didn't serialize Wild Palms with regularity, so I never got to finish it. I remember there being a trade paperback on the shelves in bookstores at the mall, and I'd leaf through it, scrying for the slightest suggestion of fucking-- but I didn't read it. I honestly knew more about the plot of Wild Palms from its teevee incarnation, than its origin as a comic book serial.
My teen PTSD was such that cause & effect kind of didn't exist in relation to one another. Unless directly addressed, I couldn't make certain connections on my own. I didn't recognize that the Wild Palms teevee miniseries 'Movie Event' was an adaptation. I remember being excited that Ernie Hudson was in it, because the black Ghostbuster was my favourite. I knew Jim Belushi from the movie 'Real Men'. But as a comix-cultural moment, Wild Palms didn't register. The cast was too insanely large and the plot was half-there as something a casual viewer could isolate & identify. There was something about teevee tech, Cronenbergian vibes, and there were occult themes (an occult brotherhood, abductions, enigmatic tattoos) but as to what was HAPPENING, it was all over the place.
Which is why I couldn't really trace the comix incarnation in Details, honestly. Because it ran in two-page instalments, and anyone who's ever been in a hairdresser's salon knows there aren't three consecutive months of *any* magazine in the house. But that art, that art, that art...
"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."
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