Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) in David Lynch’s The Straight Story
I didn’t know what to write about David Lynch. Sure, I knew that I had to write something in tribute to our preeminent filth elder (tied with John Waters)—the dreams of Filthy Dreams. But…what? Scroll through this website’s archives and you’ll already find pages upon pages penned on the man, his quinoa recipe, his paintings that look like the Band-Aids gummed up in an above-ground swimming pool trap, his admirable late-career singing-and-dancing monkey film noir short, his most recent project, the wispy album with collaborator Chrystabell, and the exhaustive episode-by-episode series on the phenomenal Twin Peaks: The Return. The weekly experience of the latter, a gift twenty-five years in the making, may still be my favorite and most meaningful interaction with art.
So, what now? Do I, as my immediate impulse told me, watch, listen, and read everything Lynch ever produced, only then return to write a 20,000-word screed about how he permitted us to “go dreamy”? Toss aside what any reader would ever want to endure and spend the year meticulously revisiting every film? Go to the IFC Theater to see Inland Empire on the big screen yet again, stare blankly into meager gritty remains of road dirt-sooty NYC snow, pretend I’m Laura Dern in Poland, and gush about the transformative experience? Pen a list of everyday objects, sights, and sounds that I can no longer witness without thinking of Lynch like train whistles, red curtains, cherry pie and black coffee, Pabst Blue Ribbon, lamps with red shades, a person leering from behind a dumpster (not an uncommon occurrence in NYC), owls, the yellow line in the middle of the road, factories, record needles, dreams, and, most importantly, the subtle menace of ceiling fans? Do I watch all the YouTube weather reports? Get really into transcendental meditation and try to find my own big fish? Eat two cookies and a Coke or his daily tomato, tuna, feta, and olive oil lunch? Jet off to Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank for a Filthy Dreams on Location? Or just make a playlist? None of this seemed right or sufficient. Yes, even the playlist.
When the news broke about Lynch’s death, after an afternoon flying through the entire stages of grief roster, I put on Eraserhead. To my own surprise. Obviously, Lynch’s head-popping trip through the gnawing frayed anxiety and body horror of being a man with both a young family and a sex drive is not only a classic but remains highly influential in all disciplines. (The most recent disciple being Ethel Cain’s Perverts, which plunges listeners into a similar wind-whipping and whirring abyss as Eraserhead’s bleak and all-encompassing sound design). Even so, Eraserhead remains the movie I struggle with the most out of Lynch’s canon. Blame it on the baby. When that degloved choking and coughing, eyeball-whirling, and pox-sprouting creature appears, its internal organs swaddled in bandages, I want to dry heave, shudder, and reach for the remote. Not because it’s bad per se, but the baby rattles me to my very core on a visceral and primordial level, which probably relates to some deeply held fear of motherhood (Freud, figure it out). And I won’t even go into the damned infant’s foaming and blood-spewing grand finale. HURRRK! As much as I adore the sperm-stomping Lady in the Radiator and her siren promise of heaven and the industrial desolation of Lynch’s reimagined Philly, it always leaves me cold.
It’s not for lack of trying. Every few years, I return to the 1977 film hoping to one day join its decades-long midnight movie fandom. The same cannot be said for the one Lynch movie I’ve (too) long ignored: 1999’s The Straight Story. Though well-received by critics at the time of its release, mostly, I assume, because they were relieved Lynch finally made something that wasn’t batshit crazy, unlike the previous subjectivity-switching LA sex-and-death-fest with a dash of Robert Blake, Lost Highway, The Straight Story now gets second billing (or even lower) in Lynch’s filmography. It’s rarely ever included in those always well-attended Lynch theatrical screenings, even the many that have cropped up in various theaters after his death. I’ve noticed! JUSTICE FOR THE STRAIGHT STORY!
Alvin (Richard Farnsworth) and Rose (Sissy Spacek) in The Straight Story
In some ways, overlooking The Straight Story is easy to do. The film is a comparatively simple tale based on a true story about an ailing 73-year-old World War II veteran, Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), who rides his small, humble John Deere lawn mower from Laurens, Iowa to Mount Zion, Wisconsin to visit his estranged brother Lyle (the always wonderful Harry Dean Stanton), who suffered a stroke. The only Lynch film not written by Lynch himself (instead by Mary Sweeney and John Roach), this is a literal straight story. There’s no shock and awe; no nitrous-huffing nymphos or closet-peering voyeurs; no brutal fucking murder or coke-snorting prom queens wrapped in plastic washing up on shore; no atomic bombs or garmonbozia; no shifting dimensions after peering through a cigarette burn or walking through a red curtain; no random appearance of Glinda the Good Witch or characters bursting into Roy Orbison tunes; and absolutely no nonlinear mind melts. If you’re wondering: why would I want that?! If I put on Lynch, I want to be confused, scared, and existentially terrorized, contemplating the dark underbelly of pristine Americana or even dimmer, Los Angeles! I hear you. I, also being an edgelord at heart, felt very much the same way, speed-reading through the sections on the film in some of my David Lynch Bibles, Lynch on Lynch and Room to Dream, and dismissing a Lynch movie rated that dreaded neuter letter, G, a grade that even he couldn’t believe (In Room to Dream, Lynch recalls saying, “You have to tell me that again!”). However, after watching The Straight Story post-Lynch’s death, boy, was I wrong! In fact, I owe Lynch, in spirit, a groveling apology. I repent! Not only is The Straight Story worthy of being placed alongside the rest of Lynch’s universally unmissable movies, but the intensely moving, tender film might be his masterpiece.
The floating opening of The Straight Story isn’t all that far removed from the spacey intro of Eraserhead. Lynch takes us on a soaring odyssey from the starlit sky, upon which the opening credits are projected, fading into a swirl of farm fields mowed by plows to the water tower and looming grain elevators of Laurens, Iowa. This sets the stage for the intersection of the celestial, mechanical, and natural that traverses the film. Yet, the gliding trip quickly crashes down with a thud. The story begins with Alvin collapsing on the floor off-screen in his home. Rather than showing viewers his tumble, Lynch fixates on Dorothy (Jane Galloway Heitz), Alvin’s chubby neighbor, who sunbathes on her front lawn with a ratty reflector. She cheerfully greets Alvin’s adult daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek) before returning to munching on a plate of Sno-balls and, what looks to be, French fries, a stomach-churning combo. Dorothy is so into stuffing her face with those puffy, pink, mass-produced pastries that she doesn’t hear Alvin’s fall. Instead, it takes one of his local bar buddies to check on him out of concern about his absence. Stomping over to Alvin’s, he finds the man prone on the floor: “What the hell is going on here? What the goll darn hell are you doing on the floor? You nuts?!” Hearing the commotion, Dorothy joins in, panicking, “What’s the number for 9-1-1?!” Rose, then, returns to stammer out: “What have you done to my dad?” To which his buddy huffs, “Oh, for cry-yay.” That folksy line alone, not to mention the entire chaotically hilarious scene, should be enough to prove that The Straight Story is still pure, unadulterated David Lynch.
Alvin hits the road
After his fall, Alvin grudgingly visits a doctor where he brushes off warnings about his hip, eyes, early stages of emphysema, circulation problems, and his diet with an obstinate: “No operation…no walker…no tests! And I’m not paying for no X-rays!” Accepting a second cane rather than a walker, Alvin struggles out with the warning: “If you don’t make some changes quickly, there’ll be some serious consequences.” Alvin doesn’t seem to care, lighting up a cigar. He’s content to shuffle off into that good night his own way, pleasantly watching a lightning storm with Rose at home with tears in his eyes. This stasis, however, is broken when Rose receives a call that his brother Lyle, with whom he hasn’t spoken in a decade, had a devastating stroke. Determined to visit Lyle, Alvin stubbornly commits to ride his trusty Rehds lawn mower—later switching to a 1966 John Deere thanks to a familiar face, Big Ed Hurley’s Everett McGill, here playing a good-natured tractor salesman—all the way to Lyle’s, just a short 240-mile jaunt down the road. Alvin selected this unusual mode of transport because he cannot drive and hates it when other people drive him. And he won’t hear anyone’s lip about it! Lynch described Alvin as a rebel in the mode of “James Dean except he was old—other than that, he was a rebel who did things his own way…” Yet I see Alvin more as a cowboy figure, one of those rugged, individualistic, masculine characters out of a John Ford flick, evidenced by the nearly permanent cowboy hat plopped on his head when not blown off by a passing semi.
The Straight Story, too, is a kind of Western road movie as Alvin chugs through the breathtaking expanses of the Midwestern rural countryside, which appear ripped from tourism ads for Iowa and Wisconsin (I’m ready to go!). The gorgeous views of America’s heartland become even more romantic when paired with Angelo Badalamenti’s also uncharacteristic score, switching out his trademark synths for sweeping strings and a dash of country swing. The sheer awe of the landscape balances the purposefully unhurried pacing as Alvin crawls down the road at just 5 miles an hour, his speed indicated by the slowed passing of the road’s yellow lines that contrast with the speeding velocity of the beginning of Lost Highway.
Alvin in his Midwestern glory
As Alvin rides during the day and camps out at night, most of the action in the film comes from the kind-hearted kooks he meets along the way. This includes a pregnant hitchhiking runaway, who joins Alvin’s campfire for a weiner dinner, a gaggle of cyclists racing down the highway, who embrace Alvin as a heroic grandfatherly figure, a former John Deere worker whose family takes Alvin in after his broken lawnmower flies down a hill, past a team of firefighters practicing a drill on a flaming house, and a pair of bickering twin lawnmower repairmen. Most of these people help Alvin out—or simply share a meal. In return, Alvin offers his hard-won wisdom, whether about the unbreakable bonds of family (like a bundle of sticks) or aging (“The worst part of getting old is rememberin’ when you was young”). In these characters—and their interactions, there lies the stilted humor, unyielding weirdness, and wholesome quirkiness beloved in Lynch’s other projects, most obviously in the lighter moments in Twin Peaks.
This isn’t to say that the typical Lynchian darkness isn’t here. It is, but almost entirely off-screen, only discussed in dialogue—Alvin’s struggle with alcoholism and his Cain and Abel battle with Lyle, the horrors of war through Alvin and another elderly veteran Verlyn’s (Wiley Harker) traumatic memories of their long gone “buddies,” and the pain that families can inflict on each other imbued in the unspoken fears of the pregnant runaway. The only time this darkness rises to the surface is perhaps the most alarming and amusing scene in the film in which Alvin witnesses a woman smash into a buck that appears out of nowhere. In a screeching rant delivered with manic hysteria worthy of a Mink Stole character, the woman, only credited as “Deer Woman,” howls:
“I’ve tried driving with my lights on, I’ve tried sounding my horn, I scream out the window, I roll the window down and bang on the side of the door and play Public Enemy real loud! I have prayed to St. Francis of Assisi, St. Christopher too-what the heck! I’ve tried everything a person can do, and still, every week, I plow into at least one deer! I have hit thirteen deer in seven weeks driving down this road, mister! And I have to drive down this road!”
Ho-oook! Rattled as she zooms off, tires squealing, Alvin makes do, using the roadkill for dinner while, amusingly, trying to ignore the blank, judgmental glares of the decoy deer lining a field where he sets up camp. Even so, the most unnerving part of The Straight Story is its lack of unnerving scenes, which made me nervous the closer and closer Alvin got to his destination. For instance, as he finally crossed the Mississippi River, looking down at that metal bridge, I felt an overwhelming sense of anxiety that he wouldn’t make it.
But nothing horrible does happen. This isn’t that kind of movie. Instead, The Straight Story is a modern American myth or even a near-religious parable about family and forgiveness—the plodding lawn mower journey itself is a type of extended repentance. It’s also about the kindness of strangers and the goodness of Americans. If this seems “little c” conservative to you, yes, in some ways it is. But highlighting the good doesn’t mean the bad doesn’t exist. We can all hold two thoughts in our minds at once (can’t we?). As Lynch said, “Maybe the people in this story seem saintly, but we’re seeing only a part of them in one specific circumstance, and this doesn’t mean The Straight Story is the truth about the Midwest, or that Dorothy Vallens [from Blue Velvet] is the truth about all women. A slice can ring true, but it’s not the whole truth.”
Alvin (Richard Farnsworth) and Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) meet again
In the hands of lesser talents, though, this slice would be cheesy as fuck. That it’s not is a testament to the emotional connection that Lynch and his star Farnsworth forge with the audience. Farnsworth, who was already living with terminal cancer while filming this movie, plays Alvin with so much empathetic realism that you feel for every time he has to get off his trailer, find his two canes, and lope his way into solving a problem (often with others’ assistance). Lynch’s capacity for cinematic empathy is usually pointed out in reference to The Elephant Man but can be witnessed in all of his movies, from Laura Palmer’s suffering and redemption in Fire Walk with Me to Nikki Grace/Sue Blue’s various trials in Inland Empire. In interviews, Lynch spoke about getting the emotions right in The Straight Story: “Emotion is a thing that cinema can really communicate, but it’s tricky. The balancing of elements is critical. A little too much of something and you kill the emotion; too little of something else and it just doesn’t happen. In The Straight Story, the challenge was all about trying to find that tender balancing point.” He nailed it as far as I’m concerned.
When Alvin makes it to Lyle’s ramshackle house, he hollers out to his brother twice, the second time with a pained “Lyle?” as if he’s worried he’s too late. Pregnant with meaning, his delivery reminded me of Lynch’s choked-up analysis of Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, which has circulated the Internet alongside many other tributes. Like that Christmas classic, only the most hard-hearted wouldn’t melt down at Alvin’s fearful call to his brother (as Lynch himself mentioned weeping in the editing room). I know I did—not just due to the poignant scene itself but when the brothers finally look up at the stars (strangely in daylight), ending that the one Lynch movie I had left to discover, it felt like a goodbye.