"What kind of pickup was it?"
That line is the setup for the biggest laugh in
The Straight Story, and maybe the biggest laugh I've ever gotten from a Lynch film.
I pulled
The Straight Story our of order, watching it ahead of
Lost Highway, because of an idea that
Highway and
Mulholland Drive are giong to have significant commonalities that aren't shared with the intervening film.
Multiple commenters have referred to
The Straight Story as un-Lynchian in subject matter and even much less than normally Lynchian in presentation, with punning nods to the layered meaning of the title, one of them supposedly being that in telling the story of Alvin Straight, Lynch has also chosen to "play it straight" for once in his career.
Ehhh, not so much. For one thing, there's a reading of the film - that I won't go into, but you can find the link on the movie's Wikipedia page if you really care - that puts together a fair amount of information to suggest that another layer of the film's title is deceitful: Alvin Straight, through the movie, tells various strangers pieces of the story of his life, but the pieces don't actually fit. When you go back and reconsider the film with all the information you have by its end, contradictions emerge: the story Straight tells doesn't add up - it isn't (excuse me) straight. He's eliding a great deal, especially, this reading has it, his own agency in a domestic tragedy that he speaks of relatively early on, in which "someone should've been watching," but wasn't. The someone was him.
I suspect that this reading is accurate and that the film's script can in fact be decoded for clues to understand more about who Alvin Straight really was, and I suspect that such detective work would be more fruitful than in other of Lynch's works, but I think it's equally beside the point. The purpose of
The Straight Story's narrative isn't to provide a mystery for the attentive viewer to unlock - to challenge the implicit flatness of the film's title, affect, and Iowan landscape - but like everything else Lynch has done, it's foremost to provide an experience for the viewer to take in as he goes along. Alvin Straight's contradictory reminiscences, if detected, create a subcurrent of unease that, really, is incidental compared to the more central mystery of the film. Why does Straight decide that he absolutely must journey under his own power to see his brother, even though the limitations of his own power (he cannot drive, he will not accept a ride, he does not care for public transportation) mean that an automobile trip of one day's hard drive takes him six weeks atop a lawn mower (a lawn mower slowed down [!] by the weight of dragging Straight's jury-rigged trailer). The orneriness of an old country man doesn't really suffice for answer, here.
Now, it's necessary to observe that the film is "based on a true story," because there was a real Alvin Straight who spent weeks atop a lawn mower travelling from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit a brother laid low by a stroke. I'm not especially interested in trying to find out how much of the script's detail was drawn directly from the true story (although supposedly the film shoot did follow the actual path the real Straight took), and I imagine that a lot of it is fabricated. Straight was already dead when the movie was made, and while the screenwriters interviewed his family members, they apparently didn't really know much of what transpired, either. (The
Straight Story is the first and only Lynch film not written by the director himself, but one of its cowriters, Mary Sweeney, was Lynch's longtime editor, producer, and [romantic] partner; they married
and divorced in 2006.) Perhaps I'm wrong and indeed the negative tones - both overt and covert - came from the family, but there are some revelations in the film that they probably could not have known. In any case, I would argue that no matter how much the film's story diverges from the reality, it isn't important; narrative and emotional truth in fiction is not the same as factual accuracy, and often the twain must part.
So back to the experience:
The Straight Story is beautiful. I was moved. I wept. Granted, it's a calendrical period of fraught emotion for me, but I may have never cried so early into a piece of art as I did at
The Straight Story. It was the look on the face of the old shopkeeper as Straight mowed his way, molasses slow, out of town. He's sad, and afraid, for his friend and for himself, and the lonely vulnerability of the elderly is the sort of thing that can get to me reliably. (Which is why in addition to it being awesome I also found
Bubba Ho-Tep so moving.)
Old people is the key; the film is beautiful and simple and despite some signature flourishes from Lynch's creative personality, it does appear sort of un-Lynchian, and those flourishes are relatively understated. And it's because, I think, the film's subject matter doesn't require an overt imposition of Lynch's personality to get us to see whatever it is Lynch sees or wants us to see in his movies, because the film's subject is inherently Lynchian and strange. Consider first the plot, again: an old man builds a trailer from scrap metal, attaches it to a damned riding mower, and drives a few hundred miles, at a pace you could keep up with by means of a low-key jog. It's just strange. But consider, more importantly, the elderly: old people are Lynchian in and of themselves. The work required to put us into Lynch's head - or, if you like, the experience of
being in Lynch's head that comes from watching one of his movies - is generally a reordering of our cognitive processes, showing us new things or old things in a new light. Lynch's worldview is accessible (usually) but unusual (always). And yet old people are like Lynchian people: their preoccupations are strange, their language curious, their pace mystifyingly slow, their gestures and facial expressions bizarre and stylized and out of sorts with our experience of the world.
I'm obviously
way overplaying this point, but think about it seriously: think about all the weird thumbs-up-ing and overlong grinning that marks the characters in
Twin Peaks, and how weird if endearing that is (recognizable gestures of approval that are stretched out of normalcy into a sort of uncomfortable otherness), and then think about the really really old waiter who's apparently a vessel for the mysterious giant figure, and how when he does it, it seems more natural than when Dale Cooper or the sherriff does it, and think about why. It's because he's really old! Old people do things like that! So do small children - who are also quite Lynchian, which is really the point, I guess. At the margins of everyday society you find entire age cohorts of people who have either not yet been socialized into understanding the appropriate and expected natural behavior of a normal person, or have moved on and been passed by. The people who are currently old and weird by virtue of their oldness weren't weird when they were my age, they're weird because society changed (or they changed) as they aged out of the mainstream; in part I think this is because of the various lamentable degradations in mental acuity that so often come with advanced age*, and in part I think this is just a fact of changing social customs.**
So a lot of the things that seem Lynchian in their out-of-placeness about character behavior in a "normal" Lynch film are natural and don't need to be imposed as part of a directorial vision because he's dealing with a main character who's already kind of prone to seeming a little askew from what the median audience member recognizes as everyday behavior. (I stumbled upon what appears to be a copy of the original script online, including scenes which weren't in the final cut, and in one Straight's daughter asks why he's gluing pesos onto the band of his hat. His reply: "Ballast." Awesome.)
I'm, as alluded to above, overarguing this point, but it's because a lot of what I've read about the film highlights its curiosity in the middle of Lynch's ouevre, whereas I felt that aside from a much more linear and graspable plot than any Lynch film except
The Elephant Man (and you could say
Dune, which wanted to have a linear and graspable plot, but didn't), it was quite of a piece with the rest of them. More "Lynchian" to me, honestly, than
The Elephant Man was. Again, if you get away from the notion that Lynch is putting us on or putting on a show or in any way doing something calculated with the presentation and meaning of his images, and instead just embrace the idea that he's more or less the guy he seems to be, and he's just (I say "just": he's of course and obviously a great technician and a supremely skilled artist who's almost always in command of his craft, however you feel about it) ... he's just putting images into the camera that match the images in his head when he closes his eyes (or keeps them open), the Otherness of Lynch's worlds fades into just another askew perspective, maybe more askew than others, and
The Straight Story is askew like the rest.
But also, and most imortantly, I implore you, Reader(s), it's lovely. OK, I've got a thing for vulnerably sad old people, but really: Old people are Lynchian, yes, and they're also sad, yes, but they're also kind of beautiful, and whatever wickedness he may be trying to atone for on his ridiculous pilgrimage, Alvin Straight is beautiful, (played beautifully by Richard Farnsworth, who was incredibly ill during the filming and eventually took his life), and the film is beautiful. You should all see it. All of you. We should all ride for six weeks to go see Harry Dean Stanton on a beleagured front porch, and then sit down and look up at the stars.
* Comedy derives from truth, right? I assume that greater familiarity with technology from a young age will make
this less apt as a comedic touchstone going forward (in terms of mere old-age confusion vs. genuine senility), but I giggled for a reason. Plus it's sweet when it could've been mean; sometimes the claws are better when you don't show them.
** Like in my puzzlement over prior modes of emotional display
here.
Labels: Film, Lynchathon
