‘The Straight Story’ Is David Lynch’s Most Accessible Film, But It’s Anything But Normal

David Lynch is not the poet laureate of the banality of evil so much as he is the evil of banality. His work lands somewhere between the ironic isolation of Edward Hopper’s paintings and the direct, aggressive surreality of Norman Rockwell’s series of “April Fools” covers for the Saturday Evening Post, navigating that place where the complexity of an individual’s interior life get suppressed by the social requirement to express outward normalcy. The opening moments of Blue Velvet are his thesis statement in precis: the camera at first focuses on the psychotically-manicured landscapes of suburbia, just beneath which lies a Buñuelian horrorscape of swarming ants, body parts, rape, drugs and murder. When terrible things happen in Lynch’s work, the urgent work of his characters is to assimilate that atrocity into normalcy. We get used to any abomination, given time. Given enough time, the definition of what is an abomination changes. George Orwell has something to say about this, too; like so many things that were once seen as science fiction, the broad acceptance of the unthinkable has become commonplace. We’re in trouble and David Lynch’s work – like his recent work Twin Peaks: The Return, is testament to his growing impatience. There’s nothing scarier than an angry David Lynch.

In 1999, he made The Straight Story for Disney. That it’s dropping now for streaming on Disney+ is curiously serendipitous with our current state of national quarantine. This world was unthinkable a month ago, but since we’ve been conditioned to normalize abnormality, we become inured to future abnormalities. Narcissists bank on this, and at its root is the groundwork for authoritarianism and the attendant practice of gaslighting. The Straight Story is thought of as Lynch’s most normal, most conventional film. As his career is in part an incisive dismantling of the myth of conventionality, that should be your first clue that this film is anything but normal or conventional.

Hollywood legend Richard Farnsworth plays 79yr old Alvin Straight who, upon learning of a stroke felling his estranged brother, gets on his ancient riding lawnmower, hooks up a trailer, and sets off on a journey of hundreds of miles to be by his brother’s side. The going is slow, as one might imagine, with large trucks screaming by on the backroads Alvin chooses, underscoring both the peril and the anachronism of his means of transport. The Straight Story is about slowing time. Staying home for weeks (soon to be months?) for the 99% of our nation that’s not allowed to be sick or take a vacation is about the paradigm shift of slowing time, too.

Lynch illustrates the vastness of the middle of our country: the fields of corn and wheat and the barns and silos that dot the landscape here and again like tacks in a child’s map marking the places they’ve been (or hope one day to go). For long stretches, it’s just Alvin, hunched down with his old cowboy hat crunched low on his head, looking at the world slowly unspooling before him – or staring at his campfire during quiet nights alone with just his long thoughts. He pulls into a campsite one night for a large group of bicyclists who have whizzed by him earlier in the day. He talks about how terrible it is to grow old: “I can’t imagine anything good about being blind and maimed at the same time.” Given time to think further, he says that the only thing good about being old might be that he’s able to better discern meaningful experiences from not-meaningful ones. What’s left unsaid is the Lynchian idea that this knowledge brings no real profit to the wise. The moments of highest tension in The Straight Story are ones where Alvin has to pass through cities full of people who don’t have time. White rabbits, all of them, with pocket watches and schedules in the sway of capricious masters. It doesn’t mean anything. No one comes to the end of their lives wishing they’d worked more.

Sissy Spacek plays Alvin’s daughter Rose. She has some sort of mental disability but Alvin confirms she has a steel-trap for facts and was a wonderful mother. Later, we learn about a tragedy in her life, and his of course, and then we watch a collection of small town regulars gathered on lawn chairs to watch the local firehouse practice their trade by burning down a derelict building. All of these things are connected and how Lynch chooses this moment to have the brakes on Alvin’s mower fail, hurtling the old guy at dangerous speeds into the middle of it all, speaks directly to the heart of our widening gyre. We are all spectators until we’re victims reliant on the kindness of strangers who are every bit as peculiar, unhinged, and damaged as we are. My favorite scene in a film full of favorite scenes finds Alvin in a bar talking to another old timer about how we try to forget our traumas, drown them in alcohol or smother them with routine, but in the end they always find a way to surface, one way or another. The monsters come out during the quiet times; the heroes, too.

The Straight Story is about the importance of family and the heroism of perseverance, but mostly it’s about the value of contemplation, which allows us to recover our moral compass and reset our emotional barometer. This is Lynch not at his most normal, but rather, at his most accessible. It’s a beautiful delivery system for painful truths. You can’t say you weren’t warned.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream The Straight Story