Jay Rohr
The Straight Story is a slice of Midwestern Americana not much unlike a piece of apple pie. Its folksy messages are a tad obvious, yet delivered with a sincere artistry that makes them plain and simple poetry. There’s no mistaking this motion picture’s point, however, room remains for interpretation. This family friendly feature doesn’t seem like it could be conjured by someone associated with nitrous huffing psychos, but David Lynch ditched the surreal nightmares he usually manifests to make this, well, straight story.
It all started when Mary Sweeney, a successful film editor and producer, was reading The New York Times. She happened across an article about Alvin Straight. When his estranged brother suffered a stroke, the 73-year-old decided to bury the hatchet. Too blind to legally drive, Alvin procured a 1966 John Deere lawn mower, hitched a ten-foot trailer to it, and hit the road. Traveling roughly five miles an hour, Alvin drove 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin.
Having grown up in the badger state, Sweeney said she “easily connected with that kind of stoic, non-verbal, stubborn, idiosyncratic American character… how hard it is to have quiet pride and dignity when you’re old and poor and are living in the middle of nowhere.”
Producer Ray Stark, known for films such as The Way We Were (1973), Annie (1982), and Steel Magnolias (1989) initially snapped up the rights to Straight’s story. He envisioned a feature starring Paul Newman. However, that movie never materialized, giving Mary Sweeney the opportunity to seize the rights when they became available again.
She then contacted her lifelong friend John Roach. Together they composed the script for The Straight Story. Since 1985, Sweeney had collaborated with director David Lynch producing many of his movies as well as editing them. Her credits with the auteur include the Twin Peaks television series (1990), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), and Lost Highway (1996). By this point in time Sweeney and Lynch had been romantically involved, so it’s no surprise she showed him the script.
Something about the material resonated with the idiosyncratic director. In an American Film Institute interview, David Lynch talked about an emotional quality to the script. He wanted to see if he could get that screen. During a conversation with Charlie Rose, circa 1997, Lynch more thoroughly elaborated on that notion.
It seems that one of his desires as a filmmaker is to present abstract concepts. Utilizing a sort of dream logic, events unfold which express ideas that are often more ethereal than concrete. Now, any interview with Lynch features his adamant desire to maintain opacity. He’s notorious for never illuminating the meaning of his movies which has brilliantly allowed continuous, robust debate about the interpretation of his films. Yet, they all share thematic qualities.
These themes may be more pronounced in one film or another, but each feature contains some aspect of them. Lynch’s pictures often contain characters in varying degrees of isolation reaching out into a hostile world, or as Mary Sweeney once put it, people possessed of “a hunger for love and dignity.” Though they initially encounter cruelty, compassion is often their salvation. This can be seen in The Elephant Man (1980), Isabella Rossellini’s character in Blue Velvet (1986), and the lead roles played by Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in Mulholland Drive (2001).
Different takes on duality also permeate Lynch’s oeuvre. The most obvious example would be Lost Highway which features a character literally becoming someone else entirely midway through the film. Twin Peaks, especially its third season The Return, includes a great deal about duality. Furthermore, dual natures are applied to society. Consider the idyllic suburbs hiding a hotbed of disturbing criminal violence in Blue Velvet. Meanwhile, Inland Empire (2006) attempted to show the way fantasy and reality mingle in film productions. Perhaps the best pairing, if not presentation, of the human and societal notions of duality is in his adaptation of Dune (1984), where in Kyle MacLachlan plays a faux messiah to a subjugated, marginalized people who are more powerful than their colonizers thanks to an inhospitable world—people and places are not always what they’re perceived to be.
What exactly makes something Lynchian is hard to pin down. However, any film that’s emotionally evocative, featuring a plot propelled by dream logic demonstrating abstract notions of reality (e.g. duality, identity, love, morality, etc.) may fit the bill. There’s a certain sinister creepiness which saturates a great deal of Lynch’s work as well. Some of his most famous works are neo-noir, showcasing relatively innocent people becoming exposed to darker truths about reality, typically through crime. Surrealism lends an uncanny aspect that makes mundane details unsettling, yet even when unsettling they connect to incredibly ordinary notions.
For instance, dreams become reality behind the neighborhood diner where a living nightmare lurks in the guise of an unsheltered person. Sweet small towns such as Twin Peaks or Lumberton, North Carolina are just masks hiding dark depravity. Having friendly drinks with folks can inadvertently invite the attention of hideous lascivious creeps like Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart (1990). Eraserhead (1977) bluntly demolishes the idea of love, marriage, and raising a family as things which induce happiness. In Lynch’s films knowledge, typically through firsthand experience, poisons the well of innocence.
This tendency to present characters encountering events or people and the subsequent emotions which they cannot deny altering them irrevocably puts The Straight Story right in Lynch’s wheelhouse. While the film largely follows the events that transpired in real life, the fictionalized version of Alvin Straight played by Richard Farnsworth includes several encounters along the road. These involve him sharing moving experiences accrued over a lifetime alongside the folksy wisdom they’ve inspired. Life hasn’t always been rosy for Straight, but he’s found more optimistic take aways than cynical ones. Furthermore, the film frequently shows that one can truly depend on the kindness of strangers.
Aesthetically, The Straight Story often feels like a David Lynch film. Many of the opening shots echo the beginning of Blue Velvet. There’re also visual compositions such as when fictional Alvin gets bad news viewers can see the shadow of rain falling across his face while he stoically holds back tears. It metaphorically speaks to the tempest within him not to mention the difficulties of the stormy journey he’ll soon take on his mower. In addition, thanks to cinematographer Freddie Francis, Midwestern fields become immense, containing the poetic comfort and disquiet of vastness that connects to eternity while reminding of insignificance.
Yet, the film is largely considered a departure from Lynch’s style of film making.
Critic Janet Maslin wrote for The New York Times, “this film’s wholesome radiance and soothing natural beauty are distinctly at odds with the famously unwholesome Lynch imagination. The chasm between the ghoulish malevolence of the filmmaker’s previous Lost Highway and the decent, forthright tone of The Straight Story is almost too huge to fathom.”
When The Straight Story premiered at Cannes critics laughed as the opening credits related Walt Disney presents a David Lynch film. No doubt they spent most of the picture waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it never did which made the material more impactful.
Successful filmmakers rarely shift thematic gears. Ridley Scott has explored religious ideas in films like Blade Runner (1982), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), and Alien: Covenant (2017) in asking who defines faith, and what does it mean to meet our creator? Steven Spielberg’s career is composed of movies about ordinary people thrown into extraordinary events. James Cameron has never really gotten away from action film aesthetics. His True Lies (1994) may be a comedy, but it has more in common with Commando (1985) than The Naked Gun (1988). Meanwhile Titanic, once its predictable romance mercifully ends, turns into an FX heavy disaster flick. Then there’s Wes Anderson, so stuck in his style and themes he’s become a parody appealing only to his niche audience.
Catherine Breillat opined that cinema “allows you to express all the nuances of a thing while including its opposites. These are things that can’t be quantified mentally; yet they can exist and be juxtaposed.” In other words, filmmakers can explore the same themes from various angles without ever retelling the same story. Director Jane Schoenbrun has, thematically speaking, made the same movie three times, starting with A Self-induced Hallucination (2018) followed by We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) then the very Lynchian I Saw the Tv Glow (2024). Besides notions of gender identity and the “egg crack”, they’re also about fictions that societies and individuals develop, which some never outgrow in order to “insulate ourselves from reality, to live lives dependent on fictions.”
Visually, director Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003), The Ice Storm (1994), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) are wildly dissimilar films. Yet, each explores ideas of societal expectations, family dysfunction, and a desire for second chances in their own way. Still, the radical visual difference between them is uncommon.
In Pain & Gain (2013), Michael Bay’s bonkers exploration of the mythical American Dream, the director employed the glossy stylization that makes his movies distinct. That’s because there’s a quality in the major motion pictures made by successful filmmakers which they endeavor to never get away from. On the one hand, this offers a familiarity audiences can rely on; they know what to expect when a signature style comes on screen. Cynically speaking, no director wants to risk box office bombs.
Still, failure is a learning tool for the willing. David Lynch epically bombed with his adaptation of Dune. The lessons he took away from that disaster paved the way to the now legendary Blue Velvet. Francis Ford Coppola stepped away from mobsters and jungle madness to create One from the Heart (1982), a musical so critically and commercially disastrous it almost blew him out of cinema history. Yet, freed from expectations based on his successes, Coppola would spend the 1980s free to make movies any way he pleased. This allowed him to acquire all the techniques necessary to compose 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but more importantly, afford the opportunity to make Rumble Fish (1983).
Adapted from a 1975 S.E. Hinton novel with the same title, one could almost call it a follow up to the 1983 coming-of-age crime drama The Outsiders. Although Coppola directed that adaptation too, this take on the novelist’s work went in a very avant-garde direction. Rumble Fish is a black and white blend of German Expressionism, French New Wave, and film noir. The only colors ever seen are the titular Rumble Fish, and the realism of The Outsiders is shed for a dreamlike quality that’s like David Lynch light.
It’s hard to imagine a major studio allowing a film like it to be made. Consider what Jeffrey Chown wrote in Hollywood Auteur: Francis Coppola, “The system produces films that do not require abstract or symbolic thinking. Rumble Fish is a demanding film for people with expectations conditioned by standard Hollywood product.”
That last word—product–-is the key. Everything in Hollywood becomes a product and products require consistency to remain marketable. Imagine a restaurant where every other order is unappetizing or not what you wanted. Filmmakers, consequently, get stuck in the pigeonholes they carve out due to box office success. Studios don’t want Steven Spielberg to make another movie, they want another Steven Spielberg movie.
Failure with Dune may have inadvertently freed David Lynch to follow his wonderfully weird ideas. And although he’d eventually establish a formula for his fiction that filmmakers like Jane Schoenbrun can now follow to a T, the absence of his familiar traits can hit audiences harder than anything unusual. Perhaps that’s because viewers keep having the contrary in mind. As The Straight Story plays out its soft tale of wounds only the living can heal, the darker world the director already showed them lurks in subconscious contrast. More than that, art can’t go anywhere new following the same path. It can only get back to where it started.
