Strange Locomotions: David Lynch's THE STRAIGHT STORY (2000)
(Tribe Online, 2000)
The surrealism in David Lynch's awaited new film, "The Straight Story", begins the moment the words "Walt Disney Pictures Presents" appear on the screen. We hear of Lynch's "departure" from his familiar obsessions with violence, sex and the unwholesome side of the mind. Yet "The Straight Story" remains at core as Lynchian as "The Lost Highway" or "The Elephant Man", with its painstaking (often subliminal) use of sound; the rarefied, dream-like tempo that at moments brings his cinema closer to painting or photography; and his humor, his exquisite eye for the incidental, the grotesque and the absurd.
The Straight Story is based on the true tale of Alvin Straight, a WWII veteran who in 1994 undertook a journey from Laurens, Iowa, to Mt. Zion, Wisconsin, to see his brother Lyall, who had suffered a stroke. The brothers had not spoken to each other in ten years. Unable to drive a car, Alvin took his lawnmower, a central narrative and visual motif of this film.
This is a hero's journey, an odyssey both personal and universal. Faced with his own impending mortality (a fact driven home all the more forcefully by the news of his brother's stroke) Alvin undertakes a spiritual pilgrimage through an underworld of sorts, but an underworld of sunny cornfields and smooth rolling hills. (In this respect, the Mt. Zion and Cain and Abel references are more than circumstantial).
Yet The Straight Story is not so much a film about spiritual redemption as a film about machines. Alvin is coupled to machines that are clearly extensions of his ailing body-the crumbling lawnmower, his canes and the hilarious "grabber". The machine's slow speed magnifies the distance of the journey, and Alvin is permanently accosted by powerful technological apparitions from a rational epoch he wants no part of: Buses, cars, huge trucks and even bicycles who quickly leave him behind. Yet Alvin is not alone, and close to the end of his journey he is helped by a man driving a bizarre-looking tractor, a fellow exile in a land where machines owe more to the dreams of surrealism than the nightmares of the rational imperative.
Lynch's American landscape is also curiously bereft of human presence, except for the warm-hearted strangers he meets. The empty structures, sprinklers, grain elevators, windmills, harvesting machines become part of the cosmic nowhere the hero transverses, their haunted, oneiric undertones as much a part of the picture as the golden sunsets and rustling fields. One is reminded of the factory in Eraserhead. This refers to a particular time in American history. During the industrial revolution, many artists and entrepeneurs began to find ways to incorporate the new technology into the pastoral landscape. Lynch offers the logical, post-apocalyptic conclusion of this process of aesthetization.
The inevitable question: Is The Straight Story a pointless exercise in "spot the Lynchianism"? Or is it a meaningful addition to his oeuvre?
True: Alvin's daughter, Rose, has a speech impediment reminiscent of the mysterious dream-dwarf's in Twin Peaks. True: The film's opening scene is similar to the one in Blue Velvet, with the character suffering a physical collapse in picturesque all-American surroundings--a metaphor for the dark side of the dream. True: The film features quarreling twins, close-ups of flames, cement deer and truly awful eating habits. True: The Straight Story is a road movie, like Wild at Heart or The Lost Highway.
But the Lynchness lies elsewhere, in a certain vision, a particular holistic approach to sound, movement and composition.
My favorite scene of the movie: Middle of the night. Close-up of sprinkler. Close-up of Rose staring out the window at it. A white, ghostly ball rolls into the frame and halts halfway through. Now there is the sprinkler and a ball, the former in movement, the other stationary. Back to Rose. Then, a child walks into the frame, slowly up to the ball, fetches it and walks back the way he came. Later, we learn that Rose's four children have been taken away, and that she has not seen them in years.
This is Lynch, a man who has mastered his own brand of abstract, phantasmagoric expressionism. If anything, The Straight Story proves his ability to challenge himself, to appropriate and incorporate unlikely themes and elements into his intriguing personal vision.
Andres Vaccari
posted by Andres Vaccari @ 2:32 PM