The Straight Story
1999, directed by David Lynch
The title of The Straight Story has at least three obvious meanings. It’s the real-life adventure of Alvin Straight; his journey follows a mostly straight line; and the story follows a straighter trajectory than David Lynch’s famously labyrinthine plots. Unable to drive a car, Alvin Straight drives a lawnmower from western Iowa to his ailing brother in Wisconsin, and this demonstration of love reconciles the brothers at the end. The movie’s challenge, however, lies in an implied fourth meaning which follows from the third. It would seem that not only the plot, but also any deeper motive, is put to us directly and without complication.
Lynch’s films typically invite all sorts of speculative readings, yet the director’s public statements were generally hostile to interpretation: “It’s better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted or you’ll be too afraid to let things keep happening. Psychology destroys the mystery, this kind of magic quality.” Here, in The Straight Story, it’s as if he were making a film so straightforward that no one would be tempted to seek any deeper meaning. What you see, in other words, is no more nor less than what you get.
The movie therefore tests the premise that good cinema always hides something. That premise might sound objectionable, but let us give it a fair hearing. The idea is not that a film must be a puzzle, but rather that movies do not work well when they speak too directly. If they’re too straightforward, they come off as forced or preachy. Instead they must throw up obstructions, challenging the viewer to arrive at some emotion or understanding that’s not automatically had. There are many ways to achieve this, but they usually involve hiding. In Persona, Ingmar Bergman argues (indirectly, of course) that the essence of good cinema is ambiguity. In Yasujiro Ozu’s films, dramatic events are generally unseen, leaving only the in-between moments of everyday life. Robert Bresson’s films are like negative photographs, drawing positive qualities through their absence. Lynch himself typically left his audience begging for answers, yet The Straight Story is different. He called it “my most experimental movie,” a description so counterintuitive it sounds like a jest. Does it break a basic rule of cinema by putting everything on the surface?
The ending would seem to validate that experiment. Like so many classic films, The Straight Story builds to a reconciliation, conveyed here with a minimum of words in the acting of Harry Dean Stanton and Richard Farnsworth: “Did you ride that thing all the way out here to see me?” “I did, Lyle.” The emotion is powerful without being cheap, yet there’s almost nothing ambiguous about it. Any halfway sensitive viewer can easily appreciate the depth of feeling between the brothers.
The Straight Story is not without artifice, yet even that sits in full view. Usually if some visual motif guides a film’s detailing, it’s concealed enough not to be obtrusive. Here the guiding motif is the straight line, from the opening shots of corn rows to the ever-present highway and its road markings. We might not be conscious of how many other straight lines there are – telephone wires, clothing lines, wood siding on houses, stripes and plaids, the horizon, streaks of rain, the bundle of sticks that the hitchhiker leaves behind – but we get the idea that things in Alvin Straight’s world are laid out in a fairly regular fashion. Sure, there are small curves and hills, sidetracks and setbacks, but on the whole, things proceed in a clear sequence. The only real antithesis to all this straightness is in the heavens, in all the meditative shots of stars and clouds – but that’s not the domain of human life.
What secrets might anyone hope to reveal about such a film? If everything’s out on the surface, the resulting openness ironically seems to close the door to interpretation. Nevertheless the opening shot of cornfields from a moving helicopter gives us one opening. The screen is filled with straight parallel lines, yet they’re rotating, which suggests that even a straight line can be seen from multiple angles. We should also regard Lynch’s stance on interpretation somewhat critically. To discourage analysis is not to say that analysis is impossible. It’s proper for an author to hope that a work will reach its audience intuitively. Robert Bresson once said, “I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it,” but that doesn’t mean that understanding shouldn’t come in the end, at least for those inclined to push further. Lynch needn’t have feared that analysis would destroy the mystery… as in science, one mystery inevitably leads to another.
The bigger opening, after the rows of corn, is the beginning of the story. The camera closes in on the side yard between two typical small-town American homes as Alvin’s daughter Rose heads out and his neighbor Dorothy interrupts her sunbathing to step inside. When no one’s around to hear, Alvin Straight falls unseen on his kitchen floor. When he’s finally found, Dorothy will assume he’s had a stroke, and although he hasn’t, he’ll soon get news that his brother Lyle has. The tension here between stereotypical American normalcy and the horror of a possible stroke should remind any Lynch fan of the opening to Blue Velvet, where Jeffrey’s father has a stroke while watering his lawn. The implied parallel between this heartwarming G-rated family movie and Lynch’s earlier tour of hideous crime and perversity should raise the first big question mark.
In fact Blue Velvet and The Straight Story are not so opposite to each other. Beneath all of its dramatics, Blue Velvet is essentially a tale of growing up. Jeffrey must choose between a mature relationship with Sandy and the temptations of a dark underworld that represents a refusal to grow up. The opening parallel to Blue Velvet should prepare us to sense that despite Alvin’s advanced age, The Straight Story is also about growing up. As Alvin tells the Olsen twins, “This trip is a hard swallow of my pride.” Anyone can sense, when Alvin and Lyle finally come together, that their relationship has reached a more mature level, and we can appreciate that these things happen not only in our teens and twenties but throughout a lifespan. The film encourages us to see maturity not as something we get over and done with, but rather as a continuous, lifelong, almost cyclical process.
From this point of view we can start to see a pattern in all the various allusions to youth and aging, which normally would be taken for granted in a film about old age. The gulf between generations stands out in Alvin’s conversation with the bikers about the pros and cons of aging; in his encounter with the young hitchhiker, whom he tells about Rose’s yearning for her children; and in his barroom reminiscences on World War II when he recalls “shootin’ moon-faced boys”. On the bridge over the Mississippi he’s hailed by a pickup truck full of children, and he camps out that night in a cemetery where he talks to a mature young priest.
Maturity of course is more than just aging, it’s the process of changing to fit one’s age. The cyclical nature of growing up comes out in two scenes where Alvin offers indirect advice. First he tells Crystal, the hitchhiker, how he had asked his children to try breaking a bundle of sticks, teaching them that the bundle is family. Crystal evidently benefits from this lesson, and the next morning she leaves Alvin an actual bundle of sticks. Her gift is more than a gesture of thanks – it’s more like a reward, because unlike Alvin’s story the bundle is real. We can imagine how his abstract lesson might come back to him even stronger, reminding him of the force of his own lesson all over again, and sustaining his resolve to continue the journey. Second, Alvin tells the Olsen twins the reason for his journey, reminding them of the value of brotherhood by recounting his own failings. This time it’s his turn to pay back a favor, as he’s just haggled the price of their work down by almost seventy dollars. In each of these two exchanges we might gather that Alvin not merely dispenses advice but re-learns a lesson that needs reinforcing.
The most puzzling incident is the woman who runs into a deer. The scene is easy enough to follow, but its point is obscure until we notice that it answers the woman’s own desperate question. When she peels away from the crash site, it becomes apparent that she’s unaware of how aggressively she drives, and that that’s why she keeps hitting deer. By the same token we can learn about Alvin Straight from the way he drives. His stubbornness in driving a lawnmower with a heavy trailer, even through the hilly river valley where he might endanger others, is probably a symptom of the same mindset that prolonged his estrangement from Lyle. Just as he makes the best of one bad situation, eating the deer and using its antlers for an ornament, he also makes the best of his own stubborn nature. Any idea of maturity must extend to making a virtue out of imperfection.
If these observations ring true, then there is after all some subtlety in The Straight Story, and the effort of interpreting it can bear fruit. All of these ideas can be felt intuitively, and putting them into words is only a supplement to the viewing experience, not a replacement for it. Lynch may or may not have been aware of these subtleties, and even the uncanny parallel to Blue Velvet may have sprung from a private experience that he consciously or unconsciously associated with growing up. In any case, in the end, The Straight Story is not quite as straightforward as its title may seem to imply… and yet that’s no discredit to the movie.
CONNECTIONS:
Phone Call from a Stranger – Story about breaking the ice in a once-close relationship
Ugetsu monogatari – Opens with lateral motion and closes with a rising camera; journey begins with a false start
Wild Strawberries – An old man’s journey of reconciliation, lined with pointed incidents that build to the conclusion
Blue Velvet – Ominous opening in a stereotypical American yard, with either a stroke or a foreshadowing of one