David Lynch's 'The Straight Story' is About Love
Also regret, time, death, beauty, family, bonds... it's a masterpiece. [1/15/2025]
The reputation The Straight Story has as David Lynch’s most “normal” film is well earned. Some fans of the director will miss the strangeness of other Lynch entries. This feels in some ways like the least Lynch film in the directors’s filmography. But while the film lacks red rooms, animatronic babies, and saxophone solos, it supplies copiously an underrated aspect of the Lynch formula: a deep seated sincerity in its empathy for the lonely and misunderstood.
The elderly Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) wants to travel from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his brother after a serious stroke. Unfortunately, the old timer health issues don’t allow him to drive a car. Thus Alvin mounts an old lawn mower to make the 200+ mile journey one crawling mile at a time. Every stop he makes reasserts his purpose and invigorates his spiritual journey with a sense of profound importance. Alvin, now filled with regrets at the end of his life, has realized a purpose, however silly, difficult, and sometimes trivial it may seem to others. He needs this journey to remember who he is, to make himself a whole before the end. “The worst part of being old is rememberin’ when you was young,” he says. His journey celebrates his experience, even as it is an obstacle.
The starry night sky is a motif throughout the film, accompanying Alvin in every stop like a personal god. When Alvin speaks of the stars, he talks of looking at them with his brother or his daughter. The sky to him is full of future unknown. In Lynch’s second most normal film, The Elephant Man, stars are used similarly to represent that undiscovered country, the life beyond, where the titular character might perhaps find a real rest. Alvin wishes to look to them with his brother for the same reasons. Nobody wants to stare at death alone. Nobody should have to. The pursuit of that companionship does end up being our lives, unreasonably or not.
The mostly kind colloquial folks Alvin meets along his road trip illustrate different sides of life. The screenplay, the first in Lynch’s career that he did not write himself, is full of these deep moments revealing others’ lives. They’re all the same; they find people to connect to. A wife who knows her husband’s kindness. Brothers squabbling over the right way to fix a lawnmower. A young woman running away from her family. They all need to find their people, because love, as in all of Lynch’s work, is the most important thing in the universe, the only thing that really matters.
Nobody wants to be alone when any moment could end it all. We all have to enter the stars eventually. Life is a hard journey, and nobody gets out alive. But The Straight Story reminds us that no matter how difficult, no matter how ridiculous our love might be, it’s enough to bring us to the edge of oblivion and let us face it. Love hard today everyone.
(And go watch The Straight Story, the only Lynch film on Disney+.)
