The Straight Shooter: Reassessing David Lynch’s The Straight Story
In its obituary for the sui generis director David Lynch (1946-2025), who recently gave up the ghost, The New York Times barely mentioned The Straight Story (David Lynch, 1999), a film that is more often than not regarded as an anomaly in Lynch’s filmography.
Film critic J. Hoberman brushed it off in no uncertain terms: “[After Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997)] Mr Lynch then reversed course with a premise so shamelessly feel-good it might have even embarrassed Steven Spielberg.”.1 Hoberman’s quip would only make sense if he meant the Spielberg behind Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993). The Straight Story is not what it appears to be at first glance. Among other things, this quintessentially American movie embodies the Japanese principle of mono no aware – the pathos that results from having a taste, with both humility and profound awareness, of the transience of human existence. It does so with empathy, the visceral experience of beauty, and the belief that people can be changed for the better by life-altering encounters. The Straight Story is the most accessible and heartfelt sublimation of pain to be found in any of Lynch’s movies. It does not hurt either that it is based on a true story, as linear and realistic as can be, shot on the actual locations where these events took place, while concurrently being more surreal in its central premise than some of Lynch’s more esoteric departures from “reality”.
The Straight Story opens with an unequivocal assertion of “Americana”: bucolic, pastel-ridden, expansive views of a Midwestern town like so many others that culminate in a reductive crane shot that has a mind of its own. It drifts past a rotund woman – now tanning in her backyard, now leaving to fetch more snacks – and descends towards a large blue window on the flank of the neighbouring house. The camera ceremonially stops outside to introduce someone through sound, as he or she suffers a loud, unseen fall inside the house. “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it…”,2 is the event real?
A midwestern town like so many others
A crane shot hovers above Rose and the rotund neighbour
Alvin suffers a loud, unseen fall inside the house (notice the lawnmower on the lower right-hand corner)
In this case, we, the audience, have been brought outside this window to bear witness; the story’s protagonist has been irreversibly set up in a way that not only attests to its reality but has also outlasted both the person this film was based on, Alvin Straight (1920-1996), and its creator, David Lynch. Film directors are ephemeral, their work as perennial as the characters they immortalise on the screen.
A couple of hours later, Alvin (Richard Farnsworth) is found lying on the floor by his friend Bud (Joseph A. Carpenter) and the woman we saw on the lawn, Dorothy (Jane Halloway Geitz), who exclaims worriedly, “What’s the number for 911?” They are soon joined by Alvin’s daughter, Rose (Sissy Spacek), with whom something is innocuously but distinctly off. Alvin remains calm but cannot get up by himself. Rose takes her reluctant father to see a doctor. He has bad circulation, leads an unhealthy diet, and suffers from vision problems due to diabetes. The doctor brings up the need for a hip operation, a walker or second cane, and a series of tests and X-rays. Alvin does not want to hear any of it, but there is no denying that he is in the early stages of emphysema, the illness that eventually killed Lynch himself. A straight cut to Alvin lighting a cigar lets us know, without a shadow of a doubt, what his stance on the matter is.
Richard Farnsworth as Alvin Straight in The Straight Story
When Rose asks her father what the doctor said, he replies he was told he will live to be a hundred. This is not so much a white lie but the loving resignation of telling Rose what she needs to hear in order to cope with her own existential pain. At this point, we do not know what lies beneath, but it is as palpable as Alvin’s ailments.
In the middle of an ominous lightning storm that Alvin and Rose are enjoying together, life takes a fateful turn. The phone rings, Rose answers, and the news she receives is that Alvin’s brother, Lyle, has had a bad stroke. The camera stays on Alvin throughout Rose’s off-screen phone call; it slowly dollies-in when Alvin’s face changes upon hearing Rose’s words, “Uncle Lyle? Oh, no”. The narrative complexity, yet emotional clarity of Richard Farnsworth’s expressiveness here is what film acting has been in pursuit of since the glory days of Soviet (eg: Aleksandr Dovzhenko), French (eg: Abel Gance), and Soviet-French (eg: Dimitri Kirsanoff) silent cinema: the actor’s internal wheels turning for maximum transparency via minimal gesture – the unadulterated communion between the camera and the soul.
Not unlike his daughter and her own phantoms, there is something buried, deep and dark within Alvin, that has to do with his brother. He will take to heart his own interpretation of what the doctor told him and apply it not to quit smoking but to swallow his pride: “If you don’t make some changes quickly, there will be some serious consequences.” We learn from Rose that something toxic happened between Alvin and Lyle on 7 July 1988 – ten years prior – and that it remains unresolved because both are so bloody stubborn. Alvin tries to figure out what to do about his brother’s condition while he endlessly mows the lawn.
Now we see Rose pensive at the window, late at night, focusing on a sprinkler evocative of the imagery in the opening scene of Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), which pinned forever in our psyches the idea that under a manicured lawn lie untold horrors. A white ball rolls into frame; a boy follows it and picks it up, walks a few steps, pauses unnaturally as if he were to turn towards Rose but does not, and then he resumes his walk and fades away on frame right in a surgically-precise example of storytelling-through-light from cinematographer Freddie Francis, who also lensed The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980).
The boy who was and wasn’t there
Sissy Spacek as Rose in The Straight Story
All these shots are intercut with a frontal close-up of Rose. In terms of film grammar, one could argue that Rose is both seeing the boy and also hallucinating. A more objective, detached profile of Rose at the window, blinking and coming out of her reverie, breaks the shot design as Alvin soundlessly appears and announces, “Rose, I’m gonna go back on the road. I’ve gotta go see Lyle.” Or maybe Alvin was there all along, in which case the detached profile of Rose was his point of view, implying that he was privy to what she just saw or imagined (a metaphysical connection that will be confirmed later when he recalls the rolling white ball and sprinkler in a boyless frame). This memorable, understated scene is ripe with Lynchian ambiguity, combining intimacy, imagined reality, and voyeurism within a purely naturalistic context. It is a crucial moment in the film that inexorably connects Alvin to his daughter as he states his mission and clear purpose in life, or what is left of it, before his brother or he himself dies. To which Rose replies, “But Dad – how are you?”
How, indeed. Alvin is 73, his eyes are bad, he does not drive anymore, his hips can barely hold him, she cannot drive him there (has she been deemed unfit to drive?), and, no small detail, Lyle lives in Mount Zion, Wisconsin, a hefty 370 miles away from Laurens, Iowa. His reply: “Rose, darling, I’m not dead yet.”
After equipping himself with plenty of Braunschweiger sustenance and petrol, a grabber to extend his reach, and a trailer-like, mobile contraption where he can sleep at night, Alvin decides to haul it all with the aid of… a lawnmower. Rose sensibly questions his choice of transportation, but the real subtext is why is he making the trip without her, close as they are. Alvin replies, “Rosie, I’ve gotta go see Lyle. And I’ve gotta make this trip on my own. I know you understand.” She doesn’t and does at once. More than a trip, this is a chance – maybe his last one – to make amends with Lyle, the universe, and himself. True to Lynchian form, that scene ends with him and Rose looking together at the stars.
The following morning, Alvin embarks on his journey, mowing the Midwest to the compass of Angelo Badalamenti’s atmospheric score, which, coherent with Lynch’s own approach in this film, shows the composer’s versatility in breaking out of style in The Straight Story. Typically known for ominous, jazzy soundtracks – think Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001) – Badalamenti’s music here is highly evocative of Mark O’Connor’s. It is melancholic bluegrass steeped in a minor key, striking an unhurried, lived-in feeling. Lynch builds a lyrical poem of images and sounds across blue skies, cloud formations, and golden cornfields.
But as is often the case with epic symbolic endeavours, things do not go well at first. (If they did, there would be no conflict and hence no movie.) Grand enterprises are often hampered by small fodder. A truck drives by and blows Alvin’s hat away. He turns off the engine of his lawnmower to go retrieve it, and when he comes back the engine is dead. He hitches a ride in a bus full of passengers who are thrilled by the old-man-in-the-lawnmower, and then yet another one in a Ford pickup that brings him and the dead mower back to square one in Laurens. Alvin keeps his cool, but he also gets a shotgun and blasts the red lawnmower into a blistering ball of fire. Like every detail in a well-crafted film, this will prove to be significant later on, when we learn of Alvin’s past as a lethal shooter during World War II.
The Straight Story
The Straight Story
From Alvin’s perspective, the problem did not reside in his plan – riding a lawnmower across the state for 370 miles – but in the old machine he executed. He proceeds to buy a replacement: a green, 1966 John Deere. All he needs to know from his friend Tom (Everett McGill), a salesman he trusts despite the fact that he had set him up with the lawnmower that failed him, is that this one is a good machine, nothing fancy, previously owned by Tom himself. For Alvin, if he trusts a man, that man’s word is truly his worth. And, in his own words, Tom knows better than to try to talk Alvin out of something he is fixated on doing, unsmart as it is.
So off he goes again, Rose and his house receding in the distance. This time Alvin and his John Deere make it past the real-life Grotto of the Redemption, the name of which could hardly be more apt for Alvin’s pilgrimage. He stays out in the open, collecting branches with his grabber, lighting fires, smoking cigars, and thinking impenetrable thoughts to which we are not granted access. Thanks to the ubiquitous potential of cinema, we discover that Alvin behaves exactly the same way when he is alone or in the company of others.
Now that he is irreversibly on the road, a series of meaningful encounters ensues. The first one involves a young woman – I’ll call her the Runaway (Anastasia Webb) – whom Alvin first sees on the side of the road, hitchhiking. He waves at her, and she gives him a neutral, Kuleshovian look, though most spectators might read it as something along the lines of “What the hell is the matter with this crazy old man.” Not one to suffer fools, he simply drives by at his steady five miles per hour. That night, as Alvin is camping by a bonfire, the Runaway materialises out of the blue. Stylistically, the moment is similar to the way in which Alvin appeared to the contemplative Rose by the window, when she was seeing the boy who was and wasn’t there. Alvin then and the Runaway now both appear soundlessly, and the objective shot of Alvin also becomes her point of view, just like the objective shot of Rose had become Alvin’s point of view in that scene. No doubt the Runaway is not an apparition; she and Alvin will coinhabit the frame, whereas Rose and the boy with the white ball never did – they were only linked by edits.
At first, the Runaway has a bit of a sceptical attitude towards Alvin. She is hungry but not too keen on Alvin’s pork-liver sausages. Her untrusting gaze comes upon the lawnmower-trailer contraption: “What a hunk of junk,” she exclaims. Without looking at her, Alvin urges her to eat her dinner. She eats in silence, and he stokes the fire. To break the ice, she asks him a few questions, and we get to learn more about Alvin. His wife, long dead, delivered 14 babies, and seven made it. He in turn asks her about her family. From her evasive silence, he reckons that she has run away and is pregnant. Yes, she is — five months, she acquiesces. She awaits the old man’s judgement, but instead, he tells her he is on his way to see his brother, Lyle. She adds that no one knows about her pregnancy, not even her boyfriend, and her family will hate her when they find out. Alvin opens up about Rose. People think his daughter is slow, but she has a sharp mind. On account of her misunderstood condition, after a fire she had nothing to do with, the state deemed Rose incompetent to look after her four kids and took them all away from her. Images of Rose at the window and the rolling white ball (no boy this time) come back to give full significance to the earlier scene. “There isn’t a day goes by that she don’t pine for them kids,” Alvin says. Then he shares with her the parable of the bundle of sticks3 — easy to break one but virtually impossible to break a bundle — masked as the anecdote of a game he used to play with his own kids. That is how he taught them the inherent strength of family. Alvin is not telling the Runaway what to do, whether to keep the baby or go back to her family. He is giving her the gift of not judging her and elucidating that, as mad as her family might be, they probably would not want to lose her. Lynch firewalks the fine line that separates nuance from preachiness, subtext from overkill. Without it being said, it is conveyed that Rose would give anything to have her children back, that the boy with the white ball symbolises her missing kids, and that in the same vein, Alvin now understands he does not want to lose his brother. The following morning, the Runaway is gone, having left behind a tied bundle of branches for Alvin. Corny? Only if you’ve lost your touch for what ultimately makes us human.
A metaphysical connection — the Runaway and his daughter Rose merge in Alvin’s grasp of human nature.
This scene between Alvin and the Runaway is quite beautiful, and if you lower your defences, it can also be quite moving, certainly in the tradition of Frank Capra, one of Lynch’s well-acknowledged cinematic heroes — It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946), which came out the year Lynch was born, being the self-evident tonal reference.4 But the scene that comes to mind as a precursor of this one, whether Lynch channelled it consciously or not, is one of my favourite scenes in the history of cinema: the encounter between the old man and the young woman in Menilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926).
The also nameless young woman in Menilmontant (superbly played by Nadia Sibirskaïa) is at the end of her rope, to the point that she contemplates throwing herself and her illegitimate baby into the Seine River, while the clueless father is idling away on a bench in a park. She is as lonely and forlorn as a human can be, without any trace of hope. Fate brings her to the exact same bench where her lover sat. It is a visibly cold day, and she has nowhere else to go. She sits in stoic despair, imagining all that life is denying to her and her baby: the warmth of a fire, a home, hygiene, food. An old man sits next to her to have a bite. Sensing her plight, he discreetly puts a piece of bread next to her. At first, she cannot take it because her whole sense of self is at stake. Battered by life and humiliated, she is clinging to her dignity by a thread. The old man cuts a slice of salami in half and places it on the bread. He never looks at her or says a word, respectful of her vulnerability. After much hesitation, she finally takes a morsel to her mouth, eating like someone who cannot take food for granted anymore. There is no need for her to say anything to the old man either. The best way of expressing her gratitude is by accepting his kindness. It is a shared moment akin to when Alvin helps the Runaway, who was on the edge of despair, feel that she still has worth and purpose in life.
Menilmontant
Alvin’s next encounter happens when a pack of dozens of cyclists overtakes him on the road. Shortly before, he had spent some precious time in solitude, enjoying a storm and traversing golden fields of corn, accompanied by Badalamenti’s nostalgic score. When he reaches the site where the cyclists have set base, they greet him with spontaneous cheers and applause. He engages in conversation with one of them, much younger than Alvin, and shares with him that one doesn’t think about getting old when one is young. The man cautiously asks Alvin about the upside of getting old. Alvin reveals there is not much positive in being blind and lame at the same time, but thanks to experience, one can “separate the wheat from the chaff” and let the irrelevant stuff slide by. Another young man who is overhearing them while tossing around a football asks him casually, as if being in on an absent joke, about the worst part of being old. Something about his tone does not sit right with Alvin. “Well, the worst part of being old is rememberin’ when you was young,” Alvin tells him, doubling it down with a nail-the-coffin look. In short, the worst part of being young is not realising the dumbness of asking that question to Alvin in such a tactless manner. This scene serves as a reminder of the lamentable shortage of films out there that treat the elderly with dignity and respect.
The next stop in the journey is precipitated by an accident. A car overtakes Alvin in a no-passing zone, the brakes squeal, and a loud thump is heard. A woman (Barbara E. Robertson) gets out of her car in semi-hysterics. She has hit and killed a deer that came out of nowhere. Alvin offers to do something for her, to no avail; he listens patiently to her self-serving complaints as she unravels. (“He’s dead. And I love deer!”) She turns herself, not the deer, into the victim of the incident. She takes off, leaving the corpse behind in the middle of the road. As if to compensate for her selfishness, the practical side of Alvin kicks in. In the next scene, we see him eating venison instead of Braunschweiger, and he has crowned his trailer with the deer’s antlers. The butchery was not entirely in vain. The spot where he has lit his bonfire is next to an abandoned house populated with kitschy statues of animals, including vigilant deer that make him a bit uncomfortable – a fine cinematic example of naturalistic reality tinged with surrealism. The statues seem to be judging him and reminding him of his own mortality. The imagery has that American quintessence of an Andrew Wyeth painting, imbuing the ordinary with quasi-magical properties.
The Straight Story
Alvin has a near-death experience. As he rides down a steep hill, the lawnmower speeds out of control. The kamikaze feat is aggravated by the fact that the massive rig he trails behind does not have any brakes. We get to experience the descent along with Alvin through a series of subjective, blurry, kinetic images and invasive sounds that, yet again, merge with the Lynchian weirdness/normalcy of reality populated by ordinary WASPish folk. At the foot of the hill, a group of friends and neighbours sit on the lawn, shooting the breeze, as an eyesore of a house is burned down as part of a fire drill. Gravity inevitably precipitates Alvin towards the flames. The lawnmower now feels like a race car, and Alvin braces himself for the worst.
The Straight Story
Almost miraculously, the lawnmower stops, and the onlookers come to his aid. Danny Riordan (James Cada) first admonishes him but then figures it is the last thing Alvin needs. He offers to help fix the busted engine. Trying to make sense of the old-man-in-the-lawnmower, they ask Alvin a barrage of questions, and this is how we find out he has been on the road for five weeks (!) and still has over 60 miles of hilly roads to go, plus the Mississippi to cross. Danny’s wife, Darla (Sally Wingert), asks if he is not afraid of being alone, since there are “a lot of weird people everywhere now”, and she clearly doesn’t mean others like them. Alvin chuckles and replies that he fought in the trenches in World War II, so no reason to be scared of the Iowa cornfields. Danny and Darla generously let Alvin stay in their yard, where he can smoke cigars and contemplate the stars at night.
Alvin gives Rose a phone call from outside the Riordans’ house. She is relieved to hear from him; as far as we know, this is their first contact in five weeks. Even though mobile phones were already around in the late ’90s, it is not the sort of gadget Alvin would ever trust. He asks her to mail him his social security cheque so he can pay for the engine repair. In the meantime, a lovely little scene takes place between Danny and Darla. Caught in the tiptoeing, cumbersome way of communicating that married couples can develop over time, Danny expresses his concern for Alvin; how the frail old man could have easily gotten killed going down that hill. Darla gets her husband’s winding proxy for approval. She gives Danny a kiss and says, “Go ahead and drive him, honey.” She adds that he is a good man – Danny is – and he capitalises by trying to make out with her. She shoos him away.
Predictably enough, Alvin passes on Danny’s kind offer. “I wanna finish this one my own way.” Danny tries to talk sense into him, warning him about all the big hills that Alvin will have to brave along the way to Lyle. Which is precisely the point. Without realising it, Danny is articulating the gist of Alvin’s penitence. He is purging his sins, and part of the appeal is to enact the story of Sisyphus5 by hauling his mythical boulder uphill; i.e.: riding his lawnmower. “You’re a kind man talkin’ to a stubborn man. I still wanna finish this the way I started it,” Alvin concludes.
Cinema has given us some wonderful examples of characters setting out on these kinds of Quixotic endeavours that would seem pointless in the eyes of most, unless one can discern the intersection of belief and purpose in their symbolic value. The acknowledgement of sin and the heartfelt will to make amends can be so overpowering that only a symbolic act can atone for certain transgressions. It is precisely the abstraction and borderline absurdity – its outright purity – that confer meaning to the person for whom it matters: the great sinner himself.
What makes Alvin’s quest stand out is the limitations he faces due to his advanced age, multiple ailments, and his so-called unhealthy habits. In another film that tackles the Sisyphus Myth approach, The Mission (Roland Joffé, 1986), the mercenary Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert De Niro) finds his fiancée sleeping with his beloved half-brother and he kills the latter, which arguably leaves him in a worse state than the deceased himself. He repentantly agrees to accompany the Jesuits in their mission to the confines of the earth, Guaraní territory in 18th-century South America. While he is at it, he doggedly engages in the physical penance of dragging a huge net with his heavy armour and weapons through the jungle, up and down waterfalls, and whatever other obstacle nature can test his mettle with.
The Mission
The thing is, Rodrigo is at the prime of his life (De Niro was then 43), strong and in great shape, as opposed to Alvin’s infirm condition. Will the world be a better place because a man drags a heavy burden behind him? In terms of cause and effect, no, not really. Is there any inherent symbolic value in it? Maybe, at least per the logic of the movie, since Rodrigo manages to purge himself and never looks back from his newfound path of cleansed individual morality. His spiritual enlightenment even allows for killing other Catholics in order to protect the Guaraní Indians against the atrocities perpetrated by the Portuguese. He has his reasons now just as he had his reasons then, when he was a ruthless slave trader, but The Mission doesn’t trade in moral ambiguity: it makes it clear what is right and what is wrong in Rodrigo’s worldview. The irony with his journey of personal redemption is that his choices affect others in irreversible ways. Countless Guaraní Indians die in the impossible war that Rodrigo wages against the colonisers. And unless you speak Guaraní, we’ll never know what the Guaraní think or feel about any of this, since they were not given the courtesy of subtitles in this Palme d’Or winner.
There are other instances in movies where self-imposed penitence neither makes the world a better place nor does it make a dent in an individual’s character, let alone have any lasting symbolic effect. Take the case of chef Adam Jones (Bradley Cooper) in Burnt (John Wells, 2015), a movie that conjures up a character doing the “penance” of shucking a million oysters. Lest we think it is just a figure of speech, the down-and-out chef keeps a detailed account of his feat in a little notebook he lugs around. But it doesn’t take long for the culinary maestro to go back to his old ways of self-serving arrogance and doucheness. Shucking, and maybe shooting, as an exercise in futility; or as T.S. Eliot dixit, “Sightless, unless / The eyes reappear”.6 True penance does not end with the millionth oyster; it is never-ending, like in the Sisyphus Myth. When we reach the top of the hill, the boulder inevitably rolls down again. What might come about as the outcome of the journey uphill is the possibility of forgiveness by others. It is in this knowledge that the eyes reappear.
Closer to the spirit of The Straight Story in more ways than one is the journey undertaken by the Japanese protagonist of the Chinese masterpiece Qian li zou dan qi (Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, Yimou Zhang, 2005). Gôichi Takata, affectingly played by Ken Takakura, is an elderly man in his ‘70s. Like Alvin, he has been estranged from someone close to him – his son, in this case – for a number of years, ever since their respective wife and mother died. One fateful day Takata learns that his son is terminally ill, and he swallows his pride and visits him. But his son won’t see him.
So Takata sets out on a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China in order to videotape a Chinese-opera performer, Li Jiamin, whom his son greatly admires but will not be able to see again due to his cancer. Takata goes through innumerable challenges to get to Li, who is now in jail and unable to perform due to his own grief after being separated from his eight-year-old son. Takata now goes in search of the boy so Li can see him in person and function again. The film becomes a meditation about Takata’s symbolic journey, and how people’s lives are touched by Takata’s mission. For how could his own son ever forgive him if he hasn’t embarked on the endless journey of repentance? It follows that the videotaping itself proves to be moot since his son has succumbed to cancer. That ineffectual goal was replaced by a mutual understanding between them that required no material proof.
Gôichi Takata (Ken Takakura) realises the pointlessness of shooting…
…and finds solace in the notion that his estranged son might have forgiven him before dying.
After a flurry of big-budget CGI-laden extravaganzas – including the wuxia drama Hero (Yimou Zhang, 2002) and the martial arts epic House of Flying Daggers (Yimou Zhang, 2004) – Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles was also considered a bit of an anomaly for Zhang, rooted as it is in physical production, realistic mise-en-scène, and the pursuit of artistic truth through uncompromising simplicity, with honesty at the core of every directorial choice. Echoing Hoberman’s condescension towards The Straight Story, Rotten Tomatoes critics’ consensus about Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles does not do it justice: “[The film] doesn’t reach the heights of Zhang Yimou’s best, but this is still a heartwarming tale of love and forgiveness from the acclaimed Chinese director.”7 A compelling analogy can be drawn between the allegedly un-Lynchian Lynch of The Straight Story and the un-Zhangian Zhang of Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. In both cases, they broke free from what audiences expected from them based on previous films, expanded their cinematic language, and put on hold their formalistic palettes to achieve a transcendental form of realism that only gains from its universal, humanistic appeal.
Takata in pain at the beginning of Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles – he just found out that his estranged son has terminal cancer
Takata in a state of mono no aware at the end of the film – acceptance as the outcome of his symbolic journey
And as eyebrow-raising as it might be to write about one’s own film, I’ll mention in passing that in La otra conquista (The Other Conquest, Salvador Carrasco, 1998), an Aztec scribe, Topiltzin, sets out against all odds to appropriate from a sacristy a statue of the Virgin Mary in whose name the Spanish Conquistadors have committed all manner of questionable acts. In taking possession of the statue as if to absorb her mystical powers, he seems to fervently believe that he will be able to redeem his colonised people. It is a Quixotic tale that can be viewed as a redemptive journey of great symbolic value, a timeless act of cultural resistance, or as the inconsequential folly of a madman. Be as it were, it is perhaps as valid as the belief that humanity can be redeemed of its sins by the symbolic sacrifice of a man dying on a cross.
Topiltzin (Damián Delgado) abducts the statue of the Virgin Mary and brings it to his cell in The Other Conquest.
But back to Alvin’s odyssey and his next encounter… Among the neighbours who witnessed his near accident was Verlyn (Wiley Harker), a man roughly Alvin’s age, who invites him for a beer. Alvin does not drink anymore – another clue to the enigma that is his troubled past – but he joins Verlyn for a change of scene. At the bar, Alvin explains himself with regard to alcohol. During World War II he was drinking hard while he was serving in France, and then even harder when he got back to the US. “I was mean,” proclaims the now impossibly mellow old man. He confesses to Verlyn that he started seeing things at home that he had seen in Europe, which has an interesting double entendre. It could mean that he was having PTSD hallucinations or, more likely, that after the war he became more susceptible to people doing vicious things to one another. The lyrics of the song playing in the bar (Happy Times, performed by Jo Stafford) cut through Alvin’s momentary silence (“Though things may look very dark… a dream is not in vain”) and give way to a masterful scene between the two elderly men. Just like the earlier scene between Alvin and the Runaway had a vertical dynamic in that Alvin was the primary giver, this one is perfectly horizontal and reciprocal. Both men see eye to eye and, prompted by each other’s tacit understanding, they can “separate the wheat from the chaff” and say things to each other that – the film makes you feel – they probably had never confided to anyone else. Simply shot, predominantly in alternating frontal singles, this is one of those scenes where the actors, more than acting, are being, and it ranks highly among the totality of Lynch’s directorial work.
Alvin helps Verlyn come out of his cocoon by stating that he can see right away when a man is trying to forget. Verlyn takes a sip of his Miller Lite and decides to open up: “There was one time when…” Alvin braces up for what is sure to follow. And it does: the short of it is that Verlyn’s brothers-in-arms were slaughtered by a Nazi plane that dropped an incendiary bomb on their mess tent while he was away preparing them coffee. All the pain in the world comes back, punctuated by an aural flashback that we also get to experience. We see Verlyn’s soul disintegrating behind his trembling attempt at holding it together.
Verlyn crumbles under the weight of the memory of his slaughtered brothers-in-arms.
Alvin understands what Verlyn is going through and remarks that the more they live, the bigger the loss of those who died in the war, including the German moon-faced boys he was shooting as a sniper. When he says that, two associations leap from the celluloid: Alvin’s overarching humanism – the kind that humans tend to arrive at through genuine suffering – and the Jean-Renoiresque grand illusion of perceived differences due to nationalities and borders, since he inherently equates the tragedies experienced by Americans and Germans. Also, rather unforgettably, the visual of Alvin-the-shooter blasting his mower away flashes again in our minds.
But the scene is not over. It’s Alvin’s turn, and now it is Verlyn who braces himself… And so do we, as an aural flashback reappears, this time in counterpoint to Alvin’s story. It turns out that Alvin’s unit had a scout named Kotz, “a little fella (…), a Polish boy from Milwaukee”, whose talents had saved their lives on many occasions, and one day after they had drawn fire from the enemy, Alvin saw something moving in the woods and he shot at it. It was Kotz, making his way back to his buddies. Head-shot, instantly dead. Everyone assumed that a German sniper had killed the irreplaceable scout. “Everyone, all these years, everyone but me,” Alvin breaks down and is on the verge of tears. Verlyn shares the moment in deferential, brotherly silence.
The straight shooter – Alvin haunted by irredeemable guilt.
The last shot of the scene reveals in the background a man who must have served Verlyn his beer and Alvin his glass of milk. He stands at a respectful distance but not so far that he wouldn’t have overheard them. A sense of voyeurism pervades this shot. Among such intimate confessions, he shouldn’t be there, and perhaps neither should we. But we are, no doubt, the better for it.
In the last shot of the scene, after all the singles, Alvin and Verlyn poignantly share the frame.
Back at the spot outside Danny Riordan’s house, where he has set camp until his mower gets fixed, Alvin is still consumed by the memory of Kotz. Paradoxically, what makes it worse is that the killing was involuntary and that it happened more than half a century ago (“the bigger the loss of those who died in the war”). He looks up at his beloved starry night, the portal to his guilt and pain. This time the celestial bodies do not make him smile, but rather look down again. The stars act as a powerful leitmotif in The Straight Story. When Alvin first contemplates them with Rose, their souls are inextricably bound by the shared experience. When he sees them on the road alone, while taking shelter from a storm, he feels at one with nature; the here-and-now provides perspective as to man’s insignificant place in the universe. And in this moment, after communing with Verlyn, Alvin realises that there are trespasses for which one can do penitence and become a better person in the eyes of others, but what is not really attainable is personal redemption. And from that knowledge, we humans draw strength to endlessly keep trying to arrive at a place that eludes us simply because it does not exist. Because the task can never be completed, we might as well ride alone for thousands of miles in a lawnmower that will never go over five mph, unless it precipitates down a hill, jeopardising our very existence. If Alvin’s priority were to reconnect with Lyle before either of them dies, he would have accepted that ride from Danny. Making it on time is important, to be sure, but the main thing here is the penitence with no reward – the one that keeps Alvin grounded and focused. This is the equivalent of shucking a million oysters only to be humbled down with a million more every time you finish. For a movie that triggers in many the conditioned response of calling it “a feel-good movie”, The Straight Story delves into the darkness, rather than the luminescent stars, of the nighttime sky. Actor Richard Farnsworth himself, who will forever stand for Alvin, was battling cancer during the shooting of the film. Less than a year after its release, at the age of 80, he killed himself with a shotgun.
After the mindful seriousness of the scene between Alvin and Verlyn comes a rather dubious scene with the Farley Brothers (looking like the moustacheless versions of the Super Mario Brothers), who have fixed Alvin’s lawnmower but are overcharging him for the repair. They bicker as if in an SNL skit, and Alvin extols the virtues of brotherly love, needlessly so.
The Farley Brothers as involuntary avatars of the Super Mario Brothers
Was Lynch on set that day? I wonder if this scene is meant to provide comic relief after the deeply moving scene between Alvin and Verlyn. It falls short and seems misplaced in the context of Mary Sweeney’s otherwise flawless editing. (Sweeney was back then Lynch’s partner and the editor of The Straight Story, aside from its co-writer and co-producer, so it is fair to credit her with a good share of the prevalent sensibility.) For a film rich in understatement, this scene comes across as preachy and redundant. Still, from its expository awkwardness, we learn that the last time Alvin saw his brother Lyle ten years ago, they said unforgivable things to each other. Not even Badalamenti’s erstwhile-affecting guitar melody can save the day, and the staging is more suited to the contrived mise en scène of Twin Peaks than to the forthright approach of The Straight Story. The irony is not lost on the engaged viewer that Danny, who offered to drive him, is standing right there when Alvin tells the twins that he just hopes he won’t be late to see Lyle.
That night, with the movie back to its senses, Alvin bids farewell to Danny and thanks him for showing kindness to a stranger. Conversely, Alvin has touched Danny and his wife Darla, Verlyn, and other members of this microcosmic community. In the logic of the movie, even the Farley Brothers, at least on paper, are going to benefit from Alvin’s straightforward ways. All in all, it is not Alvin who goes through the character arc in this movie, for he essentially remains the same; it is all the people he encounters who are changed as a result of meeting him. In the words of Greil Marcus, one of the few critics who has given The Straight Story its rightful due: “This is a story about determination sliding into obsession – craziness, one could call it – (…) with the whole enveloped by decency on the part of every character present, a decency that seems brought forth by one man’s expectation that he will find it.”8
At long last, Alvin crosses the Mississippi River. He is getting close to his destination. As he rides his lawnmower across the geographically inaccurate, albeit imposing Black Hawk Bridge, uncertainty gradually settles in. His demeanour appears to question the prospect of a return trip. Will Lyle be alive? Is he taking the journey from which one never returns?
The Straight Story
The Straight Story
Fittingly, he camps that night in a cemetery, next to a parish. The local priest brings Alvin food and keeps him company. As fate would have it, he had met Lyle shortly after his stroke. Alvin tells him about growing up with Lyle, how they did everything together. Their lives were shaped by always talking to each other until anger and vanity, fuelled by liquor, drifted them into a silence that Alvin can bear no more. All he wants now is to make peace with his brother, sit with him and look at the stars like they used to do. The priest reacts as a priest should: he listens closely and gives no advice, conceding that Alvin has to do this his own way.
Next stop is at a petrol station on the verge of his destination in Mount Zion, Wisconsin, where Lyle lives. But Alvin is not there for that kind of fuel. He goes inside the establishment and announces to the proprietor that he hasn’t had a drink in years and he is going to have a cold beer – a Miller Lite, like the one Verlyn had.
“What does a Miller’s Lite taste like?”
“Mmm.”
Another simple gesture that means a great deal. Instead of taking the puritanical route of never, ever having another drop of alcohol, Alvin relishes his beer, like someone stepping outdoors after having hidden in a bunker for years. The bartender is curious about the lawnmower rig parked outside. How did it manage to make it up the hill? Alvin smiles and declares, not without a hint of hard-earned pride, that it made it up that hill and 200 more just like it. The bartender offers him another beer: “No, this’ll do me fine.”
Everything is coming to an end: the journey of irredeemable redemption; the memory of the Midwest as a place of innocence and human decency; Lyle’s real or imagined existence; the promise that emphysema will claim Alvin’s life like it would Lynch’s own 25 years later after making of The Straight Story; and, lo and behold, the film itself. After Alvin has that cold beer, there ought not be more than a couple of scenes left to wrap up this story.
When I first watched The Straight Story a quarter of a century ago in a theatre in New York, I remember loving the film up to this point in the narrative. During the cold-beer scene, I started dreading what might be about to come. How is Lynch going to pull this off without plummeting into the kind of proverbial ending that the opening bright blue title card of the film, Walt Disney Pictures, ominously promises? The answer: with restraint and moral ambivalence, which tends to work in cinema at the hands of a director who knows what he or she wants to say and has the craft and artistry to do so.
The character of the music changes as Alvin rides the last stretch of the road from the petrol station to Lyle’s house. It becomes mournful, possibly foreshadowing that he might not find his brother alive. Imagine if, after all the challenges of Alvin’s epic journey, it was all meant to be in vain. And further tempting fate, his engine starts sputtering and, alas, the foolproof lawnmower breaks down. Or does it? Alvin waits patiently by the side of the road. Hours pass, as suggested by the film dissolves, and he just sits immobile on the failed John Deere, staring ahead into the distance, wondering what actually lies at the end of this road. A big tractor drives by; the driver asks him how he’s doing. Alvin’s response is telling: “Not too good. This thing’s just tired, I guess. (…) It just quit on me.” Obviously, he is referring to the mower, but the words apply to himself even more accurately.
The Straight Story
The Straight Story
The tractor driver suggests that Alvin try turning on the engine again. Hard to believe that this hadn’t occurred to good old pragmatic Alvin; it’s more like he is letting fate take a hand in his not making it through the very last stretch of the way. According to Rose, the trip was 370 miles long, and by the look of things, he is less than one mile away. He could even walk there from here, with the aid of his two canes, and it would not take him considerably longer than riding the lawnmower.
So he does attempt it again, the machine wakes up, and now he has no choice but to complete the journey. He does not look elated, and even less so when he finally arrives at Lyle’s self-effacing, worn-down property. He calls his brother’s name out loud and gets no response. There is an empty chair on the porch, with a painterly touch of sunlight falling on it. The camera takes on Alvin’s POV as it dollies-in towards the charged empty space that is anything but empty – the notion of Mu, that emptiness pregnant with meaning straight out of a Yasujirō Ozu movie.
The Straight Story
The Straight Story
It is a moment as unforgettable as it is foreboding. And then, just as we are about to give up hope, an off-screen voice: “Alvin?” Deep sigh of relief from Alvin and anyone else with a beating heart. Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) emerges, holding himself up with a walker. Two old men look at each other without saying anything. The fact that Alvin is here is more eloquent than any words imaginable. A restrained long-shot conveys the moment in a timeless image.
Being here is more eloquent than what words could say.
Finally, Lyle asks Alvin to sit down and his brother complies. Lyle follows suit, all vestiges of energy drained from his being. As if hearing a call, he slowly turns his head away from Alvin. The camera now takes on Lyle’s POV, framing another instance of Mu: the empty lawnmower and its rig, which we have come to recognise as the embodiment of Alvin’s spirit. Still looking at the lawnmower, Lyle asks, “Did you ride that thing all the way out here to see me?” He gets it, the whole meaning of it, penitence and all. “I did, Lyle.” As in, subtext: Forgive me, just as I have forgiven you, for I cannot forgive myself.
Alvin’s Mu
“Did you ride that thing all the way out here to see me?” Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) realising what Alvin did in an attempt to earn forgiveness from him
“I did, Lyle.” Alvin in a state of mono no aware at the end of the film – acceptance as the outcome of his symbolic journey
A beautiful cinematic choreography of gazes follows: Lyle’s eyes tear up and he takes in the pain of everything that Alvin has gone through in the last six weeks; the ten years of their estrangement; and the haunting memories of the half-century-old war. In turn, Lyle soundlessly offers the pain of his own trespasses, which the priest subtly hinted at when he spoke to Alvin at the cemetery. It takes Lyle a while to finally be able to turn towards his brother. Alvin feels Lyle’s gaze and looks back at him. Their eyes meet only for a fraction of a second. Lyle instinctively looks up towards the sky, and Alvin turns up in the same direction. It is a perfectly shared moment where they are both in pain and also grateful to be alive, however ephemeral or eternal this instant might prove to be.
Alvin had told the priest that all he wanted was to be able to sit down with his brother and look at the night sky the way they used to when they were children. Aware of this, the camera soars up and the sunlit afternoon turns into the night sky. It slowly makes its way towards the stars as Alvin and Lyle, now reunited, along with the departed but ongoing David Lynch, and we, his captive audience, pause for a moment to contemplate what a wonderful thing it is to be alive… Before we shoot, bullets or film.
A shared moment, again, and for eternity – in making this deceptively straight, profoundly personal film, Lynch proves that in truly great, enduring art, simplicity is ripe with inexhaustible layers of complexity.
Endnotes
J. Hoberman, “David Lynch, Maker of Florid and Unnerving Films, Dies at 78,” The New York Times (16 January 2025) ↩
George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1 December 1982) ↩
Aesop, The Complete Fables (Penguin Classics, 1 March 1998) ↩
Homer, Book 11 in The Odyssey (Penguin Classics, 29 November 1999) ↩
T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men” in Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (Ecco; First Edition, 25 September 1991) ↩
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/riding_alone_for_thousands_of_miles ↩
“How the Pieces Don’t Fit Together: Following David Lynch’s America” ↩
