When David Lynch played it straight

Goodbye to one of the last great dreamers

Film still from The Straight Story (1999), directed by David Lynch. Used for critical commentary purposes.

David Lynch is dead. I know my readers don’t really care for my thoughts on popular culture, but I am going to be self-indulgent here. This one hurts.

The death of David Lynch feels like the end of a chapter in cinema. It’s the end of directors who had:

• mainstream success; and

• complete creative control; and

• something interesting to do with that control.

Lynch is most celebrated for his surreal, nightmarish masterpieces like Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive. But far and away my favorite film of his is The Straight Story, in which Richard Farnsworth plays an old man making a long journey to visit his dying brother on a John Deere lawn-mower.

It’s a bad choice. In some ways, it’s not really a "David Lynch" film of them all. There are no haunting dream sequences and no unsettling small-town mysteries. It’s just a quiet, self-contained movie about regret and reconciliation.

This movie… it sneaks up on you. On the surface, it’s so quaint that you wonder how Lynch ended up directing it. There are no cinematic tricks and flourishes.

It’s not entirely devoid of Lynch’s signature touches, of course. There are moments. I love the grabber scene:

That is distinctly Lynchian. A small touch of eccentricity that punctuates the otherwise serene narrative. No matter how grounded the story is, Lynch shines through.

But it’s the end of the movie that really gets you. The whole purpose and meaning and necessity of the journey is revealed in a deeply emotional scene. Just to be clear, there is no outpouring of feels. It’s just a simple exchange of words and a subtle, almost imperceptible change of countenance by Harry Dean Stanton, who plays the brother.

Don’t watch this next clip if you haven’t seen the movie. Without the rest of the movie the effect isn’t really there. If you have already seen it, however, here’s the reminder:

We are frequently faulted by our wives, girlfriends, mothers and sisters for being emotionally unavailable, for not wearing our feelings on our sleeves. But still waters run deep. ¹

It’s like this now infamous clip from the soon to be banned TikTok: