Artforum, January 2000


LYNCH MOB. 


SEVENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD Richard Farnsworth's performance in David Lynch's.
The Straight Story (1999) has a beautiful, disarming nakedness: There doesn't
seem to be anything between the elements and his weathered skin except the
stubborn pride the old actor projects. As seventy-three-year-old Alvin Straight,
who can barely walk yet drives a battered lawn mower nearly 300 miles from low
to Wisconsin to visit his sick, estranged brother, Farnsworth takes in the world
and his own increasing frailty with an aching watchfulness. Farnsworth's eyes
articulate what Straight himself can't put into words, conveying what it means to
bear witness to decades of silent tragedy, shame, fear, and loss (Alvin mentions
almost in passing that his late wife gave birth to "four teen babies--seven made
it"). Straight's eyesight is failing, too, but he can read the signs of encroaching
mortality in the mirror. (Lynch's camera a registers every sagging fold and wrinkle
of Farnsworth's skin until it becomes a kind of narrative in itself .) Inching for ward
in a quixotic line. The Straight Story's funereal procession of open expanses and
Still-Life-with-Lawn-Mower close-ups hovers calmly at the edge of the abyss. And
when Lynch cuts away from an aerial shot of the septuagenarian crossing the
Mississippi to a view of a pitch-dark cemetery. Alvin is transformed into a hick
from the Styx. Bringing oddball myth down to it's-all-true midwestern earth, this
is one of the tenderest, most plangent spiritual odysseys ever filmed--a bucolic
Wisconsin death trip undertaken to make peace with the life Straight can feel
away, breath by halting breath.

In its regard for ordinary people and the ways it finds tri honor the mysteries of
everyday life--along with the film's diffuse sense of time and its synthesis of
almost pure visual abstraction with unadorned emotional intimacy-- The Straight
Story has obvious affinities with Iranian cinema's meld of realism and fable. But
although the film was by and large enthusiastically if not very perceptively
received by mainstream reviewers, the serious critics who have championed
like-minded foreign films were less generous, even condescending or outright
dismissive. Both camps tended to fixate on the dirty-David-Lynch-makes-
a-G-rated-movie aspect of the production, but while unctuous middlebrows like
New York Times critic Janet Maslin were enthralled by the film's supposed
wholesomeness, the highbrows were deeply suspicious. Evan a largely
sympathetic reviewer like the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum called the
movie "propaganda," as if Lynch's taking money from Disney were inherently
more compromising than Abb as Kiarostami working under the aegis of a
totalitarian theocracy. J. Hoberman's appraisal of the film in the Village Voice
was tacked on to the end of his near devotional assessment of Hou Hsiao-hsien
(Puppetmaster, Flowers of Shanghai) as "the world's greatest working narrative
moviemaker," implicitly contrasting Lynch's cultural conservatism and
mid-American attitudes ("Disney material with a vengeance," "shamelessly
feel-good," plus the obligatory dismissive Reagan reference) with Hou's
homespun chickens-come-home-to-Proust reveries ("Time ripples and folds in on
itself like a brocaded curtain"). The notion that Lynch might be Hou's peer--let
alone a more expressive, daring, boundary-crossing artist than the cloistered
Taiwanese grandmaster--was simply beneath consideration. After all, Lynch is an
American, and not the good indie sick soul-of-the-nation-hating variety, but the
worst kind of American at that: He actually likes his own people.

A peculiar double vision exists when it comes to the way art-house critics view
foreign and American films, a myopia most ludicrously apparent in John
Patterson s rabid denunciation of The Straight Story, which ran in the LA Weekly
and concluded with the sneer: "David Lynch meet Bill Bennett--you guys are
gonna get along just fine." Patterson's shrill, holes-than-Mao attack on the movie,
Lynch, and indeed the very humanity of folks like Alvin Straight amounts to a
cultural Red Guard action parading the film as a dunce-capped example of
"bourgeois triumphalism." Seeing reactionary conspiracy behind every frame,
Patterson declares than "non-whites might as well not exist" in Lynch's Iowa,
which is like faulting Kiarostami for neglecting to include Iranian Jews in, say.
The Taste of Cherry Patterson is blind to Farnsworth's nuanced performance,
perceiving him only as a wizended stand-in for Reagan--and "Gingrich, Armey,
and Robertson," the whole vast right-wing, fundamentalist plot Lynch "would like
us all to c hoke on." Funny thing is, the hysterical tone of the piece--not one
worthwhile moment is conceded to Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek's out-on-a-limb
performance as Alvin's mentally challenged daughter, or anything else in the
picture--resembles a Pat Buchanan tirade turned on its head. All that paranoid
xenophobia has been displaced back onto the rural American masses to whom it
is unfairly attributed, as if they were nothing more than a pack of
pitchfork-wielding, gay-bashing. National Endowment for the Arts-defunding
yokels. Yet The Straight Story's headstrong old gentleman and the relentlessly
single-minded protagonists of Kiarostami's films, or the equally determined little
girl of Jafar Panahi's 1995, Kiarostami-scripted White Balloon (not to mention the
upright, fiercely independent senior citizen Umberto D. of an earlier, no less
allegorical brand of Neorealism), have an innate kinship--they are gnarled
branches of the same cinematic family tree.

Yet there is a widespread view among the film intelligentsia that humanity is the
specialized province of the salt of the foreign earth, where indigenous cultures are
typically mediated through familiar Eurocentric tropes and gestures (depoliticized
avant-Godardisms, Bresson-oil rubdowns, the many moods of Antonioni). For
these rigidly positioned film missionaries, places like Iowa are what they fly over
on their pilgrimages to Lourdes-like film festivals--where true believers seek
healing epiphanies, artistic "miracles," the blessings of directorial saints. The
corollary to this critical fundamentalism is a self-flagellating notion of Americans
as Hanna-Barbaric "Other," a derisive cartoon wrapped in a cliche wrapped in a
tourniquet. Harry Dean Stanton's great, grubby credo in Repo Man--"Ordinary
fuckin' people, I hate 'em"--has been taken up selectively by the pious
gatekeepers, who are content to imagine the rest of the world as the repository of
every virtue we soulless Americans have forsaken. (Thus the enthusiasm for
neat-freak smorgasbords of schematic formalism and shrewdly
compartmentalized affect la Safe, Kids, Happiness, and Affliction: one-note arias
in the key of smug.)

Stanton, as it happens, turns up at the end of The Straight Story, as Alvin's
dilapidated brother--a lean-to shack on legs--and there's something immensely
satisfying about the pairing of Farnsworth and the eternally ornery ex-repo man.
Together, these two aged character actors embody a range of American
experience that encompasses the iconic and the breathtakingly quotidian, and in
turn the incongruous serendipity of their reconciliation speaks to just how much
of that far-flung experience David Lynch's films have laid claim to. From 1977's
Eraser head to 1999's Straight Story, no living filmmaker has gone further into the
unresolved recesses of America's dream life or fashioned so indelible a universe
from such spectral matter. Yet in spite of that--or maybe because of it--he is
close to a joke among film purists, an eccentric poor relation to those lofty saints
who have raised movies up from their embarrassing popular origins and made
them fit for monkish contemplation.

Film theologians like Kent Jones lament the absence in this country of "a
genuine, shared sense of national poetics," the kind "that exists now in France,
Taiwan, and Iran." Of course what these movie mullahs have in mind by that is a
renunciation of the idiosyncratic, visionary, irreverent strain of American culture
(which produced, don't forget, Melville, Ellington, Pollock, and Dylan) in favor of
dour burnt offerings purged of America's wicked temptations. When a real work of
loopy American poetry like The Straight Story comes along, giving faces and
voices to people no less worthy than their brethren in Iran, the cineasts are
oblivious to the national poetics right in front of them. Greil Marcus saw what
most critics missed in The Straight Story, the sense of ungainly folk
communicating in their own made-up sign languages. As he wrote in Salon,
"They make gestures that are in some profound and casual way absolutely
self-legitimating: gestures that say that those who wave their hands, stutter or
proffer s trange talismans have as much a right to speak, to tell the story, as
anyone else." To lose sight of that, of what it means to see America in the
fullness of its desires and contradictions, the promises it has broken and the
promises it has kept, is to give up on the chance of ever really understanding the
country you live in. The critic becomes nothing more than a belligerent tourist,
insulated, ignorant, and resentful, wishing he or she were anywhere but here.

Howard Hampton