Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 21 January

The Straight Story (Lynch, 1999) & David Lynch: The Art Life (Barnes/Neergaard-Holm/Nguyen, 2016)

I haven’t had very much to say, online or oth­er­wise, about the passing of David Lynch last week at the age of 78.

I’m far from an expert on the man’s work and, if I’m hon­est, have nev­er been that big a fan.

I was ter­ri­fied by Eraserhead back in my high school days and have nev­er revis­ited it. Dune came and went, as it did for Lynch him­self. I was deeply dis­tressed by Blue Velvet and so didn’t make much of an effort to watch his 90s films after that. Wild at Heart and Lost Highway are still miss­ing from my view­ing his­tory (but I do have cop­ies here and will get to them now I’ve been read­ing more appre­ci­ations of the man).

After that came Mulholland Drive (which I also didn’t really get) and Inland Empire which I abso­lutely hated. Looking up my Capital Times review in November 2007, I see I was pretty hacked off!

I fully intend invoicing David Lynch for the three hours of my life I’ll nev­er get back after watch­ing the unbe­liev­ably indul­gent Inland Empire on Sunday night. Admittedly, my time isn’t worth what it once was but its the prin­ciple of the thing. An audi­ence was obvi­ously the last con­sid­er­a­tion for Lynch when he was throw­ing this mess together.

Even the TV series Twin Peaks was some­thing I exper­i­enced more as a com­munity vibe than for its oth­er qual­it­ies. It was appoint­ment view­ing for the flat that I lived in at the time and – my par­ents read­ing should look away at this point – I once crashed my car rush­ing home from vis­it­ing them in order not to miss that week’s episode.

And one of my flat­mates at the time had long hair and become known as “Killer Bob” until he sens­ibly got it cut.

But that was pretty much it. Sorry if that dis­ap­points people who assume I’m an expert on everything!

Wishing to be bet­ter informed, on Saturday night we sat down to watch an in memori­am double-feature includ­ing a Blu-ray of Lynch’s 1999 film The Straight Story (avail­able online from Imprint Films in Australia) and the 2016 doc­u­ment­ary about Lynch, The Art Life.

The Straight Story is a beau­ti­ful, sens­it­ive and humane film about an age­ing mid-westerner (former stunt­man Richard Farnsworth) who, as his body starts to give out on him, decides to vis­it his estranged broth­er over 350 miles away. Unable to main­tain a drivers licence, Alvin Straight pulls a make­shift trail­er behind a ride-on lawn­mower, mak­ing for one of the great road movies of all time.

Based on a remark­able true story, Straight is an ele­gi­ac­al por­trait of the small town America that Lynch grew up in and the gen­er­al decency of the folk that Alvin meets is an anti­dote to the goth­ic ter­ror that Lynch showed us hid­ing beneath the sur­face in films like Blue Velvet.

The dark ima­gin­a­tion that Lynch clearly had access to was also bal­anced by his per­son­al, spir­itu­al, philo­sophy – he was a pas­sion­ate advoc­ate for tran­scend­ent­al med­it­a­tion – which is that this life is just one of many planes of exist­ence and that death is just a trans­ition from one to the next. His great friend Harry Dean Stanton – Alvin’s broth­er Lyle in the film – once told him that he thought that was horse­shit and that there was noth­ing when we go, but that didn’t stop Lynch provid­ing a won­der­ful cameo in the Stanton film Lucky in 2017 – a film that makes a great com­pan­ion piece to The Straight Story.

Anyway, wheth­er there are oth­er planes of exist­ence or not, The Straight Story reminds us that we ought to do what we can to make things right in this par­tic­u­lar plane before we leave it.

I got a lot out of the doc­u­ment­ary, too. We watch Lynch the paint­er work­ing in his stu­dio as voi­ceover inter­views with the man (and plenty of archive and fam­ily mater­i­al) tell the story of how he became an artist in the first place.

It’s full of insight and inspir­a­tion, not least the fact that luck and rela­tion­ships are neces­sary for even the greatest artists to have careers. At art school in Philadelphia he flat­ted with Jack Fisk, who would go on to become art dir­ect­or for Terrence Malick, among oth­er luminar­ies, as well as hus­band to Sissy Spacek (who her­self would later help fund Eraserhead and co-star in The Straight Story).

And, also, that pat­ron­age and fin­an­cial sup­port are import­ant. Lynch’s par­ents were unwill­ing to sup­port him through all those art school adven­tures but it was a sur­prise grant from the American Film Institute, on the strength of a single 4‑minute short film, that got him and his young fam­ily to Los Angeles and changed his life forever.

Both films are totally recom­men­ded and, yes, I will go back fill in those egre­gious gaps in my knowledge.

Where to watch The Straight Story

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from AroVision or pur­chase on region-free Blu-ray from Imprint Films

Australia, Canada, Ireland, India: Purchase region-free Blu-ray from Imprint Films

USA: Streaming on Disney+

UK: Digital rent­al from Amazon or pur­chase on region-free Blu-ray from Imprint Films

Where to watch David Lynch: The Art Life

Aotearoa & Australia: Streaming on DocPlay

Canada: Streaming on Criterion Channel (free until end of January)

Ireland & UK: Digital rental

India: Not cur­rently available

USA: Streaming on Max or Criterion Channel (free until end of January)