The Pilgrim on the Riding Mower: Lynch’s The Straight Story
The final year of the second millennium, 1999, was a remarkable one for American cinema, with many of the most critically acclaimed titles dealing with metaphysical subject matter: Fight Club, The Matrix, Magnolia, Being John Malkovich, and The Sixth Sense. One title that isn’t found on many of those lists, however, is a little miracle of a movie from a director who couldn’t have been less likely to produce it: David Lynch, a filmmaker unsurpassed in his surrealistic and twisted visions of the everyday. It is a G-rated, profanity-less, Disney distributed film about a 73-year-old Iowa man, Alvin Straight, who drives his 1966 John Deere riding lawnmower nearly 300 miles in order to visit his ailing brother, Lyle, in Mt. Zion, Wisconsin. It’s based on a New York Times published account from 1994 and is called The Straight Story, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. The film itself could be seen as a post-modern parable, a story ostensibly centering on the reconciliation of two brothers, but in essence one that offers all of us something in even higher demand in 2024: forgiveness and a little grace, courtesy of a crippled, stubborn old man from Iowa.
At a midwestern pace, viewers are introduced to Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) and his daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek), the inhabitants of a humble white home in Laurens, a small farming community. Rose is slow, hesitant of speech, and concerned about her father, who has been told by his doctor that, due to his deteriorating hips, smoking habit, and other “diabetes-related problems,” unless he makes changes there will be “serious consequences.” Alvin has no intention of making any health changes (playing down the doctor’s dire prediction to his daughter when asked and forever lighting up his Swisher Sweet cigarillos), but once Rose receives a phone call notifying her of her uncle’s recent stroke, his life will dramatically change.
The first 20 minutes of the movie cements this Straight man as stubborn and lost, broken physically and, like his ancient riding mower, desperately in need of a rebuild. However, as Lynch’s camera studies the old man’s face in these early scenes, we can perceive, too, that he is worn down emotionally and spiritually—his eyes moist and searching, a look of recognition in them that his days are numbered. Upon getting the news, in the midst of an electrical storm, of his brother’s collapse, Alvin is purposeless no longer. He has chosen his path and mission; he later tells Rose simply, “I’m gonna go back on the road again. I’ve gotta go see Lyle.” On the soundtrack we hear the first iteration of what I’ll term the reconciliation theme: a plaintive plucking of a harp that will signify the most heartfelt moments in the film.
And so Alvin’s journey, which will suffer a false start when his original machine breaks down and he replaces it with the upgrade of the John Deere mower, begins as a rather quixotic quest, a search for purpose against all odds. A force outside himself seems to drive Alvin, and the obstinacy of taking the least practical (but the only one available to him) of all vehicles appears capricious at first. The night before he launches his mower/ark, Rose reminds Alvin that it is “harvest time.” What reaping will Alvin gain from his sowing, viewers must wonder. The road ahead is daunting. And, as Alvin faces the buffeting winds and unrelenting sun on the highway to Zion and his brother, the pilgrim is alone and his pilgrimage a solitary one.
Between the pilgrim and Zion, however, Alvin meets a collection of lost sheep, starting with a young woman he initially passes on the road while she is hitchhiking. Later the two road warriors meet, as the young woman stumbles upon Alvin’s campfire in a field. The old man asks her if she is hungry, and despite her less-than-gracious reply (“Whadya got?” she suspiciously asks), she takes a “wiener” from Alvin and begins to cook it over the open fire. There’s a quiet tension between the two wayfarers, but Alvin’s thoughts can be read in the glow of the fire: he wants so much to question the young woman but holds off and allows her to initiate more conversation. After sharing a bit of his own story, Alvin then broaches the essential topic, asking his guest, “Where is your family?” Getting no reply, Alvin presses the subject with two more questions that get to the heart of the woman’s dilemma: “Are you runnin’ away?” and then, more pointedly, “How far along are ya?”
What ensues is the start of healing for the young woman. After confiding that her family “hates” her and that neither her family nor her boyfriend are aware of her pregnancy, Alvin transforms into counselor and trusted father figure. Granting that her family may be “mad,” he assures her that they would never want to lose her or her “little problem” due to that temporary anger. In a frosty Iowa field, he makes a perfectly cogent and convincing point to his youthful companion: “A warm bed and a roof sounds a mite better than eatin’ a hot dog on a stick with an old geezer travelin’ on a lawn mower.”
He then entrusts the pregnant girl with the tale of another mother: Rose. Claiming that she is not “slow” at all, Alvin relates how his daughter lost her four children to the state following an accident in which someone else was watching the kids, a fire broke out, and her second boy “got burned real bad.” Alvin tells her that “there isn’t a day goes by that she don’t pine for them kids.” These words are voiced over a brief scene in which we leave the field and see Rose alone at night in the empty Straight house, staring out the window. In the background, for the second time, we hear the reconciliation theme on the soundtrack. As we leave Rose in her grief, there is a crafty dissolve: as Rose’s face fades, our young mother’s face emerges on the screen. Alvin then makes his closing argument. He describes a game he used to play with his own kids in which he had them take a single stick and break it, then collected several sticks together “in a bundle” and asked them to break those. Of course, they couldn’t. “Then I’d say,” he concludes, “that bundle—that’s family.” Each of our wayfarers goes to sleep, and the next dawn Alvin finds himself alone. The haunting reconciliation theme is heard yet again as Alvin spies hope: next to the smoking embers of the previous night’s campfire is a bundle of sticks tied together with the young woman’s shoelace.
The pilgrimage continues, and Alvin comes to the most perilous moment in it as he nears the Mississippi river. A belt snaps on the John Deere as he is going down a hill. With no breaks on the trailer, the mower gains a dizzying amount of speed for Alvin, and as it comes to a rest at the bottom, he is unquestionably shaken and disoriented. Thankfully, a Good Samaritan is on hand to aid the pilgrim. His name is Danny Riordan, a worker for John Deere for over 30 years, and he and his wife and in-laws all help get the “rig” off the road and onto his property. An expert in all things Deere, he immediately recognizes the mower as a model from “’65 or ‘66” and informs Alvin that his journey has come to an impasse: the drive belt is gone and he has transmission problems to boot. However, Danny offers his front yard to “bivouac” in and erects a tarp over the trailer to keep off the forecasted rain.
The next day brings two more lost souls into Alvin’s orbit. In a much more comic encounter, we meet the Olsen twins (Harald and Thorvald), bickering mechanics who are tasked with repairing the John Deere mower. Dressed in ridiculously matching denim overalls and red caps, the two brothers suggest a midwestern Laurel and Hardy, as they attempt to charge Alvin more than he thinks fair for the work, especially considering that much of their time has been spent on bickering. After briefly explaining the purpose of his trip, Alvin dispenses some truth the Olsen twins need to hear:
There’s no one knows your life better than a brother that’s near
your age. He knows who you are and what you are better than
anyone on earth. My brother and I said some unforgivable things
the last time we met, but I’m tryin’ to put that behind me, and
this trip is a hard swallow of my pride. I just hope that I’m not too late.
A brother’s a brother.
Again, the reconciliation theme can be heard, and while it is not certain these brothers will be able to do the hard swallowing necessary to bring about a mending of their relationship, Alvin has pushed them in that direction.
Eventually, his slow-motion chariot gets Alvin to his brother’s cabin in the woods, and in this anti-Blockbuster film, it should come as little shock that the climax of The Straight Story is understated and moves at the pace of a 73 year-old man on two crutches. The brother is played by the great Harry Dean Stanton, son of a Kentucky tobacco farmer and the ultimate supporting actor, who had a 60-year career and was a favorite of several Hollywood auteurs, including Lynch, Sam Peckinpah, and Francis Ford Coppola. He has two lines in the movie. There is a reconciliation, but one that maintains a muted tone and is related in Hemingwayesque simplicity. The final shot of the film reprises its opening: the camera tilts heavenward, revealing a night sky filled with stars.
A great film is identical to a great story, as Flannery O’Connor describes it: “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.” No mere statement, or collection of them (including the previous brief description), could mean what David Lynch’s small miracle of a movie does. As I have revisited the movie over the years (most recently as part of a semester-long series called “Movies at the Millennium” for my university), its simple sincerity never fails to charm me. With all the division and ironic snark of our current day, it is refreshing to encounter the guileless determination and forgiving heart of Alvin Straight. In fact, his spirit is evergreen. Recently, I have come across a slew of articles in the press on how older people manage to end their lives happily. Without exception, so-called experts—psychologists, cardiologists, “life coaches”—stress the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation with those we are closest to. Hospice nurses tell us that the single greatest regret people have at the end of their lives is that they never got a chance to heal the wounds of strained relationships. Despite his reputation as a post-modern purveyor of what, in the words of critic Tim Kreider (in a contemporary reading of the film in Film Quarterly) are “involuted and hidden…repressed memories,” Lynch, whether he intended to or not, created a straight narrative, and one that offers some warmhearted salve to the soul in the unlikely form of a man on a riding mower creeping down a country road.
Bernie Prokop is Associate Professor of English at Colorado Christian University, has curated the university’s Film Series for over 10 years, and will be doing the commentary track on the upcoming Film Masters release of Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Strange Woman (1946).
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