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.

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Where to watch The Straight Story