A Straight Story on a Rural Road
In the other films we’ve seen thus far, many characters have ached for bigger and better things, using a route away from their dead-end, small-town lives and into “the city” as a one-way pass to freedom of identity. In David Lynch’s The Straight Story, however, Alvin Straight contains his six-week journey to the rural bowels of the Midwest, traveling atop an old riding lawnmower from his farm in Iowa to his ailing brother’s house in Wisconsin. Along the way, he meets a motley cast of roadside drifters, stressed-out city-type workaholics, suburbanites, and “good country people” like himself. Each plays a minutely significant role in his overall quest, showing how the rural road can operate as a space for realization, revelation, and actualization in ways that previous films have not. In an open but still enclosed space like the Midwest, everyone either knows each other already or is bound to meet in some way—we tend to see signs in the small things but tell it straight; and our futures can be revealed through the trials and tribulations of our neighbors. We are bound in a way by our attitudes, our determinations, and our brand of emotional expression. Alvin, being a poor-sighted senior citizen who wants to finish this rural road trip "the way I started it" (that is, slow and steady and marked by frequently enlightening stops), has the patience and the unconventional ways of "seeing" to understand all of this and more. It's not about how fast he's going or how far he still has to go—a journey like that, so populated by those similar-minded people who admit they have certain things to lose but also much to gain, becomes not about the journey at all anymore, but about oneself.