Category: field notes

I had the pleasure last year to write not once but twice about the work of David Lynch. I contributed a short essay about his film The Straight Story, which was just turning a quarter century old, for a special issue of The Wire dedicated to Lynch on the occasion of his new album release, Cellophane Memories, a collaboration with Texas-based singer Chrystabell. I also reviewed that album for Pitchfork. So, when Lynch’s death was announced, his work was especially present for me, still lingering from the hours I’d spent pondering it. Below is the Wire essay. I talked about it a bit when it first came out, and music critic Ned Raggett was generous enough to cite it in something he published this week.

Parable of the Mower
Sound design and radical juxtaposition lead the narrative in The Straight Story

Disney acquired David Lynch’s The Straight Story in 1999 after the Cannes Film Festival showered it with praise. It remains, 25 years later, Lynch’s sole G-rated release, for general consumption.

The film tells a story (based on a true one) about an elderly American Second World War veteran, lacking a driver’s license, who employs his gas-powered lawn mower to travel from his home in lowa to visit his estranged brother in Wisconsin, hundreds of miles away. The brother suffered a stroke. The protagonist Alvin Straight, played by Richard Farnsworth, deals with countless trappings of old age, including emphysema and failing eyes. The mower isn’t in much better shape.

Lynch’s only other credit on the film, besides directing, is sound design. And the sound in The Straight Story exudes his characteristic surreality by way of heightened mundanity (the score is by Angelo Badalamenti, dependably). The movie takes its title from the actual family name, Straight, of the man on whom its lead is based. Lynch also plays it straight, so straight that his use of sound here comes down to two approaches: very loud and very quiet.

First, though, Lynch instructs us to listen by having his characters discuss listening. Straight’s daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek) tells him (and us) about the sounds he makes when he stands, thus raising concerns about advanced age without announcing them. Soon after, a giant agricultural structure fills the screen, and we hear its thunderous nocturnal drone (Eraserhead’s radiator, minus the lady, writ large). The scene shifts from the looming structure to a moonlit backyard, where father and daughter are enjoying the evening. The whirr, quieter now, persists in the ambience. Says the older Straight, “Listen to that old grain elevator.” Rose replies: “It’s harvest time.”

Moments akin to the grain elevator’s violent drone punctuate The Straight Story like chapter headings. Lightning goes off with biblical intensity. A truck scares Straight off the road, and its fading rumble lasts for more than 30 seconds after it passes. Sometimes the noise is of Straight’s making: when he leaves town, his cantankerous friends yell over the mower’s motor. When a mower fails, Straight shoots it like a lame horse; it explodes loudly into flames. In the noisiest moments, exaggerated volume routinely subverts the seeming realism.

At other times, near-silence is the emphasis. When Straight rises from the seat of his mower, we hear each creak, a sonic exoskeleton of his troubling fragility. Later, in a bar scene, we only notice someone sharpening a knife when the bartender extends his attention from Straight to include the other patron. It’s a masterful moment, when the creative opportunity of diegetic sound — not just what’s in the scene, but what’s perceived by those in the scene — is on full display. In that same sequence, Lynch appears to nod to one of his most famous scenes. The director who, in Blue Velvet, introduced the exchange, “Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!” into the vernacular, here records the sound of a beer bottle being opened with delicacy befitting an ASMR session. The most telling quiet moments are the ones when Lynch captures conversations from a distance, and mikes them with a faithfulness that renders them just shy of unintelligible. If he instructed us to listen earlier, he later tags on ethical amendments about privacy.

Throughout the film, all the sounds are real (or at least Foley) until late in the narrative, when a fellow veteran tells Straight a story of his own, and then the soundtrack superimposes the sounds of war itself. There’s nothing subtle about the audio overlay, but there’s also nothing subtle about the impact of the story on the man’s life, when his fellow soldiers were killed by a passing German warplane. The man switches, tellingly, to the present tense and says, “I can see the swastika.” Past and present are simultaneous in the moment. Straight commiserates with an equally harrowing story, and again there is a noisy resonance, but its origin is more ambiguous. Quite likely it is sound from the street given meaning and purpose by Straight’s tale. That is the best sound effect of all.