Friday, January 17, 2025

My Favorite David Lynch Film

I was introduced to David Lynch way back in the day.

As a young man drawn to the subversive and the countercultural during the soulless pastel venality of the Reagan years, I'd seen the iconic image of the titular character to Eraserhead often.  It made a fine t-shirt and/or poster for those of a punky or anarchic persuasion.  

The film itself was a fever dream of paternal anxiety, fiercely unsettling.  I saw it first on VHS, natch, but hadn't "seen" it until I went for a viewing at the long-lamented Biograph in Georgetown.  I left the theater with a lingering sense that the world had been knocked slightly askew, as the movie seemed to warp the world around its claustrophobic vision.

When Blue Velvet dropped, I saw it the very first weekend, sitting alone in the theater, as I so often did as a socially awkward, anxious, and desperately lonely teen.  It was technicolor gorgeous and seethingly, subtly horrid, skewed and shaking, which utterly fit my grim adolescent cynicism about the world.  I found it so amenably disturbing that I immediately told my punkish friends that they had to get out and get equally shaken.  

I went with them for a second viewing two weeks later, but as it happened, in between first and second viewings I'd had my quite belated first kiss.  And my second.  And thirtieth.  My entire view of the world had shifted, and riding high on the bliss of fresh first love, Blue Velvet parsed as a darkly preposterous absurdist comedy.  My friends were shaken.  In the theater, I laughed and laughed and laughed, out loud and often.    

Which...er...wasn't quite the response of the rest of the audience.  It...um...may have cemented my reputation as being a little on the weird side.  

Love sees the world differently, eh?

Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart and much of the Lynch ouevre were staples of my edgy young adulthood.  I went back and gloried at the dark, grotesque, defiant humanity of The Elephant Man.  I lamented the corporate sabotage of his tragicomic attempt at Dune, a lingering reminder that mercantilism is and will always be the enemy of art.

But none of these are my favorite Lynch film, the one that stands out and away from every other one of his creative outputs.

My favorite Lynch film is...hands down...The Straight Story, and it is unlike almost every other thing he made.  It shows the same attention to craft, the same gift for visual composition, and bears all of the marks of an auteur.

It's based on the true story of Alvin Straight, an elderly man who was deeply estranged from his brother.  Upon hearing his brother had had a stroke and might not live, Straight determined to go and visit him to reconcile.  But he'd lost his license, and had no car.  Stubbornly determined to make the trip himself, Straight got on his ancient lawn tractor and traveled hundreds of miles, from Iowa to Wisconsin, set on restoring his relationship.

It is a David Lynch film, and as such is as deeply committed to concept as any other of his works.  Yet it is tonally unique.  The characters aren't caricatures, but neither are they warped and seething with madness.  They are human...and decent...and good.  The world through which Straight travels on the road to a hoped-for reconciliation is vast and glorious, dangerous and beautiful.  The whole film is suffused with light and fiercely, authentically kind.  It's marvelous and human, grounded and spiritual.

But it isn't subversive, you might suggest.  Ah, but no.  No no no.

I would contend that, of all of his films, The Straight Story is the most powerfully subversive.

And being weird, as I still am, of course it's my favorite.

Because love sees the world differently, eh?

Thanks for that reminder, David.