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.

Travelin' John

The news of John Fain's passing came, as so many things do these days, in a social media post.  

I'd known John for a little over a decade.  I met him in the social hall of my little church, after he arrived one Sunday morning on a bicycle laden for life outdoors.  Folks in my congregation already knew him, or knew of him, and as he sat through worship that day, his lean, grizzled geniality changed the spirit of the morning.  There was, if I am honest, a tiny bit of wariness.  One doesn't ever know, when folks who are wired in radically non-standard ways enter your space, how things are going to go.

It went fine.  He sang our sturdy old hymns and prayed with us and was clearly at ease.  He knew he was welcome in that gentle little sanctuary.

Talking with him over coffee and snacks later that morning was...different.  John was different.  In a less gracious age, we'd have called him mad, or crazy.  Now, mentally ill.  Or better yet, neurodivergent, if we're feeling welcoming.  Having worked with the homeless mentally ill for years at my home church, I was more in that latter camp.  Some neurodivergence runs so deep that it sabotages and fragments the soul.  John's was, for the most part and most of the time, not of that type.  John was just very idiosyncratically himself.  He was "shamanic," or so I decided.

John was fun to talk with.  He was wildly unpredictable, utterly chill and intense all at once, with a mind that flitted from concept to concept in ways that required attention and adaptivity.  I immediately liked him, because he was immediately likeable.  I enjoyed how he made himself at home, receiving and harmonizing with the hospitality he'd been offered.  I enjoyed talking esoteric theology, or of our mutual appreciation for the music of Tom Waits.

John visited us many times over the years.  Some visits, just for a day, as he got provisioned and repaired and did what he needed to do.  Other visits, for longer.  One miserably hot and stormy summer, he camped out on our property for a bit, coming into the fellowship hall to get cool and escape the dank mid Atlantic swampiness.   He stayed with some church members for a while during a bitterly cold early Spring in 2014, when the roads and trails were sheets of ice.  That Sunday, when he came to church, he asked if he could come up to the pulpit and read the scriptures as our liturgist, and after some thought, we said...sure.  He did so ably, and with grace, like he got up and read the Gospel in front of folks every day.

John was a friend of the church, and his arrival was always welcome.  Travelin' John, we called him.

I learned things from John.  As the sort of pastor who is awkward at fundraising, John Fain taught me the art of the ask.  Because John had need, and was utterly unselfconscious about naming it.  He needed food, because he was hungry.  He needed clean clothes, and repairs for his bike and trailer.  He needed a place to stay, because it was smotheringly hot or bitterly cold.  These weren't trivial things for him, and were genuine needs that were within our power to meet.  He asked without shame, but also without any sense of grasping.  If you said no, he'd just nod, and be cool with it.  No hard feelings, but hey, could you maybe do this, instead?  And often you would, because you could, really, without even missing it.

His last years weren't spent travelling, as his discomfort around uniformed law enforcement got translated into getting into the care of the county.  Even so, he'd message me now and again, just to say hey.   I'd found myself thinking a month or so ago, when a different traveler came through looking for provisions, that I'd not heard from him in a while, and wondering how he was.

Not well, evidently.  

I and all the souls at Poolesville Presbyterian will miss his visits, and his presence, and his spirit.  

Godspeed, John.  May the sun light the long road of peace before you, and the wind be at your back.