David Lynch – 1999 –
I’ve always had the odd feeling that in the future The Straight Story might be considered not
only David Lynch’s masterpiece but perhaps the last masterpiece of the 20th century and the era of celluloid. The
film points us in the direction that American film should have followed, but
which no one – not even Lynch himself, apparently – has shown much interest in
pursuing. This path leads to
straightforward, affecting stories interpreted in a rigorous and gratifying
cinematic style. As seen in The Straight Story, this philosophy is
the obvious and desperately needed antidote to two (equally patronizing)
extremes currently dominating film; 1) the bland, obvious style of the
mainstream designed to secure box-office or Oscars, and 2) the indulgent, politicized,
elitist attitude of the “art film” world.
By making The Straight Story,
Lynch laid out the scathing evidence that the priority to appear cool and edgy is
a dead-end used as a veil by weak filmmakers to hide the fact that they are not
doing anything all that original or interesting. The very idea of Lynch – the man behind
surreal and disturbing works like Eraserhead
(1978), Blue Velvet (1986) and Lost Highway (1997) – making not only a
Disney film but a conspicuously G-rated Disney film is a radical act of
innovation far more potent than anything attempted by the mind-numbingly pretentious
snooze-fests repeatedly coughed up by Lars Von Trier and Michael Haneke. By stripping away everything commonly
associated with what we think of as a David Lynch film, everything except his
sense of cinema, he shows us that nothing else really matters except that sense of cinema. We’re able to see that Lynch’s cinema is not
about surface elements like violence and identity crisis, but about his use of
the camera to recreate characters’ visual or emotional points-of-view. This is the essence of cinematic expression
articulated since the beginning and pursued most passionately by Eisenstein,
Hitchcock and Ozu. Lynch deserves the
highest praise not just for risking his street credit but for declaring his
allegiance to the legacy of cinema to which he belongs; coming in the middle of
an era defined by just the opposite attitude; a near-sighted contempt for
everything except the things that Tarantino tells us are cool. And what did he get for his trouble? Some polite platitudes from people unhappy
with too much sex and violence in movies, and from his own admirers vitriolic accusations
of having sold out; (though who exactly sells out by making a film about an old
man on a lawnmower is a mystery yet to solved).
Lynch must’ve taken the accusations too much to heart, though, because
he went on to make the three-hour Inland Empire (2006),
the bare antithesis of The Straight Story;
being the abandonment of Lynch’s precise, purist style in favor of film-school
posturing and excess. (And since then he
seems content making unimpressive shorts for on-line distribution that no one
really cares or talks about.) I may be
in the minority, but I believe that Inland Empire is
an almost worthless exercise attempting to excise style from substance, made
from anxiety and laziness, and The
Straight Story is conversely the most sublime example I can think of from
the past twenty years of style becoming substance. This is what pure cinema should be; effortlessly
accessible to casual audiences, yet also rich with depth and rigor for cinematic
minds eager to delve into the function of each angle and each edit.
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