My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

There’s an elephant in the room when it comes to ‘My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?’. It’s a big elephant with floppy ears and a trunk like a fire hose and somebody’s painted on the side of it, in garish pink letters, “this is, y’know, that Werner Herzog film produced by David Lynch that looks more like a David Lynch film than a Werner Herzog film”. If someone would be so kind as to take the elephant outside and pass me my elephant gun, maybe we can have an intelligent conversation.

Oh, don’t worry about the elephant by the way. The blunderbuss is for use on the next jackass who sits up excitedly during the scene where a dwarf in a tux wanders onscreen, and points and says “Look, it’s a dwarf! That’s a David Lynch moment!” I have five words for said jackass: Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen.

Granted, ‘My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?’ – hereinafter, ‘My Son…’, since even the acronym treatment (‘MSMSWHYD’) is liable to give me RSI – starts out in startlingly non-Herzogian fashion with Detectives Havenhurst (Williem Dafoe) and Vargas (Michael Pena) shooting the shit in their cruiser as they head over to a murder scene. The deceased is a Mrs Macallam (Grace Zabriskie); the perp is her son, Brad (Michael Shannon). Brad has holed himself up across the road from the murder scene with a couple of hostages. A large chunk of the movie consists of Havenhurst and Vargas trying to open up a dialogue with Brad before the SWAT team open up a different kind of dialogue that involves hot lead. 

In between attempts to appeal to Brad, Havenhurst and Vargas interview his girlfriend Ingrid (a winningly sympathetic Chloe Sevigny) and his erstwhile mentor, theatre director Lee Myers (Udo Kier). Brad’s increasingly fragile mental state is thus revealed in a series of flashbacks – some of which say more about the witnesses than about Brad – which document the months leading up to the murder. The first signs that he’d bummed a ride out of Normal, we learn, were after he returned from Peru. No sooner is this bit of dialogue out than we’re in Herzog territory good and proper, and to all the naysayers I offer this screengrab:

 

Of course, we were in Herzog territory all the time. The desperately self-delusive Brad is a man-child redolent of Bruno S. in ‘The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’ and ‘Stroszek’. Herzog’s bleak vision of Americana in that latter film may have been upgraded from Wisconsin to San Diego in ‘My Son …’, but the same sense of dislocation, of alien-ness, remains. The dancing chicken at the end of ‘Stroszek’ finds is corollary in the flamingos that turn out to be Brad’s hostages. 

The genius of Michael Shannon’s performance is the glimpse he gives us of the stunningly out-of-kilter way Brad’s mind works. You can easily imagine Brad sitting cross-legged in front of the TV for a Herzog marathon, favouring the crazed, messianic performances of Klaus Kinski in ‘Aguirre, Wrath of God’ and ‘Fitzcarraldo’ and fancying himself as America’s equivalent thespian talent. He’s an actor, is our Brad. Or at least he thinks he is. What we see of his rehearsals for Myers’s howlingly pretentious production of the Orestes tragedy is enough to convince otherwise. 

Herzog throws out satirical barbs left, right and centre. ‘My Son …’ is poisoned love letter to a nation’s obsession with fame; a skit on actorly eccentricities (you can almost feel the ghost of Kinski hovering just offscreen); the most deadpan send up of cop movie conventions you’ll ever see; and an exercising in bouncing bizarro ensemble combinations off each and seeing what happens. Case in point? This scene …

 

… where Brad, already way up Bonkers Creek and demonstrably deficient in the paddle department, goes to borrow a sword from his jaw-droppingly racist and homophobic white trash ostrich-farmer uncle (Brad Dourif) while Myers camps in up in the background. Or the dinner table conversation which redefines awkward, where we have Shannon, Zabriski and Sevigny playing the scene as if it were written by Strindberg and directed by Mike Leigh and the two of them were at fisticuffs over how it should be played while their cast tried to do the take under a veil of abject embarrassment. 

Did I mention that ‘My Son …’ is a weird little film? 

Perhaps its weirdest element is its visual aesthetic. While images proliferate that could only have been conjured by Herzog, it looks uglier, muddier and less ecstatically poetic than is to be expected from a Herzog film. It was filmed using lightweight digital cameras, and while a whole generation of directors might have embraced the RED ONE, it pissed Herzog off no end. “An immature camera,” he declared, “created by computer people who do not have a sensibility or understanding for the value of high-precision mechanics which has a 200-year history.” 

Fortunately, the film was created by a man whose understanding and values are at the other end of the spectrum. Oh, and it was produced David Lynch.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Straight Story

It was David Lynch week on Out 1 last week, an occasion fittingly marked by some of the best writing Out 1 have yet published. My commitments to the Diane-fest meant I couldn’t join in at the time; however, this week’s Personal Fave is a belated salute to Out 1’s assessment of American cinema’s most idiosyncratic of auteurs.

I’ve seen me some weird stuff in the oeuvre of David Lynch. I’ve seen dancing dwarves talking backwards. I’ve seen Dennis Hopper snorting oxygen and getting medieval on some guys ass the moment Roy Orbison comes on the radio. I’ve seen nightclub acts to slit your wrists to in the Club Silencio.

But I ain’t never seen anything as weird as the opening credits to ‘The Straight Story’:

WALT DISNEY PICTURES PRESENTS

A FILM BY DAVID LYNCH

Think about that for a while. Really think about it. As Lula observes to Sailor, “This whole world is wild at heart and crazy on top.”

‘The Straight Story’ is easily the most non-David-Lynch David Lynch film, and yet it’s quintessentially Lynch. No-one else could have put such a quirky and individualistic spin on the story.

Let’s start with the title. ‘The Straight Story’. It’s a statement of intent: the film is straight (ie. the narrative has a traditional beginning, middle and end – man needs to go on journey, goes on journey, arrives at destination), whereas Lynch normally employs fractured or curiously circular narratives (I’m convinced the true beginning of ‘Mulholland Drive’ is about twenty minutes before the end credits) … and that’s only when he can be bothered to pay lip-service to narrative.

It also tells a story – a true story. A huge departure for Lynch: everything from ‘Eraserhead’ to ‘Inland Empire’ by way of ‘Twin Peaks’ has played out within its own self-contained and nightmarishly internalised boundaries. Twin Peaks, for example, isn’t a place – not like the Iowa of ‘The Straight Story’ is a place – it’s a state of mind. Its director’s mind – and that’s a way scarier place to be than anywhere in the U S of A.

‘The Straight Story’ recounts the odyssey of 73-year old Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) from Iowa to Wisconsin, desperate to mend bridges with his stroke-victim brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) before time runs out for either of them. Not in the best of health himself, and unable to drive a car, he opts to undertake the journey on a ride-on motor mower.

En route, he meets with bad weather, mechanical breakdowns, the kindness of strangers, memories of the past and reminds of his own mortality. Everyone he encounters is won over by his homespun wisdom and hard-earned experience.

I am soooo glad David Lynch directed this film. In the hands of almost any other director (except possibly Michael Bay, who would have made the lawnmower turn into a robot and blow shit up), ‘The Straight Story’ would have been two hours of saccharine whimsy. Imagine Spielberg calling the shots! Christ, being force-fed treacle for the entire running time would be less sickly!

Lynch channels the essential quirkiness of the story; his sense of the bizarre, coupled with Farnsworth’s perfectly nuanced, slightly irascible but ultimately dignified characterisation, are the reason ‘The Straight Story’ is such a gem of a movie. Take Alvin’s abortive first attempt, his ages-old Rehds mower conking out on him before he’s reached the next town. The mower roped down to the back of a pick-up truck, he’s unceremoniously driven home. Cut to: daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek) and next door neighbour Dorothy (Jane Galloway Heitz) sitting at the kitchen table. “A man in a pick-up brought my dad back,” Rose recounts. “What kind of pick-up?” Dorothy asks. Alvin comes limping through the kitchen, shotgun in hand, a perfectly deadpan man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do expression on his face. He heads for the screen door; goes outside. They watch him in silence. The door closes behind him. “A Ford,” Rose replies tonelessly, glancing through the window as Alvin raises the shotgun and fires both barrels into the mower.

(He buys a John Deere as replacement and it gets him to his brother’s. As ‘The Italian Job’ was the best advert the Mini ever had, so is ‘The Straight Story’ to the John Deere company.)

Or take Alvin’s encounter with the hapless motorist who, on an empty stretch of road with nary a sign of life to either side of it, manages to plough into a deer – “my thirteenth in seven weeks”. Alvin asks if there’s anything he can do. “There’s nothing anyone can do,” she wails. “I’ve tried driving with my lights on. I’ve tried sounding my horn. I scream out the window. I roll the window down and bang on the side of the door and play Public Enemy real loud ... and still every week I plow into at least one … And I love deer.” Hysterical, she stomps back to her car, slams the door and accelerates away. Cut to: Alvin roasting a chunk of deer meat over a campfire, any number of the deceased’s herd gathering accusingly behind him. (A pair of antlers decorate his trailer for the rest of the trip.)

There’s humour here, too, another unusual ingredient for Lynch. The screenplay (by John Roach and Mary Sweeney) is a masterwork of dryly-observed and absurdist wit. A scene in a hardware store – where Alvin haggles over a grabber the storekeeper doesn’t want to sell because it’ll take him weeks to get a replacement on order – plays out like Oscar Wilde gone rural and getting no further sartorially than a pair of dungarees.

The emotional core of the film, however – and I’m willing to stake a tenuous claim that in this respect Lynch channels the aesthetic of Sam Peckinpah – is its treatment of the protagonist as anachronism. A man out of time. Alvin is among the last of his generation. Indeed, many of his contemporaries died in World War II. In the film’s quietest – and most devastating – scene, Alvin and another old-timer share reminiscences of the war. Alvin recalls that he still sees “my buddies’ faces … they’re still young”. The longer he lives, the more acutely aware he is of how little time they had. And it’s not just his dead comrades he mourns. The loss of life transcended national boundaries. “By the end, we were shooting moon-faced boys,” he says of the supposed enemy. A dozen times or more I’ve seen this film, and that one line has me in tears.

But Lynch never milks it. “The worst thing about getting’ old is remembering when you were young,” Alvin muses at one point, and there’s nary a hint of the weeping violins that would swamp the soundtrack on a Spielberg or Zemeckis film. Here, it’s a statement of fact, delivered with the conviction of one who knows.

Richard Farnsworth was 80 when he played Alvin Straight. A stuntman for 40 years before becoming an actor, he was debilitated by arthritis and had been diagnosed with terminal cancer when ‘The Straight Story’ went before the cameras. And he gave a performance of such grace! Of such beautiful characterisation! His Best Actor nomination was well deserved (unfortunately he had uncharacteristically strong competition, including Russell Crowe for ‘The Insider’ and Kevin Spacey – the winner on the evening – for ‘American Beauty’).

Richard Farnsworth died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound (and I’ll step outside and raise fists with anyone who makes a judgemental comment about suicide) shortly after the film was completed. ‘The Straight Story’ stands, alongside Dirk Bogarde’s ‘These Foolish Things’ as perhaps the loveliest, most elegiac swansong any actor could hope for.



I’ve reached 1,250 words. Enough is enough, even though there are still so many things about the film to be said. I saw it at Nottingham’s Broadway cinema when it was first released in 1999 and loved it completely and wholeheartedly. I love it more every time I watch it. It’s David Lynch’s most open and emotionally perfect film as director. The more I think about it – and having now written so indulgently on it – the more I think ‘The Straight Story’ might just be my favourite film of all time.