When David Lynch Turned Iowa into a 350-Mile-Long Memento Mori

From a 2025 point-of-view, “The Straight Story” seems flat-out weird. That includes the odd facts that it’s a Disney movie that the MPAA rated G.

And David Lynch made this 1999 movie, right after he made his bizarro response to the OJ Simpson Trial, “Lost Highway,” in which the postmodern psyche of America is a schizo surveillance hellscape.

Weird, too, that you can find “The Straight Story” among the plethora of commercial products that fill Disney-Plus’ offerings. I imagine a family somewhere stumbling upon it one night. “Let’s watch that, it looks cute.” And then there’s shot after shot of an old guy on a tractor.

That’s the story, Straight’s story, based on a true story. A vision-impaired, small-town codger travels most of the way across Iowa to Wisconsin to see his estranged brother, who just suffered a stroke. They haven’t spoken in ten years.

But the catch is he travels on his lawnmower. Approximate speed: three miles per hour.

It seems impossible, after you watch “Lost Highway,” “Blue Velvet” and the Twin Peaks material — all produced between the late ‘80s and 1997 — that Lynch could figure out how to artistically depict this story in some awesomely nuanced way.

After all, his M.O. in that period was to take American bourgeois normality and couple it with highbrow Euro surrealism and cable-TV sleaze.

But part of Lynch’s genius was to intuit how people perceive life filmically.

In my view, in “Lost Highway” he obliquely nails why Americans became obsessed with a disturbing murder trial in the early 1990s, so much so that I vividly remember being let out of school to watch the OJ trial’s verdict.

“The Straight Story” takes place on a lost highway of a kind, highway 18, running across the north part of Iowa. Richard Straight goes east from his hometown of Laurens, Iowa. Who is he, and what does he perceive?

Lynch’s casting of Richard Farnsworth to play the lead couldn’t be more perfect. Farnsworth plays Straight as lost in old age. “The worst part about growing old,” he tells a younger man, “is remembering what it was like when you were young.” He’s not quite to the point of Levon Helm’s character in “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” blind and begging to be killed, but you could imagine him getting to that point soon.

Despite a deceased wife, seven children, a brother, and who knows who else, all Straight has currently as family is his daughter, played by Sissy Spacek. She’s lost children of her own, taken away by the state because it’s believed she’s unfit to be a mother. Both Straight and his daughter, every day, have a lot to mourn.

Straight collapses one day, in the style of the widely mocked cable-TV commercial in which an old lady shouts, “I’ve fallen … and I can’t get up.” He’s fine, but knowing his brother just had a stroke, life seems to be slipping away too quickly.

This is represented several times as a leaky line or sprinkler, water spurting out of an enclosed line, much like a blood vessel might leak during a stroke. Straight might be contemplating the possibility that he too, like his brother, might face a stroke at any time, which means he could never see his brother in person again.

Early in the film — as the character decides to go on his strange journey — Lynch lets Farnsworth sit in the moment above, camera closing in just a bit, as the shadows of rain down the window come over part of his head and face. It’s a visual reminder of stroke possibilities.

Occasionally in “The Straight Story,” Lynch sneaks in his trademark surrealism in controlled microdoses.

Like any patchwork narrative, we get snippets of Straight’s story as he proceeds across Iowa. He meets several groups of people, each conversation revealing one more thing about him. In one late conversation, it turns out that Straight was a sniper in WW2, guilty of a friendly-fire event that haunts him daily.

That’s one element Lynch was probably feeling at that point, in the late ‘90s: the impending loss of WW2 vets. I saw just yesterday that the last pilot who flew in the Battle of Britain died, at age 104. They’re all gone now. Where does time and life go?

That last question is Lynch’s meditation throughout “The Straight Story.” Formally, Straight’s pace is an answer to that meditation. Life, in old age, slows down tremendously. It’s a drag. No longer can Straight drive a car. The best he can do is three miles per hour on his lawnmower.

And early in the movie, he’s told by his doctor that he needs a walker. When Straight refuses, the doctor says to get a second cane. That’s how Straight walks around throughout the movie, when he’s not on his lawnmower.

I live about 90 minutes from Laurens, Iowa currently. If I were to drive in any direction, 360 degrees around me, the world would look exactly like it does in this film. Also, I’ve had both area codes mentioned in the movie. Imagining an old codger doing what Straight does seems odd but also strangely understandable. It’s not completely out the question that I might do it myself at his point in life. The oldsters around here still prize their independence and their quiet, as my grandparents and other kin have.

But I need to watch this movie about once a month, probably for the rest of my life.

That’s because the pace of life for me, middle-aged nobody, has increased to an unendurable point. One thing after another happens with no pause. Transportation goes faster, the Internet goes faster. Phones go at warp speed.

Straight’s pace, which is Lynch’s editing pace, is three miles per hour. It is meditative.

You, too, probably need it.

One great shot has a long view of Straight on his lawnmower, and then the camera pans up to the clouds. Then it dissolves, which means we anticipate a lot of time going by, but when the camera pans back down, the lawnmower has barely moved down the road.

Lynch feels out how pace of life creates the meaning of life. He’s going back to a time before the 1840s, even though Straight is riding on a low horsepower combustible engine. He might as well be riding on a horse that’s walking.

Trains, and then cars, created new perceptual meanings. Life could travel at 30mph instead of 3. For Lynch, some of that is figured as monstrous in the film, ala “Eraserhead.” Straight and Nance in “Eraserhead” feel alienation; for Straight, it’s the speed of life as figured by vehicles.

Semis are this movie’s motor monsters. Even bikes — figured as the annual RAGBRAI bicycle race across Iowa — go too fast.

All that comes to a head when Straight loses control of his lawnmower midway through Act 2, pulling a heavy trailer, when going down a hill.

Lynch renders this as a manic moment, not far from what Fred Madison experiences schizophrenically in “Lost Highway.” You can see the standard Lynch shots of a fast race down a highway, camera pointed to the yellow road markings.

Lynch ends this sequence with the combination of Straight’s near-death experience and the burning down of an old “eyesore” of a house, which typical Midwest types have pulled up their lawnchairs to watch. Here, Straight is no longer paired with water leaking but with fire burning, annihilating the last vestige of an object that endured family and memories, ala Straight himself.

And those deer antlers behind him, like the barn, are a significant treasure. They figure as a memento mori for Straight. In an earlier scene, he encounters a hysterical woman who hits a deer, killing it while crashing her car. She complains, almost uncontrollably, that she’s hit 13 deer in the past seven weeks.

As a lifelong Midwesterner, I can almost believe that. And I feel her pain.

That deer is no prize: it’s Straight’s metaphorical crown that sits atop his trailer. In odd shots, it looks like he’s wearing the antlers, as if he’s the deer who could get hit by the monstrous machines passing him by at manic speeds.

As Straight’s journey goes, the people he meets get older. The first person he talks to is a young, pregnant female hitchhiker. Then the middle-aged RAGBRAI racers show up. Next up are older folks and a fellow WW2 vet.

Late in the movie, before reaching his brother’s place in Wisconsin, he meets a priest at night in a graveyard.

Throughout the movie, Straight knows he’s about to die. What’s it all amounted to? A lot of pain. He’s quit alcohol, thanks to a preacher from his past. But where’s his family? But again, what’s his life amounted to?

The Iowa landscape gets transformed into meditative space where Straight undergoes a purgatorial journey. What you are supposed to do, maybe to figure out the questions above, is go really really slowly.

And that means staring at the stars.

Lynch begins and ends the film with a star field.

You can’t see this in most big cities. You have to go out to Laurens to experience it, and even then you probably need to drive outside of town. Thankfully for Straight, on his journey that’s where he always is. This is his view at night:

What’s the speed of the stars? Slower, it would seem, than a lawnmower.

I know the physicists will tell me that’s not true, but from Lynch’s point-of-view, which is the perception of his filmic world, seen through the mostly blind eyes of Richard Straight, these stars barely move.

Lynch might even be saying, before the ubiquity of black screens that suck in eyeballs and scroll at hyper-manic paces, that this is the blackness that you should really be staring into.

Anything faster than 3mph may be masking death, which looms like the dead deer’s antlers stretching out to catch Richard Straight.