The
Straight Story
Olden Silence
published in Real Time No.38, Sydney,
2000
What
is it like to be alone, truly alone? You would loose something
we take for granted every moment of our social existence:
proximity. Things, objects, events, people would be held
from afar. All would be over there, beyond reach, away from
you. As you get old, an audiovisual loneliness develops
in tandem with a psychological and physical fraying of the
self. Faces are not as distinct; voices become muted and
muffled; everything appears to be occurring 'over there'
as the senses become dulled, diffused, dilated. Combine
this with the loss of loved ones, friends, even acquaintances,
and all immediacy and proximity start to fade.
David
Lynch's THE STRAIGHT STORY (2000) braces the psycho-acoustic
realm of loneliness as it is enveloped by the onset of old
age. Just as you will eventually experience the dimming
of light and the narrowing of frequencies in real life,
so will you experience all manner and mode of recession,
resignation and regression during the sonorous unfolding
of THE STRAIGHT STORY.
This
is what marks Lynch as a uniquely experiential director:
he investigates the audiovisual nature of cinema in order
to generate visceral and vicarious experiences which provide
the basis for psychological consideration. We know this
of him well - albeit filtered unnecessarily through a cultdom
of surrealism, absurdism and artifice. Do not presume that
Lynch's predilection for producing a proscenia for psychotica
marks a fixed disposure to loudness. No matter how 'loud'
his cinema may appear at every level of its execution, Lynch
is more concerned with the screaming silence and numbing
noise which vibrates deep within the individual than any
vocalization which is distributed at the sociological plane.
And it is Lynch's hypersensitivity to those vibrations -
to the monumental psychic cataclysms which follow even the
most microscopic events - that grants him direct access
to the most particular frissons of the self. Put another
way: Lynch carries a genuinely scarred cranium in difference
to, say, the tacky toupee which serves as the mantle for
Oliver Stone's 'wild youth' cinema. Where Stone plays reissue
CDs of The Doors and hears the selfish voice of a generation,
Lynch hears air whistling under a door and hears the sound
of degeneration within the self.
For
a film which depicts old age with great attention to detail,
THE STRAIGHT STORY gracefully avoids the pithy conceits
of 'generation gaps' and similar journalistic tropes which
have embalmed the 90s teen cycle before a single sign of
acne is allowed on the screen. More remarkably, THE STRAIGHT
STORY is not even 'aimed' at an older audience, begging
for their laboured, pathetic identification. For THE STRAIGHT
STORY is a document of how cinema can address old age in
the act of aging. That is, this film foregrounds age as
a process of the present, and in doing so goes against most
narrative norms which exploit the advance of age as a dramatic
and thematic pause for contemplation, memory and resolution
- for revisiting the past. Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth)
has not only aged in the back story of the film, but he
engages in forward action (literally, driving forth on a
tractor) in a cathartic attempt to deal with his aging by
achieving closure through speaking to his brother (cameoed
by Harry Dean Stanton). So let us work through some of the
ways in which Lynch executes this act of aging as a series
of cinesonic acts.
First
sonic feature of THE STRAIGHT STORY: the silencing of speech.
The dramatic graft which forges momentum in the film's story
is the silence which hangs like a cloud over the Straight
brothers. Having not spoken to each other in so many years,
their silence resounds like an unfinished sentence, an unresolved
melody, an incomplete causality. Alvin travels across three
states not merely to reunite with his blood brother, but
to hear his own voice in the shared acoustic space of his
brother. That is how Alvin will deal with the psycho-acoustic
loneliness which has befallen him. It is so fitting that
his brother is wordless at this reunion, overcome with emotion
as he hears the sound of Alvin's voice. The silence that
lolls between them at the film's finish is the end to a
disturbing hum which rang ceaselessly across time and space
until physical proximity could touch that hum and set it
to rest. The beauty of the moment lies not merely in its
emotional depth, but in the way that it reflects on the
material role of the human voice in such familial conflict,
and the way it extends to the social plane a physical aspect
of how vibrations can continue unabated until the grounding
of physical touch will reduce them to stasis. Only a director
with an ear (David Lynch is also the sound designer for
THE STRAIGHT STORY) could construct this type of post-literary
acousmatic object of narration. In the hands of a less tuned
director, this same narrational envelope could be presented
through the conventional trappings which both literary types
and so-called cineastes would find expressive and poetic.
But the power of Lynch lies in his ability to wrench the
poetic from its historical stricture within those traditions
- which surely in the year 2000 have to be verging on the
archaic and should therefore be treated with polite disdain.
Lynch's
approach to the dramatic signification of non-speech and
unfinished-speech is thematically mapped across the characters
of THE STRAIGHT STORY. Rose (Sissy Spacek) talks in a dysfunctional
manner due to her placement within this same familial map.
Traumatized by the forced separation of her children due
to her own psychological instability, her speech patterns
carry the scar of this wrenching, leaving her to speak grammatically
correct sentences but in a timing which forces the flow
of meaning through a series of ruptures and spurts of fragmented
phrases and clauses. (It truly is a remarkable vocal performance.)
Like Alvin, her voice is her story - not through words as
written into her, but as words sounded through her. Note
also the way these voices are contrasted against the warm
blanketed tones which flow forth from the friendly family
with whom Alvin stays while his tractor is being repaired
en route. Their rich sonority and the effortless way in
which it flows from their mouths sonically portrays a comfortable
middle America - retired and retiring - not in a parodic
way, but as a means of contrasting their fortunate life
against the emotional trauma which Alvin has been holding
within him for so many years.
In
the documentary BROTHER'S KEEPER (1992), one of two brothers
accused of mercy-killing a third brother (all past their
60s) takes the stand in a court trial. This withered shell
of a man is struck catatonic and collapses into a nervous
spasm, shaking his arm uncontrollably. The court adjourns.
He takes the stand again, opens his mouth - and reverts
to the same state. The court adjourns again. And again.
It is hard to think of a more moving scene in a documentary,
struck by the complete incapacity of the human voice at
the point of its declaration. The ending of THE STRAIGHT
STORY reminded me of that scene. It also reminded me of
how much I detest those things we call 'scripts'; of how
I wish scriptwriters would try shutting up for once. Stop
stuffing words down characters' throats and making them
mouth your authorial power. Consider the options of having
an actor perform the silence which more aptly reflects how
often we are lost for words and rendered speechless in our
everyday emotional exchanges. John Roach & Mary Sweeney's
lean script for THE STRAIGHT STORY is the result not only
of someone who writes well, but also someone who listens
well. Mary Sweeney's editing also creates the appropriate
timing crucial to conveying this distinctive temporality.
And David Lynch's direction of Farnsworth and Spacek evidences
an ability to hear their wordlessness as much as their speech.
Second
sonic feature of THE STRAIGHT STORY: the permeance of quietude.
In an era when digital sound has favoured the format's ability
to maintain non-distorting louder levels and more impactful
transient peaks, it is forgotten how effectively the relatively
'pure' silence generated through the absence of surface
noise can be in sound design. Don't misread me here: I'm
not advocating 'quiet' in today's 'noisy movies'. Such a
reactionary stance leads to gentle chords on grand pianos
and soft strums of acoustic guitars, which to my ear are
repulsive signs of conservative times. My point is that
one can achieve a type of abject silence in digital sound
wherein the absence of surface noise creates dramatic and
psychological holes in a narrative, intensifying equally
modes of identification (sucking you into the absence) and
disorientation (unsettling you by removing a 'ground hum'
of a picture). THE STRAIGHT STORY is possibly the first
film to explore the psycho-acoustic ramifications of this
in detail.
There
are many moments in the film where one hears absolutely
nothing. Conditioned to hearing the crackle of the optical
print, silence in the analogue film soundtrack always comforts
you, saying 'I really haven't gone away'. Even 'fades to
black' rarely occur in silence, as they will carry an audio
fade-out, cross-fade or resolving musical cue - all of which
will work toward preparing for the fade-up before once is
stranded in a cinematic void. The abject silence of THE
STRAIGHT STORY echoes that loss of proximity engineered
by old age: literally, we are removed from the film - not
merely from a certain narrational moment, turn or passage,
but from the realm of narration. We are left sitting in
the cinema in total isolation, the kind one gets when the
cinema's amplifiers suddenly cut out. Yet the film also
exploits the digital soundtrack's capacity to move accurately
between these aural extremes. The mix of the film quite
noticeably does not stay at a median of acceptable audio
presence. Normally, a film's dialogue in particular will
hover within a comfortable decibel range, utilizing a variety
of compression methods to keep the signal level at a norm
so as to aid psycho-acoustic aspects of legibility on the
part of the cinema listener. THE STRAIGHT STORY has numerous
moments where one is urged to listen more carefully - not
because of distractions, simultaneous events or sonic density,
but simply because one is at a remove from spoken action.
The best scene of this is when Alvin is chatting with the
family with whom he spends a few days. In one unedited shot,
we hear a long, quite insignificant conversation at a very
low level, filmed from a long distance so as to create a
calming, casual observational feeling. A vicarious deafness
is experienced here in that one can manage to understand
words - as do old people suffering the onset of deafness
- but at a severely reduced auditory level. Again, THE STRAIGHT
STORY provides the sonic suit within which we can experience
old age.
Third
sonic feature of THE STRAIGHT STORY: aural decay. In the
history of modern sound design, Lynch is the harbinger of
deep booms and dark drones, the kind of which are noticeable
in his early films. Progressively, Lynch's sound design
has readdressed this approach, developing it initially into
the thick textures of sonic nothingness which permeate the
psychotic expanses of shadowy nothingness throughout LOST
HIGHWAY (1997). With THE STRAIGHT STORY, Lynch has focussed
on the residue of those events. In scintillating passages
of silence, one often hears a breathy textural hum ever
so faintly on the soundtrack. It sounds like a long-ringing
reverberant patina of parts of Angelo Badalamenti's lyrical
score - almost as if a phrase of his music has been digitally
processed into a jus or light puree of reverberant diffusion
which gently coats the auditorium. One faintly makes out
the haunting presence of music, yet recognizable instrumentation
and tonality are absent. Orson Welles engineered a similar
effect with a Bernard Herrmann cue in CITIZEN KANE (1941)
as Susan Alexander lies in her bed, exhausted from the opera
forced down her own throat, the orchestral din ringing softly
yet fatally in her head, intermingled with the sound of
her own fading breath. The effect in THE STRAIGHT STORY
also carries a fatalistic aspect to it - not so morbidly,
but due to the rich yet fixed tonality of these harmonic
sheets of soft pink noise, these hums have a base key which
works contra-harmonically to Badalamenti's whimsical cues.
The music rolls on lovingly while Alvin distractedly putt-putts
on his tractor, while these tones well up in the proceeding
silences as a forecast of the possibility that his brother
may have already died.
Many
people have not even heard these tones in the film, but
they are definitely there. Sonically and symbolically, they
recall the sensation of a distant ringing in the ear, leftover
from loud events which affected the ear the night before,
some years ago, or way back in one's youth. Like an emotional
tinitis, this ringing is subtle but persuasive. It is the
sound of the past: lingering, lilting, longing. It is the
ringing which will not stop until Alvin speaks with his
brother. And only then - only at that precise auditory moment
when they are near enough to each other to hear the other's
voice - will the silence of estrangement be replaced with
the silence of calm. Only then will the decay reside.
