Boys Don’t Cry
With Hilary Swank, Chloe Sevigny, Peter Sarsgaard, Brendan Sexton III, Alison Folland, Alicia Goranson, and Jeannetta Arnette.
With Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Jennifer Edwards-Hughes, James Cada, and Harry Dean Stanton.
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The propagandizing is obvious in the Teena Brandon movie, Boys Don’t Cry, where practically everything we see and hear conspires to feed our outrage at the sexual intolerance of other characters in the story. (Even before Brandon’s death was reconfigured as movie material, it functioned as a contemporary parallel to the 1955 case of Emmett Till, the black teenager who was brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman in Mississippi, only a few months before the launching of the Montgomery bus boycott.) But I doubt many viewers would think of The Straight Story, a Disney release directed by David Lynch, as propaganda–if only because, like many other Disney products, it’s steeped in a traditional national mythology that finds simple folk wisdom inspirational. Yet if it didn’t have a pronounced ideological thrust–and a fairly, if likably, reactionary one at that–I doubt that the American mainstream press would have been quite so scandalized by its failure to get a prize in Cannes, especially after the top prize went to its ideological opposite, Rosetta: a skeptical, leftist, and anything-but-transcendental Belgian feature about contemporary working-class struggle. In retrospect, the gesture must have seemed tantamount to spitting on the American flag.
I can’t tell you much about how The Straight Story fiddles with the facts of Alvin Straight’s life, because most of what I know about his life comes from the movie. But I can alert you to a casual lie in the movie’s press book. The first sentence of the section called “about the production” reads, “It was Mary Sweeney who discovered the story of Alvin Straight from reading The New York Times in 1994.” Sweeney is the film’s cowriter, coproducer, and editor as well as Lynch’s companion. She also produced Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, and it was Almereyda who saw the news story, clipped it, and sent it to Sweeney. Not a serious lie in any respect, but symptomatic of the way “extraneous” information is systematically weeded out of many docudramas. The extraneous information about Straight that gets weeded out of The Straight Story includes all the things he did for a living, apart from the fact that he grew up on a farm and fought in World War II.
For them, Brandon Teena was a latter-day Joan of Arc.” And why else exclude such distracting information as the fact that one of two other people killed along with Teena Brandon was Phillip DeVine, a black man with an artificial leg who was involved with the sister of Teena’s girlfriend (another omitted character)?
Like Eraserhead–Lynch’s first and to my mind still his best feature, another religious parable with its own sense of heaven and hell–and a good many other works that might be called quintessentially American, The Straight Story is both a celebration of innocence and a deterministic confirmation of biological and familial ties. In some ways it’s a less personal work than Eraserhead because Lynch didn’t write it, and it appears that the script was developed mainly without his input. (However, two of his oldest friends have pivotal roles in the film–Jack Fisk, who helped finance Eraserhead, is the production designer, and Fisk’s wife, Sissy Spacek, plays Rose.) Nevertheless this film represents a clear desire for renewal in a career that has stalled because Lynch has relied too heavily on tropes associated with noir and sexual decadence. I hasten to add that I prefer it to Boys Don’t Cry (though director and cowriter Kimberly Peirce is clearly a talented newcomer). My preference has less to do with its ideology–I’m as susceptible as anyone to affirmative patriotic gestures–than with its artistry. Some of Lynch’s best work here periodically borders on calendar art, but overall the stylistic invention places The Straight Story on a different level.
