It's always seen as the outlier in David Lynch's canon, and maybe it is to a certain degree, because The Straight Story is really the only one you can really watch with the whole family. But it's also the purest of Lynch.
For all their groovy little subtleties, his movies deal in extremes, especially in the grand cosmic dance of good and evil. His films have some of the most vile and reprehensible people ever portrayed on film, and they do some terrible, terrible things.
But they are also full of decent people - folk who are kind and generous and fair and honourable and empathetic. Twin Peaks has its dark side of drugs and murder and possession by malevolent entities from a higher dimension, but it also has Big Ed and Hawk and Norma and Coop himself, and they're all good people, through and through. They're not as showy as the bad guys, and not as obvious, but they are just as powerful in their own way.
And that's all you get in the Straight Story - it's just chock full of human decencies. Some of them have seen some shit and are old and bold enough to acknowledge their fears and weaknesses, and some just like to help a fella out because he could use a hand. It's the lightest possible side of the American Dream, all cornfields and golden hour sunlight.
You don't always have to have the darkness to contrast against the light, sometimes you can just bathe in its glow.
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