The Straight Story (1999): Crip Time to Rethink Disability
When we think of David Lynch, we often think of fractured identities, nightmares, and distorted realities, as seen in Twin Peaks or Mulholland Drive. So The Straight Story feels like an irregularity. It’s quiet, linear, gentle, and one of the most thoughtful films about disability, aging, and time that American cinema has produced. The premise is simple: Alvin Straight, an older man with failing eyesight, limited mobility, and a body that’s breaking down, decides to travel across state lines on a riding lawnmower to see his estranged brother. He can no longer drive and needs two canes to walk. So he rejects everything the mass culture tells us matters—speed and efficiency. His journey unfolds slowly, not despite disability, but through it.
Disability scholar Alison Kafer has a term for this: crip time. In Feminist, Queer, Crip, she describes how disabled lives move at different rhythms than what society expects. Crip time pushes back against the relentless demand for productivity and linear progress. It doesn’t ask disabled people to speed up and fit into the world’s schedule. It asks the world to reconsider what time is for in the first place.
What makes The Straight Story so remarkable is how completely it commits to this idea. Disability doesn’t disrupt the narrative — it creates it. Alvin’s canes, his lawnmower puttering along at five miles per hour, his need to rest, the breakdowns that force him to start over — these aren’t obstacles he heroically overcomes. They’re the conditions under which the whole film exists. When his lawnmower breaks down partway through, he doesn’t push through. He goes back home and starts again. Slower this time. The film refuses to give us the arc we’re trained to expect: the triumphant recovery, the inspirational overcoming, the return to “normal.” Alvin isn’t trying to get back to normal. He’s just trying to reach his brother.
Lynch isn’t usually associated with slow cinema, but that’s precisely what he’s doing here. Long takes, silences that stretch out, minimal dialogue. Those wide shots of flat Midwestern landscapes that seem to go on forever. It forces you to share Alvin’s experience of time, to feel the fatigue, the distance, the waiting. Slowness becomes an ethical stance. It asks you to be patient, to sit with discomfort, to resist the urge to skip ahead. Most movies erase these sensations in their rush toward resolution.
Crip time also changes how we see care in the film. Alvin’s daughter Rose has a cognitive disability, and the state took her children away because they decided she couldn’t care for them. But Lynch keeps showing us something else: Rose’s emotional intelligence, her attentiveness, the way she helps Alvin after he collapses, how carefully she delivers difficult news. Her suffering isn’t about personal failure. It’s about systems that equate disability with incompetence, that can’t imagine care outside their narrow definitions. Care in this film doesn’t happen in institutions or through official channels. It happens slowly between people, on its own time. When Alvin breaks down on the road, strangers help him, not because it’s their job, but simply because he needs help. These moments show care as something that unfolds according to what bodies actually need, not according to some efficiency metric. Crip time reframes care as a process, not a task to be checked off a list.
The final scene says it all. Alvin arrives at his brother Lyle’s house, and there’s barely any dialogue. Just a long silence between two older men who haven’t spoken in years. When Lyle finally asks, “You rode that thing all the way just to see me?” Alvin says, “Yes.” That’s it. Disability isn’t a tragedy here; it’s what made this moment possible. The film stretched time not to delay meaning but to let it accumulate, to give it weight.
Kafer calls this “crip futurity”: imagining a future that includes disability rather than trying to eliminate it. By slowing everything down, Lynch rejects the ableist obsession with productivity, cure, and speed. He shows us that disability isn’t where meaning ends. Sometimes it’s where meaning actually begins in a future we’re all heading toward, whether we acknowledge it or not.
