Re: Actress Anne Heche Tells of Abuse

to jwgh's alt.religion.kibology page

Message-ID: <1ezih0a.1kvrzy41irwaukN%jwgh@earthlink.net>
Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology
Subject: Re: Actress Anne Heche Tells of Abuse
From: "Jacob W. Haller" <jwgh at earthlink.net>
Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2001 09:40:34 -0400

James "Kibo" Parry <kibo at world.std.com> wrote:

[. . .]

THE STRAIGHT SHOW

[. . .]

It's David Lynch's new TV show about the heartwarming old guy who makes the world a better place by exposing pregnant teenagers to fascist symbols!¹

The shows in the first season will consist of him driving to Wisconsin to visit his brother. Along the way he meets people and exposes them to his SUPER-STRONG OLD PERSON WISDOM. Also his tractor breaks down and people help him fix it.²

At the beginning of the second season he succeeds in getting to Wisconsin.³ Then a mysterious figure from his past shows up and starts inflicting anti-wisdom on people, convincing children that they should eat lead paint or run away from home to California.⁴ ("I hear it's a real party state.⁵")

Ratings start to drop, so in the series finale all of the series's sympathetic characters are tortured horribly on-screen and most of them die.⁶

-jwgh

-- 
"Some people think they are Jesus Christ or Napolean, but they can't all
be right."
  - Stephen Hawking, /Black Holes and Baby Universes and other Essays/

Annotations

This references the movie David Lynch made for Disney in 1999, The Straight Story, in which Richard Farnsworth plays an elderly man (Alvin Straight) who drives a lawn mower from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his brother. The trip is precipitated by news that his brother has had a stroke.
Along the way he meets various people, including a pregnant teenager who has run away from home; he convinces her to return to her family in part by telling her a story whose moral is that a bundle of sticks is harder to break than an individual stick. This proverb is also associated with fascism, fascio being Italian for bundle. (Searching for fascism and sticks will turn up all sorts of interesting sites.) As far as I know David Lynch hasn't indicated whether this allusion was intentional or not.
back
This essentially sums up the plot of The Straight Story.
back
The first season of David Lynch's television show, Twin Peaks, revolved around the question of who murdered Laura Palmer. Towards the beginning of the second season this mystery was solved. At that point the series started to lose its way and ratings started to drop.
back
In Twin Peaks, after the main character (FBI Agent Dale Cooper) solves the mystery of Laura Palmer's death a mysterious figure from his past appears and starts killing people and generally doing creepy things.
I enjoyed coming up with things that Alvin Straight's arch-nemesis might advise people to do.
back
This is what people in The Straight Story say whenever they hear that Alvin is going to Wisconsin.
back
Finally, Twin Peaks's ratings fell precipitously and it was cancelled. For the final episode David Lynch came back to direct and basically did what I describe here.
back

to jwgh's alt.religion.kibology page