Football is full of cliches.
“Win your clunkers.”
“Good teams win; great teams cover.”
“Go 1-0 this week.”
“Football is won in the trenches.”
But can you ever think of a game that was so straightforward that it completely negated the need for cliches? A win so comprehensive, decisive and, for lack of a better word, solid
that it you thought, “yeah, no need to further analyze that one!”That’s how I felt about Mizzou’s 27-6 win over Texas A&M. But there’s already plenty of analysis about that on this website.
So I’m going to spend the next few hundred words talking about David Lynch’s A Straight Story, a film that captures that same feeling of, “Yeah, perfect, no notes,” that I got while watching Mizzou systematically squeeze the life out of Mike Elko and the Aggies.
Without getting too personal, I consider David Lynch a creative godfather. His work through film and television is incredibly important to me, and I’ve adopted many of his creative mantras as my own.
“Keep your eye on the donut, not the hole.”
“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.“
“There is an ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness inside each one of us.”
So imagine my curiosity earlier in life when I first encountered The Straight Story, a G-rated family drama that Lynch directed for Disney back in 1999. It tells the story of a 73-year-old Alvin Straight travels across the Midwest on a riding lawnmower to visit his ailing brother. You would think there’s more to the story than that – that he encounters some sort of Odyssean venture through the cornfields of Iowa – but that’s really about it. It’s frictionless, quiet and, in my opinion, perfect.
Now, I don’t know how much you know about David Lynch’s work but let me give you just a taste… and, uh, content warning for violence, sexuality, and general malevolence.
So yeah! G-rated Disney flick about senior citizens from the guy that did that.
I’ll be the first to admit that I think there’s a beauty in simplicity. In riding a wave rather than trying to surf it. In letting something take you where it wants to go.
And that’s sort of how I feel when I watch The Straight Story, a film so wholesome and good that it sort of nestles into the core of your humanity and dwells there for the entire runtime. You feel lighter after watching it, like you yourself just rode a lawnmower through a cornfield on a 75-degree day. It’s soul-nourishing in that way… a pure beam of positive radiance.
That’s a pretty verbose way of describing a film that, as I mentioned earlier, is about as smooth a ride as, well, a lawnmower through a Midwestern dirt road. But again, there’s not really a cliched way of approaching it because it sits outside of the typical narrative arc that I’ve come to associate with David Lynch films.
That’s about 400 words on The Straight Story, so let me bring it back to Mizzou Football. Didn’t it feel that way watching Mizzou and Texas A&M on Saturday? Was it weird for anyone else out there? We’ve become so used to one of three things when Eli Drinkwitz’s Mizzou squares off against a traditionally very good college football.
- It gets absolutely pancaked. See: Texas A&M, 2025.
- It absolutely pancakes the opponent. See: Florida, two weeks ago.
- It engages in a brutal struggle between the forces of good and evil, ending with a narratively unsatisfying but emotionally bolstering conclusion (win or lose.) See: Georgia, 2023, or LSU, 2020.
This win over Texas A&M was none of those things. It was a slow, methodical exploitation of the Aggies’ weaknesses and the Tigers’ strengths. Victory felt assured early in the game and slowly but surely became more certain over the course of a few hours. It never backslid and never hit any road bumps. You just got to watch Mizzou drift its way to a win over a pretty good, if fatally flawed, Texas A&M squad. And maybe it wasn’t the most exciting game of football? But let’s be honest… would you take 15 or 16 slow, boring, conflict-free wins? Or a season’s worth of nail-biters that may or may not end in glory? I know what I’d choose.
For gassing up, putting their foot to the pedal and coasting to victory, Mizzou gets 5 out of 5 riding mowers. Vroom vroom! But in a slow, relaxing way, you know?
