“Sissy is a star. Stars are mostly in space. And Sissy has the word space in her name,”—David Lynch, 2011.
Lynch knew Spacek since she met Jack Fisk in 1973 on the set of Badlands; Fisk was Lynch’s “best friend since high school.” Spacek and Fisk married in 1974.
But Spacek appears as an actor in just one Lynch film, and it’s not even a starring role. “I’ve wanted to work with her,” he told Charlie Rose in 2000, “but you’ve got to get the right part lined up with the right person and it happened this time.”
You’re telling me there was no way to squeeze her into Twin Peaks? Log Lady? Come on! You’d think Inland Empire would’ve been a possibility, too; on the other hand, there’s something wholesome yet insectile about the otherworldly Laura Dern. You can’t replace her in Blue Velvet. And there’s nothing for Spacek in Wild at Heart. Mulholland Drive? Lost Highway? Fire Walk With Me? Nope. Dern, Watts, Arquette, and Lee are all nearly the same age. And blonde. Spacek is almost 20 years older and strawberry blonde. If we’re splitting hairs.
So Dern’s some kind of alien muse, and Spacek is the lifelong friend: the warm presence, the steady comfort, the only way to live. Perhaps this is the reason Lynch and Spacek, not Dern, were snatched up by aliens on the way to one of Fisk’s sets. According to Lynch, the aliens told them that “in many, many galaxies in our universe, on so many planets, Sissy Spacek is revered.”
When we see young Spacek in Badlands, Carrie, 3 Women, and Prime Cut, we can’t help but espy an extraordinary extraterrestrial. And Lynch knew her then. The Texan twang. The golden forehead. The skeletal smile. The all-American freckled surface of more blue-eyed mystery. There’s something so off-putting yet undeniably charming in those early roles—and then she grew out of it, into a simmering Southern siren; by 1986, in Crimes of the Heart, she’s fucking glowing.
Lynch did what he could to grind her beauty back down with a snaggle tooth and a frenzied haircut for 1999’s The Straight Story; she’s not the lead, but her performance cuts just as deep as Richard Farnsworth’s.
Rewatching The Straight Story in 2025, knowing how Lynch died, the parallels to Farnsworth’s Alvin Straight are obvious and infuriating. “I can see and hear that you smoke,” his doctor tells him. “My guess is you’re in the early stages of emphysema.” Farnsworth would be dead by his own hand only a year later; I could barely keep it together during Spacek’s stuttering breakdown.
But then I remembered Prime Cut, her film debut, where she and Lee Marvin are chased by a combine harvester in 1972. Which, naturally, led me back to The Straight Story’s combines, Spacek’s wilting set to an aching Angelo Badalamenti score, trying to take care of her frail, dying father.
The Straight Story might be Lynch’s most downer film. When Alvin Straight finally reaches his brother, there’s no big scene. They just look up at the stars and the movie ends. The Straight Story opens with stars, too: when Alvin decides to make his trip, he’s watching the stars with Rose (Spacek). She’s underlit until Farnsworth tells her to “Look up at the sky, Rosie. The sky is sure full of stars tonight.” She turns her head into the light and her sad eyes find the sky.
If we end up in the stars at the end of our lives, maybe we’ll find aliens worshiping Sissy Spacek. And maybe we’ll find David Lynch riding a John Deere lawnmower.