Lynch/Oz

Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe (2022) ***

Despite the fact that director David Lynch has said there’s not a day that goes by that he doesn’t think about The Wizard of Oz and despite the fact that his 1990 Wild at Heart (his weakest film) is deliberately filled with Oz imagery (which, you’ll be glad to know, I won’t detail), I was dubious at the prospect of a nearly two-hour dissertation on the cinematic connections. I was wrong. Disregarding the corny Lynch-homage film opening, Lynch/Oz, directed by Alexandre O. Philippe (The People vs. George Lucas), makes connections that go to the heart and origins of Lynch’s art and philosophy. Comprised of six audio-visual essays on the subject, Lynch/Oz could be accused of not having a cohesive thesis but, despite its scattershot, wandering approach, one reveals itself. I have room to touch on only a select group of observations here; for the full story, see the film.

Amy Nicholson, head film critic for the LA Weekly, gives the film’s strongest argument in the film’s first chapter, entitled “Wind”. Keeping in mind that Lynch must have seen Oz at a young age on television, Nicholson compellingly proposes that the themes and stylistic techniques of Oz have permeated everything Lynch has created. The sound of a chorus mimicking the wind is the first thing one hears when Oz begins, and it’s the wind that transports Dorothy to another reality, another world, an alternate existence. In the 1960s, when Lynch was a fine artist, he was working on a painting when he said he heard the sound of a wind blowing. This compelled him to want to merge his paintings with sound and film: “…cinema is a moving painting” — a technique he’s used to this day. Consider the traffic lights in Twin Peaks blowing in the breeze in the middle of the night or the wind-created cyclone in Season Three; the wind is practically a background character throughout the series (Lynch has also been reporting the weather in morning video broadcasts on and off for decades). When Lynch wants more out of an actor’s performance, he’s been known to tell them, “More wind.”

The curtain behind which the Wizard of Oz hides (and which is eventually pulled back to reveal a different reality) is alluded to throughout Lynch’s films, from the Blue Velvet curtains to the curtain shrouded Red Room in Twin Peaks to the Silencio scene in Mulholland Drive. The number of characters in Lynch films lost in strange places who just want to get back home stand out as well.

One of the more entertaining chapters (how could it not be?) is John Water’s “Kindred”, in which he riffs on Oz (“It was the ultimate American movie that made me want to be in show business … and probably made me want to take LSD. It changed my life. The Wizard of Oz is still my favorite movie.”). He argues one idea both he and Lynch took from Oz (and other children’s movies like Snow White, Cinderella and Peter Pan) was that the villain was one of the most interesting characters — “and they got the best costumes”.

“Multitudes”, by director Karyn Kusama (Yellowjackets), gives a deep dive into Mulholland Drive, examining burgeoning actress Betty Elms (played by Naomi Watts) and her alternate reality doppelganger, Diane Selwyn. Along the way she points out something I hadn’t noticed: the sequence in Oz of Judy Garland, lip-synching to a recording of herself singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, is echoed in many scenes in Lynch’s catalog, when characters lip-synch sing to recordings (starting with Blue Velvet, 1986). The midgets of Munchkinland are echoed in Lynch’s dancing “The Man from Another Place” in Peaks‘ Red Room. The tragedy of Garland’s later life and her fraught, dark relationship with Hollywood (MGM pumping her full of amphetamines and barbiturates in the ’30s and then abandoning her later in her career) is certainly one of the catalysts for the making of Mulholland Drive.

This theme is continued in directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s chapter, “Judy”. In Twin Peaks mythology, Judy (hunted by both the demon Bob and members of the Blue Rose Task Force) is a mysterious, malevolent entity, unknowable, unfindable, spoken about in whispers.

Rodney Ascher, who directed the cinematic essay Room 237, about interpretations of Stanley Kubrick’s film, The Shining, contributes the chapter “Membranes”. It’s a free form look at how Ozian themes of characters entering alternate realities, learning truths about themselves and attempting to find their way home permeate American film, from Back to the Future to Beverly Hills Cop. Lynch films, of course, are nearly all predicated on this theme.

Director David Lowery (The Green Knight, 2021) contributes “Dig”, displaying the cohesive visual motifs many great filmmakers have returned to and maintained throughout their careers.

“It’s caused people to dream for decades. There’s something about the Wizard of Oz that’s cosmic,” says Lynch in one of his masterclass talks. Lynch/Oz ends with a perfect clip: an ABC commercial, circa 1991, promoting a time change for the Twin Peaks series. It features Agent Dale Cooper waking up in bed ala Dorothy, surrounded by characters from the show. “Auntie Em! I must have been dreaming. It was horrible — we were on Saturdays!”

—Michael R. Neno, 2024 July 28