“There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about The Wizard of Oz.” Filmmaker Karyn Kusama, one of five narrators in Lynch/Oz, shares this quote which she witnessed from David Lynch during a Q&A session following a 2001 screening of his most celebrated feature film, Mulholland Drive. Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary goes to great, if often wildly unfocused, lengths to prove this central thesis, with one narrator even speculating that Lynch must have first watched that staple of American cinema at the perfectly formative time in his childhood, which caused it become “baked into his subconscious.”
Oz’s influence on Lynch’s enigmatic work is clear, as many of his stories involve innocent characters thrust into another world by trauma. Just as Dust-Bowl ennui, the panic of briefly losing her beloved pet and a nasty blow to the head launched Dorothy into the swirling winds that dropped her into Oz, so too are Lynch’s characters, from Jeffrey Beaumont to Laura Palmer, plunged into strange, dark realms that lie within just beneath the surface. Lynch’s work figuratively, and often quite literally, involves pulling back the curtain between worlds, and this documentary certainly emphasizes that aspect of his art to the point of belaboring it.
The heavy influence of The Wizard of Oz on Lynch’s work is on-the-nose in Wild at Heart and more thematically integrated in Mulholland Drive, but Philippe’s film argues that Oz is seminal to modern American storytelling at large. Film critic Amy Nicholson, who opens the film with her “chapter” entitled “Wind,” calls it the “quintessential American fairy tale” and sets a solid foundation of the film’s history—it flopped upon release but it was resurrected by holiday airplay on network TV—and its influence on cinema and American culture. Like each of the five chapters in this film, Nicholson’s contains some intriguing insights, but it is also prone to fawning hyperbole, as when she declares that she sees more of Lynch in Oz than she sees of the director in his own films, and that “the story of Oz is the story of David Lynch becoming a filmmaker.”
Elsewhere, documentarian Rodney Ascher absurdly tells dark personal stories related to the heralded Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, as after his first viewing of that episode his cat somehow captured and gorily tore apart a bird overnight despite being locked inside the apartment, and after the second viewing, he learned the next morning that his father had died. At the end of a chapter that also includes discussion of Stanley Kubrick and films like The Matrix—not surprising for the director of Room 237 and A Glitch in the Matrix—he declares that as a result of his personal experiences there must be some “bad juju baked into the bones” of Part 8. As if Lynch’s work needs a veneer of magic to inspire otherworldly wonder.
The only narrator who sounds candid and conversational, despite the images on the screen consisting entirely of film clips or archival footage of Lynch, is John Waters. As a contemporary of Lynch (there’s a photo shown of a theater marquee advertising Eraserhead alongside Pink Flamingos), Waters clearly both respects Lynch’s work and was heavily influenced by The Wizard of Oz himself, going so far as to say that watching Oz as a kid was the reason he wanted to go into show business. “David lives in a different reality than our own, that’s fairly obvious,” Waters opines, but unlike the other narrators, this sentiment feels genuine and not rigidly scripted. His most interesting insight stems from a disdain for 1950s America and its judgmental, conformist façade that hid a dark underbelly, pointing to Lynch’s frequent subversion of nostalgic Americana by way of the darkness in the human heart that is always whooshing just below the surface.
While Lynch/Oz presents some interesting parallels and insights, it too frequently relies on side-by-side comparisons or clips that feel cherrypicked to rather flimsily illustrate a point. Much of it can feel forced—are Lost Highway’s quickly passing dashed yellow lines really a parallel to the Yellow Brick Road; the red sands of Dune’s Arrakis probably aren’t mean to mimic the sepia tones of Kansas. Like Lynch’s work, the film can sometimes feel overwhelming, but from a deluge of the literal rather than by billowing abstractions. While it’s probably still worth a watch for any Lynch fan or cinephile in general, too often this documentary feels like an overly enthusiastic college kid syncing up The Wizard of Oz with Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, straining to identify direct parallels that are only sometimes, and perhaps unintentionally, there.
Photo courtesy of Exhibit A Pictures
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