Directed by cinematic archaeologist Alexandre O. Philippe (“Hitchcock’s Shower Scene”), “Lynch/Oz” takes on the pervasive, profound and lasting influence the 1939 cinematic masterpiece “The Wizard of Oz” has had on the mind and work of the great David Lynch, (“Mulholland Dr.” “Twin Peaks,” etc.), architect of darkly menacing, surrealist, film worlds. “La vida es sueno (life is a dream),” the playwright Calderon de la Barca told us. In cinema, where we can be in a river one second, and in a desert the next second, the editing process gives all films the aspect of a dream.
But for Lynch, the dream is not just in the cuts. It is in the storytelling, the characters and the heated celluloid (now digital) air they breathe. Broken into chapters and narrated by such people as noted film critic Amy Nicholson (“L.A. Weekly”), Rodney Ascher, director of the great “A Glitch in the Matrix” and fellow filmmakers Karyn Kusama (TV’s “Yellowjackets”), John Waters (“Hairspray,” “Cry-Baby”) and David Lowery (“The Green Knight”), “Lynch/Oz” ruminates on the anxiety, and also the exhilaration of the influence a great work of art can have on other artists. “Lynch/Oz” asks us to recollect when we first saw “The Wizard of Oz.” Like me, Lowery saw the film first on a black-and-white TV and had no idea the film switches to Technicolor for the scenes set in Oz.
How many times have we seen curtains in the background of a Lynch set? And have you asked yourself: Who is the man behind the curtain? The curtains have often been entrances to the twilight-zone labyrinth of Lynch’s head, where a character like the protagonist of the neo-noir “Lost Highway” (1997) – the first of a Los Angeles-set trilogy for Lynch – might change in name and appearance for no explicable reason. But as in a dream somehow we follow that protean character to wherever he, she or they might go. Who is Naomi Watts’ sexually-repressed, aspiring actress Betty Elms in “Mulholland Dr.” if not a Dorothy Gale-like figure thrown into the dark, sexually-twisted, Oz-like Hollywood?
Philippe shows us a sequence from Joel and Ethan Coen’s “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000) that looks almost exactly like one in “The Wizard of Oz.” It’s not coincidental. “Oz” is everywhere, not unlike the plethora of high-heeled, bright red shoes in Lynch’s work. The sound of wind has been a Lynch motif, Philippe observes. I think we’re in Kansas. We are reminded that Victor Fleming, the primary “Wizard of Oz” director made the film the same year he completed “Gone with the Wind.”
On a tangent, Philippe finds connections between Fleming’s fantasy and the 1985 Robert Zemeckis rite-of-passage “Back to the Future.” How popular has the “fish-out-water” been with audiences? How many of Lynch’s films have moved between different worlds? Even in “The Straight Story,” (1999), arguably one of Lynch’s most realistic films, an old man stands on threshold of life and death. Asked about “The Wizard of Oz” by an audience member at a screening, Lynch, who has been nominated for four Academy Awards and never won, says that not a day goes by when he doesn’t think about it.
The everlasting impression the sublime Margaret Hamilton has had on viewers as the Wicked Witch of the East is duly noted (we need a film about that). Philippe also shows us the undeniable Oz-iness of scenes and imagery from Guillermo del Toro’s twin masterpieces “The Devil’s Backbone” (2001) and “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006). Like “The Wizard of Oz,” films often take us on a “mystical journey” such as the one in “Apocalypse Now “ (1979) in which Brando is both Oz and Witch. As Lynch himself says, “Something about “The Wizard of Oz” is cosmic.” I’m sure he taps his heels when he says it.
(“Lynch/Oz” contains disturbing images, violent behavior and nudity)
Not Rated. At the Brattle Grade: B+