Filmmaker David Lynch, best known for Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, and the Twin Peaks TV series, is the subject of the documentary Lynch/Oz — a deliberately oddball juxtaposition that honors the artist’s deeply felt kinship to the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
Documentary maker Alexandre O. Philippe enlists commentary from two sources — one reviewer and several film-industry professionals — that represent the current state of critical thinking.
When these commentators go far afield of Lynch’s bizarre storylines to give their own interpretations, Lynch/Oz unloads lots of cultural unsophistication. This cinematic illiteracy relates to how the media fool a credulous, uncritical public — especially this millennium.
Since MGM’s beloved musical fantasy (based on books by L. Frank Baum) first aired on TV in 1956, it influenced Lynch through surrealism — the now-forgotten movement that began in the 1920s when European artists sought to reveal unconscious thoughts, using the logic of dreams and the effrontery of political (anarchist) rebellion. Surrealism suited cinema’s creative potential as a new, popular art form.
Yet Lynch/Oz’s six politically correct sections start with a smug reading: “We all contain within our selves a deep truth of ourselves and the power to be what we want to be.” That’s Amy Nicholson repeating the recent revisionism toward Hitchcock’s Vertigo that values pop art only in solipsistic terms. She equates Lynch and Oz to Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, “writing twisted gory stuff,” essentially denying Lynch’s ability to create an art experience and understanding that people can hold in common. She contradicts herself: “You can’t use Oz like that because everyone’s seen this film.”
But that’s why Lynch’s greatest effort is his 1990 Twin Peaks, in which he reached beyond his indie-movie cult to address a mass audience. It matched how The Wizard of Oz was introduced to Boomers via ritual TV broadcasts. The first Twin Peaks series was probably the most profoundly affecting TV drama series since Peyton Place lifted the lid off middle-class American society. Twin Peaks used the nature of serial narrative form to explore America’s pre-Y2K morality, haunted by murder and secret lusts. It familiarized psychological undercurrents (as in a high-school student’s unforgettable premonitions of dread), not today’s politicized polarization.
Filmmaker John Waters, one of the “hosts” in Lynch/Oz, turns cleverness into divisiveness by casting Lynch’s penchant for 1950s motifs as a rebuke of mid-century conformity: “We both have a love and a hate for the 1950s. It was the most judgmental, conformist thing ever.” Waters’s pet peeve is belied when Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead praise Lynch’s references to Bettie Page pin-ups in Twin Peaks as reactions to that era’s so-called repression. They misunderstand how both Oz and Lynch could undermine middlebrow orthodoxy. Saying that Lynch is “not just a surrealist, he’s a populist surrealist” ignores that no Lynch film is as popular as The Wizard of Oz; his cult status is an aspect of modern cynicism. Oz itself had already codified repressed fears.
Rodney Ascher’s interpretation of Lynch’s overwrought 2017 TV sequel Twin Peaks: The Return stumbles over politics: “It was right after the election, and a lot of us were confused and uncertain about what was going to happen in the world.” This fundamentally denies how Lynch faces the reality of evil, following the moral of fairy tales and art.
Ascher’s comment that “everyday, we’re dragged into some chaotic hellscape against our will” is certainly topical, but it shrinks Lynch into a mere reflection of Millennial chaos. Ascher previously directed the doc Room 237, a pinhead exegesis of Kubrick’s The Shining, which typifies how few critics or film professionals appreciate what surrealism is or its wit.
The politics of Benson and Moorhead get even more subjective: “What is a MAGA hat? A MAGA hat essentially says, ‘Lets get back to this idea that the thing that America was, that was so much better than now.’” But then comes the glib addendum: “The reality is nothing has ever been fine. It was just fine for a few people.”
Lynch/Oz peaks when filmmakers Karyn Kusama and David Lowery separately hold forth. Kusama notes Lynch’s homage to Oz yet perceptively equates Oz with Gone with the Wind. “In the same way that we consult the Bible, I think Oz has served as a foundational text for Lynch, I really do.” She sees Lynch’s protagonists as detectives of “metaphysical mysteries, cosmic mysteries, the American unconscious.”
Admiring Lynch’s “humility in front of another piece of art,” Kusama approves of Oz’s effect on Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive: “You feel a sense of deep, almost anticipatory wounding in his depiction of Hollywood. That movie shook me. . . . It might as well be a documentary.” She actually understands surrealism.
Lowery’s testimony also shames other criticism, finding the surrealist nature of cinema to be “transportive” and necessary. “We’re looking into the past, but we’re also looking into the future, and that is a very valuable thing for the culture.” Lowery links Lynch to films more recent than Oz, inserting movie clips like hip-hop samples, name-checking other artists he respects (some questionable). Still, he understands the legacy of art, not just hip or funny film-buff-dom. Lowery’s sensitivity to myth (calling cinema “a Quaalude for the proletariat” hilariously summarizes his own hallucinatory The Green Knight) reveals his kinship to Lynch — and to Spielberg, who, at his best, was the modern era’s other true populist surrealist.
Don’t smirk at the idea of Lynch/Oz. The Wizard of Oz could influence Lynch’s straight-faced surrealism because it taught him how to communicate the personal dreams and fears we share. We’re in earnest need of that insight.