Lynch/Oz (2023)

It is reasonable to assume that you could take just about any popular director and apply some connection to The Wizard of Oz, particularly if they are known as a stylist.  But no one would better fit that motif than David Lynch whose films are surreal fantasies packed in with disturbing imagery and an Oz-like sensibility that make sense when presented alongside Victor Fleming’s classic film.  Alexandre O. Phillipe, who has previously made great video essays on horror films as diverse as Psycho, Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist now shifts out of the horror genre and into Lynch’s work, which is a horror show of its own particular kind.

Using voice-over essays presented by five diverse filmmakers and film scholars, Phillipe aims to dissect Lynch’s work through their words, find connections and possibly derive some connective tissue.  Is Lynch channeling ‘Oz’ in his films.  Are Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, meant to be bent representation of that children’s classic?  It’s easy to think so, given the comparisons that include curtains, heavy make-up, long roads, journey’s to dangerous places and bizarre characters, both friend and foe, along the way.

The film’s approach is not new.  I has the feeling of one of those video essays that one might find on YouTube where a film fan took pieces of a particular film and used selected clips to build a thesis about what the film really means. 

Each essay makes a persuasive argument even though we know that we could possibly attach Lynch’s subtext to just about anything.  L.A. film critic Amy Nicholson sees Lynch’s work as a means of conveying Dorothy’s journey into the motif of breaking open the real truth that lies beneath ones bucolic world and entering a place where nothing is what is seems and what is real is always in question. 

Film director Rodney Asher, best known for the documentary Room 237 in which fans of The Shining posit crackpot theories about that film being subversive to everything from the massacre of American Indians to the Moon Landing, here has his own theory about the ways and means in which Lynch has a great deal to say about the American character, particularly Middle-America which is the origins of Dorothy and Lynch himself.

John Waters occupies the third chapter, the campy director draws parallels not only to he and Lynch being the same age and both growing up with the triteness of the 1950s, an era that was presented as ideal, but was rife with racism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia.  They see the underside of that American landscape and try to unearth it – both Lynch and Waters became filmmakers at the same time and came through underground channels.

Girlfight director Karen Kusama dig deep into Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. and parses out the idea of fantasy, reality and personal identity a crucial to that film, and how it parallels what the Naomi Watts’ character is experiencing both as Betty Elms and her darker doppelganger Diane Selwyn.  Again, nothing is what it seems the Kusama’s parallel to the divergence of what Judy Garland portrayed on screen and the Hell that she went through in real life cannot be avoided.

Finally director David Lowery questions the idea of leaving home, returning home and the idea that you can’t go home again.  This is played upon in The Wizard of Oz and becomes thematic in Lynch’s work.  How do the character’s step into the magical world with all of his kooky characters and dangers along the way and then return to their cozy understandings of the comforts of their standard lives back home.

You come out the other side of this film wanting to discuss this more in depth, to experience Lynch’s work for yourself and even want to place it more in the context of The Wizard of Oz.  That may say more about his work than even the film itself would indicate.