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From The Wiz to Depraved, from Toto to “pals of Dorothy,” arguably no American film has influenced well-liked consciousness greater than Victor Fleming’s 1939 The Wizard of Oz. And but its lingering thematic and visible presence in David Lynch’s filmography would possibly come, to some, as a shock. In any case, most of us first watch The Wizard of Oz as youngsters; Lynch’s fare usually veers so darkish that full-grown adults want a visible and conceptual palate-cleanser earlier than heading to mattress. For these causes, Alexandre O. Philippe’s Lynch/Oz would appear a must-see for followers of the yellow brick highway or the Nice Northern Resort of Twin Peaks. If solely.
What might have been a riveting exploration of how one of many weirdest American film classics formed certainly one of our weirdest up to date auteurs is, as an alternative, a sequence of desultory video essays narrated by critics and administrators who, occasionally, appear to know little about movie or movie historical past. In some way practically each canonical movie is “like” The Wizard of Oz — from The Miracle Employee to The Massive Lebowski. The movie’s late-Despair context and queer attraction are virtually totally handed over as audio system rhapsodize about what are extremely frequent narrative themes and plot factors throughout not simply cinema, however each Western and Jap storytelling: a bodily journey bringing about an epiphany, a portal into a brand new and international world, asymmetries of energy, and so forth.
A lot of what’s thematically traced to The Wizard of Oz additionally applies to the books that preceded it: Frank Baum’s 1900 youngsters’s novel upon which it was based mostly, Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia sequence — to not point out older texts like Homer’s The Iliad and the Odyssey or the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. Lynch/Oz demonstrates how all nice filmmakers construct on the work of nice filmmakers earlier than them — from Antonioni to Arthur Penn to George Lucas. “Is that an Oz narrative?” asks director Rodney Ascher, commenting on Luke Skywalker touring to the Dying Star to hitch the Insurrection. “Is every thing?”
But when “every thing” is an Oz narrative, then why concentrate on David Lynch? Lynch/Oz is most compelling when the display screen splits to check hanging visible parallels between the fantasy musical and Lynch moments: the depraved witch who out of the blue seems in Misplaced Freeway (1997), Naomi Watts’s Dorothy-like awe as she arrives in Hollywood in Mulholland Drive (2002), the preponderance of ruby purple sneakers donned by Lynch’s feminine characters. Filmmakers John Waters and Karyn Kusama provide the one redeeming commentary, with distinct, evidence-backed claims particular to The Wizard of Oz and the way it influenced Lynch and different administrators.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t take into consideration The Wizard of Oz,” Lynch has stated of the movie — and from the excerpts of his work on this doc, it’s not laborious to imagine that. However by evaluating this cinematic touchstone to so many motion pictures, of so many kinds, a number of having nothing to do with Lynch (Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America?), Philippe dilutes the thesis of the movie. For these with solely a stumbling grasp of movie historical past or storytelling staples, Lynch/Oz might show insightful (“look, all these motion pictures include related conflicts or plot factors!”), however for many who want a deeper understanding of both The Wizard of Oz or Lynch’s singular oeuvre, this doc will disappoint.
Lynch/Oz is at the moment in theaters.
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