How much does David Lynch owe The Wizard of Oz (1939) for inspiring his twisted, surreal, sinister big-screen fairy tales? Swiss director Alexandre O. Philippe’s latest essay-film Lynch/Oz certainly makes a strong case for Victor Fleming’s fabled Technicolor classic being a “foundational text” for the Lynch Cinematic Universe, with supporting testimony from fellow film-makers including John Waters, Karyn Kusama and David Lowery. Backing up his search for Oz echoes in Lynch’s work, Philippe also deploys a densely layered mosaic of tangentially related clips here including Gone With The Wind (1939), The Miracle Worker (1962), Suspiria (1977), Star Wars (1977), The Shining (1980), Do The Right Thing (1989), The Piano (1993), The Big Lebowski (1998), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), and dozens more.
Compared to Philippe’s previous deep-dive documentaries on Psycho (1960), The Exorcist (1973), Alien (1979), John Ford’s use of Wild West mythology and more, Lynch/Oz feels a little unfocused and uneven. The director conceived this film as a Covid lockdown project, dealing with his interviewees remotely. Some on his wish list politely declined, including Lynch himself, which was inevitable given how firmly he resists explaining his work.
Philippe ended up with six chapters narrated by six film-makers and one critic, Amy Nicholson. The quality of their insights varies greatly, but most Lynch-o-philes will indulge these wild tangents and personal interpretations, given that his films invite almost limitless subjective interpretation already. Following its Tribeca launch last month, Lynch/Oz has its European premiere at Karlovy Vary film festival this week, screening in a bespoke section alongside Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) and The Wizard of Oz itself.
Philippe couches Lynch/Oz in knowingly Lynchian motifs: eerily empty theatres, noir-ish lighting, gothic Americana, ghostly guitar music, unsettling sound design, nightmarish doppelgangers, creepy carnival ringmasters, heavy velvet curtains and so on. Throughout the film, he finds countless visual parallels, interview quotes and subtle background clues that reinforce Lynch’s fascination with The Wizard of Oz. Most obviously, Wild at Heart is bursting with overt Oz homages. But Philippe and his guests also tease out deeper thematic echoes across the director’s career, from Eraserhead (1977) and The Elephant Man (1980) to Blue Velvet (1986), The Straight Story (1991), Mullholland Drive (2001), Inland Empire (2006) and the various incarnations of Twin Peaks.
One of the most illuminating commentators in Lynch/Oz is Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Destroyer, Yellowjackets), who uses her own youthful encounters with Lynch while working as a New York diner waitress as the jumping-off point for a closely argued dissertation on the director’s recurring use of characters who “contain multitudes”, and how that idea resonates in the real world. Kusama’s narration is a little starchy, but her acute observations and coherent arguments stand out. Phillipe’s sprawling portmanteau project would have benefited from more of this focus and rigour.
By contrast, Waters is the least formal and most gossipy guest speaker here, the joker in the pack. The veteran trash maestro claims The Wizard of Oz “made me want to take LSD” and recalls how he always identified with the Wicked Witch of the West, which scores a resounding zero on the Richter Scale of surprise revelations. As ever, Waters is great company, even if his insights are scrappy and his links to Lynch pretty tenuous. Philippe knows this, straining to accentuate even the most slender connection, notably a clip from the cult Baltimore director’s unfinished early Oz-spoof film, Dorothy the Kansas City Pothead (1968).
In their chapter, art-house sci-fi horror directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead probe the darker subtexts behind both The Wizard of Oz and Lynch’s work, arguing that morbid folklore about on-set suicides and wild backstage parties prefigured later revelations about Judy Garland’s very real mistreatment, addictions and early death. Then David Lowery digs for hidden meaning in Lynch’s recurring visual motifs by highlighting similar patterns in the films of Hitchcock, Spielberg, Jane Campion, Wong Kar-wei and others.
All these personally slanted mini-essays are diverting enough, though the thinking is often more lateral than literal, drifting away from Phillipe’s initial premise into more general cinematic rumination. Lynch/Oz is a strong concept that never fully delivers on its intriguing promise, but it still leads viewers on a colourful, cuturally rich ramble down the Yellow Brick Road and far beyond. Toto, we are definitely not in Kansas any more.
Venue: Karlovy Vary Film Festival (Out of the Past)
Director, screenwriter: Alexandre O. Philippe
Cinematography: Robert Muratore
Editor: David Lawrence
Music: Aaron Lawrence
Producer: Kerry Deignan Roy
Production company: Exhibit A Pictures (US)
World sales: Dogwoof, London
In English
109 minutes
