Lynch/Oz Review: Alexandre O. Philippe Draws the Curtain on a Surrealist Master

Philippe’s essay film is both dead-serious about its subjects and playfully exploratory.

3
Lynch/Oz
Photo: Janus Films

“Is that an Oz narrative?” asks director Rodney Ascher in the second chapter of Alexandre O. Philippe’s trippy, tricky, and obsessive cine-essay Lynch/Oz. Ascher is clearly being a touch dishonest with the question because he’s at that moment referring to Beverly Hills Cop. He follows up that query by wondering in tongue-in-cheek fashion, “Is everything?”

Even though Philippe’s film is ostensibly about the many ways that The Wizard of Oz permeates the work of David Lynch, Ascher’s half-serious digression into the expansively universal nature of Victor Fleming’s Technicolor musical fantasy, calling its fish-out-water plot a “sturdy template” for just about any kind of film you could imagine, is typical of the filmed essays collected by Philippe. It’s both dead-serious about its subjects and playfully exploratory.

That dual nature is present in Lynch/Oz from the start. In the first chapter, film critic Amy Nicholson, the only non-filmmaker among the unseen (only heard) contributors, hints at the curious nature of the project. She describes The Wizard of Oz as one of those “next to impossible” films that “we can all agree on” before linking it to Lynch, whose works of art appeal to a narrower taste. She picks up on the obvious visual tropes from Fleming’s film that Lynch keeps coming back to—all those red shoes and curtains—before delving into more outré connections, like the understanding “that adventures cannot be planned.”

Advertisement

Director Karyn Kusama’s chapter picks up Nicholson’s baton, essentially positing that most of Lynch’s work is structured around Dorothy figures. Per Kusama, the classic Lynch protagonist, from Mulholland Drive’s Betty to Twin Peaks’s Dale Cooper, is a wide-eyed optimist who needs to follow that yellow brick road and pull back the curtain, no matter what nightmares their creator throws at them: “They invite chaos into their lives because they have to know.”

Like Nicholson’s, Kusama’s segment is pleasingly wide-ranging and inconclusive. She openly acknowledges the difficulty of the assignment, given the futility of sourcing definitive answers from the gnomic Lynch, who seems to enjoy both twitching that curtain back and being the man behind it pulling the levers, a kind of doubling commonly seen in his work.

YouTube video

The filmmaking duo of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are similarly flummoxed in trying to come up with a clear thesis for their chapter. Instead, they—well, at least the one who’s speaking, as it’s unclear if it’s Benson or Moorhead in the moment—start off with the audacious claim that The Wizard of Oz is at this point more influential on cinematic hero narratives than Joseph Campbell, throwing everything from After Hours to Apocalypse Now into the mix of evidence like overeager film-studies scholars. After that, they delve quickly into one of the film’s denser studies of the actual assignment, convincingly linking how the characters of The Wizard of Oz live in both real and unreal worlds with the doppelgangers who litter Lynch’s work.

Advertisement

Taking a different and more personal tack is John Waters. In some ways his chapter has less than any of the others to do with the specifics of Lynch’s work (unlike Ascher’s connecting of Dorothy to The Elephant Man’s John Merrick as innocents cast into nightmares). As in most of Waters’s interviews or one-man shows, his theme is largely about his biography and view of the world. As with other contributors here, Waters can only wonder whether The Wizard of Oz was as eye-opening a cinematic experience for Lynch as it was for him. But unlike several of the other essayists, Waters spends less time spelunking in the dark specifics of Lynch’s oeuvre and instead pins together the moments where their philosophical and creative spheres overlapped.

At one point, Waters muses on his and Lynch’s shared affinities as the screen displays a snapshot of a theater marquee advertising a double feature of The Elephant Man and Pink Flamingos. This approach may not make thematic sense for Lynch/Oz, but it does tease out interesting linkages. When Waters says that he and Lynch “have a love and a hate for the 1950s,” the insight lands somewhere between obvious and revelatory, immediately conjuring up all the white-picket-fence conformist norms that both of their works seem so intent on shattering.

Less rewarding is David Lowery’s chapter. Like Waters, he ends up talking almost more about his own work than that of Lynch. But unlike the other chapters’ more free-associative riverine flows of words and imagery, Lowery’s makes somewhat mundane points. He explains how when characters in his films stare off screen with rapt wonder, it’s just him having his actors do “Spielberg face” like he remembers from the transformative films of his youth.

Advertisement

When Lowery suggests that Lynch using totemic pieces from The Wizard of Oz is another example of an artist going back to “the things that compelled us to be storytellers in the first place,” the point is well made but doesn’t feel particularly insightful. But Philippe uses that moment to kick off a lovely montage of filmmakers’ different repeated tics, from Alfred Hitchcock’s birds to Terrence Malick’s rustling waist-high grass and Spike Lee’s double dolly shot. This segment doesn’t really have anything to do with Lynch, except to include him by association in the pantheon of the greats. Which ultimately is what Philippe is doing throughout Lynch/Oz. Cryptic and discursive but fully engaged by a passion for the form, the documentary succeeds by posing a question it doesn’t truly ever intend to answer.

Score: 
 Director: Alexandre O. Philippe  Screenwriter: Alexandre O. Philippe  Distributor: Janus Films  Running Time: 108 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Chris Barsanti

Chris Barsanti has written for the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and Online Film Critics Society.

3 Comments

  1. Hitchcock was the first to use the “double dolly zoom” in Vertigo (Or as you incorrectly call it, the (double dolly shot) Spike Lee appropriated it, and continue to overuse it… pointlessly. I know you felt compelled to mention Lee for reasons of forced inclusiveness, but he is far from “a great” in any sense of the word.

  2. I don’t want to be critical of David Lynch’s methods, a great deal of responsibility is in the acting style of the performers he casted in his films. He allowed them to express more than usual, and this is why his art seems surreal. I think he casted visual appealing perfect for the Twin Peaks film and series. At the time he admitted in interviews he didn’t know who the protagonist was. He used the Neilsen Ratings to finish his script. He was OZ in the sense he was small projecting huge phallus That’s Hollywood.

  3. Not surprised David Lowery had little to say beyond the obvious. His films share the same quality.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.