REVIEW: Just as his often non-linear, puzzle-box movies and TV series have been polarising, so too will a new documentary on the career of David Lynch.
For while there are those who adore his singular visions of The Elephant Man, Dune and Wild at Heart and the hypnotic qualities of Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway and Twin Peaks, there are almost as many who can’t stand his eclectic – and rather eccentric – sensibilities.
Even my own household is divided, a 2002 film festival screening of Mulholland proving so impenetrable and frustratingly obtuse to my beloved wife that she demanded we watch an hour of You’ve Got Mail as soon as we got home, so she knew that everything was still okay with the world.
Having previously deconstructed Hitchcock’s famous Psycho shower scene, the origins of Ridley Scott’s Alien, the zombie movie genre and the life and times of Germany’s “psychic” octopus Paul, Swiss film-maker Alexandre O. Philippe has now perhaps taken on his most ambitious challenge in Lynch/Oz (which debuts on Sky TV’s Rialto Channel on Thursday, August 3 at 8.30pm), attempting to explain even just a little of what exactly Lynch is trying to say –or convey – through his storytelling.
Seizing on a rare breadcrumb and insight provided by the notoriously cryptic auteur during a post-screening Q&A of the aforementioned Mulholland at the 2001 New York Film Festival, Philippe attempts to tease out how his comment that “there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about The Wizard of Oz” is reflected in his works both major and minor.
Dividing his visual essay into six chapters, Philippe enlists the help of seven fellow film-makers (everyone from the equally iconoclastic “kindred spirit” John Waters to Pete’s Dragon-remake helmer David Lowery and sometime Yellowjackets director Karyn Kusama) and Lynchophiles to look at the links between the now 77-year-old Montanan’s oeuvre and Victor Fleming’s beloved adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s fantasy novel.
The result is fascinating, enlightening and certainly not for those who watched Oz for the flying monkeys or Wild at Heart for Nic Cage crooning Elvis.
Yes, it does address those curly Oz rumours around partying Munchkins and disturbing on-screen images, but it’s more interested in how Lynch adopted the story’s stranger-in-a-strange land and curtain imagery for his own, often, twisted tales.
In fact, where this works best is actually in its investigations into and assertion that Oz has had a massive influence on so many subsequent Hollywood classics. Everything from Back to the Future to The Matrix, Forrest Gump, The Fellowship of the Ring, Star Wars, Beverly Hills Cop and Crocodile Dundee, this argues, possess the broad strokes of Dorothy Gale’s adventures “somewhere over the rainbow”.
Lowery admits to being influenced by Spielberg movies in the same way that Lynch has been by Fleming’s film, while Waters, who in 1968 made his own homage in the form of a short entitled Dorothy, the Kansas City Pothead, describes the seemingly timeless Oz “as like a drug for kids to get them hooked on movies”, while confessing the only time he dressed up in drag was as The Wicked Witch of the West.
Ultimately, maybe you won’t gain a new appreciation for some of Lynch’s more challenging works, but at the very least, Lynch/Oz offers a reminder of the continuing appeal and ongoing resonance and influence of a movie that’s now almost 84 years old.
Lynch/Oz debuts on Sky TV’s Rialto Channel on Thursday, August 3 at 8.30pm.
Discussion about this post