‘Lynch/Oz’ Review: a weakly argued collection of glorified video essays
Documentary filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s latest offering, Lynch/Oz, explores the connections between Victor Fleming’s technicolour fantasy The Wizard of Oz and David Lynch‘s surreal oeuvre. The film is split into six video essays, with critics and filmmakers like John Waters and David Lowery employed to examine Oz’s enduring influence.
Philippe has crafted a career by creating films about cinema, previously helming documentaries about Alien, Psycho, Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist. Now, the director has turned his attention towards Lynch’s beautifully terrifying world, arguing that the influence of The Wizard of Oz is at the core of everything the filmmaker creates. Lynch/Oz is presented as a glorified compilation of YouTube video essays, a medium that has become increasingly popular over the past few years. However, Lynch/Oz doesn’t go any further than your average YouTube cinema essayist would. In fact, I’ve seen plenty of video essays created by non-professionals that have captivated me more and provided significantly more persuasive arguments.
The issue with Lynch/Oz is the often tenuous links it pulls between The Wizard of Oz and a generalisation of Lynch’s entire back catalogue. In the first essay, critic Amy Nicholson makes somewhat interesting connections between the use of wind sounds in the 1939 classic with the frequent use of similar noises in Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Mulholland Drive, etc. Although Nicholson makes some decent points, she and the second contributor Rodney Ascher (creator of Room 237), are quickly overshadowed by legendary auteur John Waters.
The director behind Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble bursts with energy as he discusses the influence of Oz on his own films and, thus, how he recognises its manifestations in Lynch’s world. As a filmmaker born in the same era as Lynch, also rising to prominence through the underground midnight-movie circuit of the 1970s, Waters seems to harness the most precise and compelling points out of everyone in the picture.
Outside of Water’s section, the other contributors deliver half-baked points, some more convincing than others. There are parallels recognised between the use of elements such as curtains, ruby slippers, crossfades and lip-syncing in The Wizard of Oz and many of Lynch’s films. However, the narrators often stretch their imaginations a little too far without sufficient evidence to support their claims. For instance, Jennifer’s Body director Karyn Kusama proposes that Lynch’s frequent use of lip-syncing must come from a childhood assumption that Judy Garland was lip-syncing to ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’.
Lynch/Oz uses plenty of clips spanning cinema history to argue that practically every film in existence has taken some form of inspiration from The Wizard of Oz, which becomes tiresome and predictable. At one point, it is even argued that Twin Peaks‘ Agent Dale Cooper and Garland’s Dorothy are linked because they are both detectives – Dorothy in a much less literal sense. The Green Knight director David Lowery rounds off the film with a rather engrossing segment, although an ending montage draws it out for longer than necessary.
Although Lynch/Oz has some satisfying moments, the documentary would be more successful if it dug deeper into its points and developed them with more nuance and evidence. Standout moments include Waters and Lowery’s segments, which could be watched as standalone video essays. Although the film is a promising concept sure to excite fans of both Oz, Lynch and cinema in general, it finds itself going around in circles, attempting to reach a statement that is never fully convincing.
