Lynch/Oz opens with an old academic joke, told wordlessly – why are the curtains blue? In this case, however, the curtains twitch between the lustrous green of Oz’s Emerald City and the lurid red of Twin Peaks’s Black Lodge. The rest of the documentary collects the most educated guesses of various critics and filmmakers indebted to the work of David Lynch, an artist who famously spent his career refusing to answer on any record. It’s a testament to director Alexandre O. Philippe that the result doesn’t feel like a multiple-choice test or anything-goes extra credit but a crash course in media literacy from overqualified practitioners.
The Wizard of Oz is presented first as a key to Lynch’s work—the film is one of the few cinematic influences he let slip over the years—and eventually as a key to the national imagination—Los Angeles Times film critic Amy Nicholson credits it as the quintessential American fairytale. As the film reached network TV nirvana with regular holiday airings in the 1950s, it seeped into the subconscious of adolescent filmmakers like Lynch and John Waters, who traces its unconscious inspirations in different yet parallel directions in his own work. Without The Wizard of Oz, the documentary quietly posits, our cinematic identity has no shape, not only for the lack of its generational spectacle but the loss of the medium’s most famous man behind the curtain. Highly recommended.
Can Lynch/Oz be used in media literacy or film studies courses?
Per the curtains, what sets Lynch/Oz apart is a refusal to humor any correct answer as to why they’re green, red, or blue. The filmography of David Lynch is rife with innocents crossing thresholds from mundane realities into dream-logic wonderlands full of inexplicable peril, but no assumption is ever made that he kept sending Dorothies to Oz on purpose. The documentary exercises media literacy as a muscle and treats the media in question as more than puzzles to be solved. Why does Laura Dern try to wish away her trauma in Wild at Heart by clicking her red heels together? It’s an easy starting point as one of Lynch’s most overt references that still begs closer inspection of both films.
Philippe’s scope is also helpfully wide enough to reach beyond the limits of the titular contrast. Films as far afield from Blue Velvet as Babe and Beverly Hills Cop are worked in as counterpoints and complements alike. This is film education presented as a series of ripples in an ever-wider ocean as opposed to a canonized curriculum; Lynch/Oz invites all curiosity, no matter how much any viewer has seen, and rewards it with even more.
What level of film education is Lynch/Oz suitable for?
The episodic structure of Lynch/Oz makes it extremely versatile for any level of film course. The only bar for entry is the severity of films referenced—language and sexual content, depending—so educators can pick and choose which essays their class is prepared for. For high schoolers, Lynch/Oz serves as a gently challenging introduction to visual media literacy, particularly when paired with The Wizard of Oz. For collegiate students, this is an accessible and engaging study of an American master that doubles as a syllabus of the video essay form, extending an obvious invitation to try their hands at using the color of curtains as the beginning of a mystery instead of the end.
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