[ Dramatic music plays]
[ Electricity buzzes]
Ladies and gentlemen.
"Lynch.
Oz."
[ Down-tempo music plays ]
NICHOLSON: When you look at the grand scope
of American storytelling...
in this strange,
mixed-up, argumentative, polarised country...
...finding a story we can all agree on
is next to impossible.
There's these two very similar films
that are famous in film history
because they share the same story beats,
the same trajectory.
They were both flops when they came out.
The first one is "The Wizard of Oz,"
and the second one is Frank Capra's
"It's A Wonderful Life."
I'm shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet,
and I'm going to see the world.
Get me back!
I don't care what happens to me.
There's no place like home.
NICHOLSON: And a curious thing happened with both of them.
They went away for a few years,
and then they were re-presented on TV
and they were kind of put forth as special events.
50% of the television sets in America
were tuned to "The Wizard of Oz."
And then "Oz" did so well in the numbers
that the network brought it back
and it eventually settled into a pattern.
Always the same time of year. Always the same moment.
It's right there, and it's special and it's precious.
If "The Wizard of Oz" is not
the quintessentially American fairy tale,
I really don't know what is.
It's one of the first movies
I think most children are introduced to
as "Hello, you are a child. Welcome to the world of movies.
Let me open up the curtain of what cinema is."
♪ Somewhere over the rainbow ♪
♪ Bluebirds fly ♪
NICHOLSON: But even beyond that, what makes it special
is this is a movie that we've had
that every generation of kids has watched for eight decades.
[ Chanting indistinctly]
There's just something in the shared
candy-coloured musical universe of "The Wizard of Oz"
that I find so remarkable,
so visually and sonically influential.
We've all been to Oz.
One is starved for Technicolor up there.
NICHOLSON: And the thing is, it has not aged at all
because it's a film that takes place so squarely
in the world of musical and fantasy.
You can never underestimate the power of
when a movie that is extensively taking place
in a normal universe breaks out into song.
Because that is the moment
when the film looks at the audience and it says,
"Are you in?"
♪ Somewhere... ♪
NICHOLSON: It makes me think of the moment early on
in "Wild at Heart."
Nicolas Cage takes Laura Dern to a metal bar,
and suddenly in the middle of this metal bar,
he begins to sing Elvis.
♪ I would beg and steal ♪
♪ Just to feel ♪
♪ Your heart ♪
NICHOLSON: And the band magically knows the notes
and everybody else who's also at this metal bar
magically sings along.
♪ So close to mine ♪
NICHOLSON: David Lynch must have been four or five years old
that first year they put "The Wizard of Oz" on TV.
I do see the story of "The Wizard of Oz"
as the story of David Lynch himself becoming a filmmaker.
[ Down-tempo music plays ]
I feel like I see him in it
more than I even see his individual films.
Despite all the references,
despite all the red shoes and the curtains.
[ Down-tempo music plays ]
He's a guy from the Plains.
Missoula doesn't look too different
than the Kansas in this movie.
And so he goes on this journey himself.
He's always talking about consciousness and transcendence.
And he takes us there through his films.
There's an ocean of pure,
vibrant consciousness inside each one of us.
MERRICK'S MOTHER: The stream flows, the wind blows,
the cloud fleets, the heart beats.
LYNCH: And it's right at the source and base of mind,
right at the source of thought,
and it's also at the source of all matter.
You, uh -- You'd better close your eyes,
my child, for a moment, in order to be
better in tune with the infinite.
NICHOLSON: And I think that's what Dorothy does in this film.
She transcends and she goes to this other world
and she goes on this journey where she winds up
finding herself and knowing her own powers,
which to me is the David Lynch story above everything.
There's no place like home.
NICHOLSON: He talks about his movies like "Lost Highway,"
for example, as being what he calls psychogenic fugues,
where a character gets knocked upside by trauma
and they wind up slipping into this other dimension
almost as a way of trying to find stability.
I mean, whether or not you believe Oz is real,
you know that Dorothy got hit on the head,
that something very bad happened to her
and that she was unconscious for a long time...
that she went to another place,
that she had this near-death experience
in the middle of a tornado.
Shit.
Got this damn sticky stuff in my hair.
NICHOLSON: There's this very small detail
at the opening of "The Wizard of Oz."
Right when the title comes up onscreen,
you hear this gust of wind,
but it's not a sound effect.
It is humans sounding like a gust of wind.
They're going "Woooh."
That human wind sets up this mood for the whole film,
you know, a whole film that winds up being defined by wind.
And then when the house starts to swirl around,
it is an absolute cacophony inside of this tornado.
And then she lands and this entire movie
goes silent for the first time.
And that silence clears the table for the audience.
And then the music kicks in
and you start to hear the Oz theme,
and you get a little gust of that human wind sound again.
And you have to wonder if those same winds
are the ones we hear in David's films.
PEOPLE: Woooh! Woooh!
LYNCH: I was painting a painting
about four-foot square.
And I was sitting back,
probably taking a smoke,
and looking at it.
And from the painting, I heard a wind.
NICHOLSON: I've heard David Lynch say that
when he wants something special from his actors,
he says "More wind,"
which means put more mystery in their performance.
He, too, has that love of rooms
that seem filled with wind that you can hear,
even if a room seems like it should be completely airless.
[Wind rushing ]
And I love that he talks about wind as the source of mystery
when that is exactly what happens in "Oz."
Wind is the source that rolls the girl around
and it puts her somewhere new.
The camera work in that scene
helps set this really ominous sense about Oz.
And it sets up this vibration of this land is beautiful,
but you need to watch your back.
Something with poison in it, I think.
With poison in it, but attractive to the eye.
NICHOLSON: I think there is a sense in a David Lynch film
where he trains you really early on
as the audience to never be content
to just take things at surface value.
He is always interested in what's underneath the surface,
and he is pushing underneath that,
and he is the person who would say,
"Do you think that group of apple trees
just looks like apple trees? I would look again.
That grove of apple trees is actually alive."
Ouch!
NICHOLSON: There's violence
where you're not expecting to see it.
"The Wizard of Oz" is absolutely darker under the surface
than the movie forces you to acknowledge.
I mean, Dorothy enters Oz killing somebody.
And that's all that's left of the Wicked Witch of the East.
NICHOLSON: Two powerful women die in "The Wizard of Oz"
at the hands of a young girl who is pretty okay with it.
Like, does Alice go into Wonderland
and just start murdering people left and right?
I'm melting! Melting!
She's dead. You killed her.
NICHOLSON: And it's funny because Frank Baum
looked across the ocean at Hans Christian Andersen
and the Brothers Grimm,
who were writing really grisly, gory stuff.
And he thought, "I'm going to write a story
that does not have that horror."
But he didn't really do that.
NICHOLSON: I think if there is a driving question or driving goal
that really connects David Lynch in all of his films,
it is that nothing should be taken for granted
and that nothing is exactly what it is.
Fred?
I'm not me.
I'm not.
I'm not me.
I'm not. I'm not me.
[ Gasping ]
NICHOLSON: And that we all contain within ourselves
a deep truth of who we are
and the power to be the person that we want to be.
100%.
NICHOLSON: It's interesting because every time
I see David Lynch, I see a man who has done a lot of work
to maintain the sense of moving through the world like a child.
And I love that he is so drawn to a character like Dorothy,
whose defining characteristic is a complete lack of cynicism.
She walks through this world,
and when people are kind, she's grateful.
The only way to get Dorothy back to Kansas
is for me to take her there myself.
[ Gasps ]
Oh, will you? Could you? Oh!
NICHOLSON: And when people are mean, she's like,
"Well, you're mean."
Shame on you.
[ Crying 1 What did you do that for?
NICHOLSON: But yet she's never jaded about anything.
She has this gigantic, curious spirit that propels her forward.
I think where David Lynch and Dorothy
have this strong point of connection is in the fact
that they both know that adventures cannot be planned.
Life!
Is full of surprises.
NICHOLSON: They can only be approached
with the right attitude.
A man's attitude -- A man's attitude go some ways.
The way his life will be.
Is that something you might agree with?
Sure.
NICHOLSON: He still thinks, I think, of curtains
almost as this gateway to magic.
They open up and then you get to enter this other world.
He favours theatrical curtains,
the kind of curtains that belong to magicians and movie theatres,
you know, the kind of curtains that you only use
when you are framing a performance.
The kind of curtains he would have seen
when he goes to the movies when he was a young boy
and that curtain opens up.
And so when you see a curtain like that,
you know that something is about to happen that is not real life.
If a curtain is your divider between reality and fantasy,
the curtain is easy to get through and to walk through.
The curtain is welcoming.
It's as easy as Toto pulling back the curtain
on the great wizard himself.
WIZARD: Think yourself lucky.
Oh, ah, I -- I am the great and powerful Wizard of Oz.
You're a very bad man.
NICHOLSON: And you see on the Wizard's face
this disappointment
because he has disappointed them.
I'm just a very bad wizard.
NICHOLSON: And it's almost unfair, I think,
for everybody to be so sad when they see him
because it's still a great show.
There's this fear that the director does not want
his craft to be exposed.
And I wonder if that's a little bit of
where David Lynch is like,
"I don't want to explain my films.
I don't want to ever show you my gears and my levers
because nothing lives up
to what you have perceived on the screen."
Damian asks, "What's behind the red curtains?"
It's a top-secret thing, Damian.
And, uh...
Just leave it -- leave it like that.
NICHOLSON: Sometimes when you see a filmmaker make an allusion
to a film that they love, they're doing it for this reason
of saying "This film was an influence on me.
You know, go watch it, go pay attention to it."
But that is not at all
how I think David Lynch uses "The Wizard of Oz."
I mean, you can't use "The Wizard of Oz" like that
because everyone's seen that film.
I think he wants to go home.
Home.
Where is your home? Is that right?
He knows where his home is.
Well, where is his home?
Where home.
♪ We're off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz ♪
NICHOLSON: He almost uses it as a way
of making his films more approachable.
When you have something like "Wild at Heart,"
which is a story without really clear arcs,
and there's violence that comes in out of nowhere,
and tragedy that comes in out of nowhere,
and yet incredible hot lust and humour and romance,
to take this crazy, like, mother figure
with her red press-on nails
and keep associating her with the Wicked Witch
is almost a way of giving that character a parallel.
Look out!
I'm going! Ohhh!
NICHOLSON: And letting the audience say,
"I kind of understand who she is and why she does this.
And I don't need to know any more about her motivations."
He's using "The Wizard of Oz," I think,
almost as a way of shaking hands with the people in the audience
and saying, "We do have this shared language.
You can trust me."
We will pursue...
Capture, and incarcerate.
Let's hit the road.
[ Dramatic music plays]
ASCHER: My family and I were just watching
"Back to the Future,"
which couldn't be a less Lynchian movie if it tried.
But if you use the lens of "Oz" to look at it,
well, what do you have?
A young man from Any town, USA,
who travels magically to another world,
in this case, his own past.
This has got to be a dream.
ASCHER: Where he encounters doppelgangers of people
that he knows from home.
Now. I've got no reason to suspect
that "Back to the Future" was inspired by "The Wizard of Oz."
But "The Wizard of Oz" is a really sturdy template.
It's a provocative lens to look at, you know,
a lot of different stories through.
Mom. Dad.
-Did you hit your head? -Marty, are you alright?
You guys -- you guys look great.
Auntie Em, it's you.
ASCHER: There's a strong Oz/Kansas dynamic
in "Blue Velvet."
We see how close the real world
and then that nightmare world are to one another.
FRANK: Dreams talk to you.
ORBISON: ♪ In dreams ♪
In dreams, you're mine.
ASCHER: Jeffrey leaves the Kansas of his family's bubble
deep in the suburbs of Lumberton to the other side of Lincoln,
where the sinister adults-only action goes down.
Here's to an interesting expeflence,huh?
I'll drink to that.
ASCHER: He crosses over when he sneaks into
Dorothy Va||en's apartment.
She's certainly a character from Oz,
not from Kansas, in Jeffrey's journey.
And then Jeffrey is dragged through hell,
kills the big bad, and then returns to his family.
And then at the very end of that scene with the robin,
with Jeffrey and his family gathered around the window...
MRS. BEAUMONT: Jeffrey, lunch is ready.
Okay.
ASCHER: ...looks an awful lot like Dorothy in her bed,
surrounded by her loving family.
It's a strange world.
Isn't it?
ASCHER: But knowing things, having experienced things
that they never will.
Paul Atreides is a very Dorothy-like character.
He certainly travels through multiple worlds.
Moves from the more colourful Caladan to Arrakis, Dune,
which is sepia-toned, a lot like Kansas.
Ultimately, he liberates Dune just as Dorothy liberates Oz.
John Merrick, the Elephant Man,
is really the epitome of a character
who moves between different worlds.
A freak on exhibit in the carnival
is just about the lowest social class
I can imagine in Victorian England.
And he leaves it for London Hospital,
which becomes his gateway to the upper class.
If Oz echoes Kansas,
well, then, the hospital echoes the carnival.
The horror and the abuse recur again,
first, more politely as scientific curiosity,
but then again quite literally.
So if you see Dorothy as an innocent character
flung into a dangerous world,
well, Merrick's been born into one,
and he strives to find his kinder Kansas,
which, you know, is sort of a reversal of "Oz."
And the images that we see of his angelic mother seem,
at least to me, to be a little inspired
by Glinda the Good Witch,
the epitome of kindness.
Nothing will die.
ASCHER: But just because "Oz" can be a handy way
to help parse out particular elements of Lynch's work,
I wouldn't assume that all of those similarities
were necessarily directly inspired by "Oz."
They could be.
Desiring an idea is like a bait on a hook.
-MAN: Yeah. -You can pull them in.
I like to think of it as in the other room,
the puzzle is all together,
but they keep flipping in just one piece at a time.
-In the other room... -Over there.
ASCHER: Based on G|inda's appearance in "Wild at Heart,"
I think it's safe to assume that he spent some time
thinking about the movie.
But, you know, I personally have no idea
how far that influence really goes.
He's certainly aware of "Oz."
It's certainly something that he thinks about.
Certainly something that's important to him.
I'm going to play "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."
And try to, anyway-
ASCHER: A lot of people go to the movies
in order to experience new worlds and new sensations,
and for that, you need a relatable, innocent,
inexperienced character to be confronted by those things.
And I think that that approach works really well
because, I mean,
the real world often feels chaotic and strange.
Every day we're dragged into
some chaotic new hellscape against our will.
And we have to find allies.
We have to find a way out to not only achieve our goals,
but make it back home at the end of the day.
Of course, I could be projecting.
It might be that the broad strokes of "Oz" --
an innocent character finding herself in a nightmare world,
characters appearing in more than one shape
within more than one avatar, having multiple doppelgangers,
even the man behind the curtain,
sort of a sinister power figure at the centre of the narrative,
one who has two faces --
Well, could be that that's a generic enough,
a powerful enough metaphor that you could squeeze it
and poke it and prod it to apply to most anything.
Thousands of movies are based on the idea of fish out of water.
"Beverly Hills Cop" --
Axel Foley travels from the urban grime of Detroit
to glitzy Beverly Hills, learns a couple lessons,
including that there's less difference than you might think
at first glance between those places,
and then he goes back home.
The idea of going on a great journey,
extending yourself beyond your comfort level...
Look. They're shooting buffalo.
ASCH ER: It's a story that's, what,
three-quarters of American movies?
It's probably hard to overstate how common that trope is.
Luke travels from his home, his Kansas-like desert home
to the Death Star to the Rebellion.
Is that an "Oz" narrative?
Is everything?
There's a really interesting movie I watched recently,
"The Miracle Worker,"
Arthur Penn's 1962 movie about Helen Keller.
And it really felt like
I was watching an early lost David Lynch film.
There's a dinner scene where the very formal
and proper Keller family are sitting around the table,
and Helen is racing around it like a wild animal,
growling at food, grunting,
and all the rest of the family around her
are trying to act like nothing is strange.
That kind of contrast,
at once comic and horrifying and a little sad,
it felt very Lynchian.
She'll be alright in a minute.
ASCHER: There's another moment where her teacher
is watching Helen out the window,
and then Annie flashes back to her own school days.
As a kid, she was in an institution for the blind,
and Penn uses a double exposure dissolve that lasts
just an incredibly long time.
If it doesn't look like a dream scene
straight out of "The Elephant Man"
or "Eraserhead," I don't know what does.
It's something that David Lynch
does in a way that feels effortless
and it has this powerful, dreamlike effect.
There's that amazing dissolve on Cooper's face
that lasts a minute, minute and a half
where he seems to be unmoored in his world.
In "The Miracle Worker,"
it's almost as if the ghosts of Annie's past have returned.
And in both cases, it's slightly "Oz"-like.
All these characters are becoming untethered
and losing track of which layer of reality they're in.
Why would Lynch be that absorbed with "The Wizard of Oz"?
Well, it's a very nostalgic American icon of a film.
But anyway, Toto, we're home.
Home. And this is my room.
ASCHER: In a lot of his movies, there's a sense of a search
for a sort of lost, perfect American world.
A nostalgia for paradise lost.
Perhaps for one that never really existed.
Did he watch "The Wizard of Oz" on a perfect day
at the perfect time as a child
and it sort of baked into his subconscious?
I wonder if on the same day
he watched "The Brain From Planet Arous" instead,
would his movies be very, very different?
[ Dramatic music plays]
Many filmmakers' works are often variations on a theme.
To me, Stanley Kubrick's films are often
about exposing the abuses, the excesses of people in power.
"Paths of Glory" being one of the most literal ones.
[ Speaks German ]
-Guten tag. -[ Laughter]
Hey, talk in a civilised language!
But that continues all the way up to "Eyes Wide Shut,"
which is about the decadent super rich.
Ladies, where exactly are we going?
-Exactly? -[ Laughter]
Where the rainbow ends.
ASCHER: In "The Shining," there's the whole conversation
about all the best people who stayed at the Overlook.
We had four presidents who stayed here.
Lots of movie stars.
Royalty?
All the best people.
ASCHER: Even Lolita is a girl who's preyed upon
by different powerful men,
Clare Quilty and Humbert Humbert.
Gee, I'm really winning here. I'm really winning.
I hope I don't get overcome with power.
ASCHER: Lolita is a girl who's forced to live
in multiple worlds,
the normal one of teenagers,
but also a darker adult one.
You want to stay with this filthy boy?
-That's what it is, isn't it? -Yes!
-Why don't you leave me alone? -Shut your filthy mouth.
ASCHER: There's a lot of "Lolita" the film
in "Twin Peaks,"
and there's a lot of Dolores Haze
in Laura Palmer.
What is real? How do you define real?
ASCHER: Right now, I'm wrapping up a film
about simulation theory
and "The Wizard of Oz" has been coming up a lot
because at the end of the day, what kind of movie is it?
It's the story of a young girl
who moves between parallel worlds.
It means buckle your seat belt, Dorothy,
because Kansas is going bye-bye.
-[ Thunder rumbles] -ASCHER: And there's a question,
a sort of question mark left at the end.
Which of these worlds is the real one?
Are both of them real in some way?
But it wasn't a dream. It was a place.
And you, and you, and you, and you were there.
ASCHER: That's a question that people play with
in countless movies that have been influenced by it,
everything from "Nightmare on Elm Street" to "The Matrix."
Lynch's films are filled with characters
who move between different worlds,
and they're often very innocent characters like Dorothy.
Never seen so many trees in my life.
W.C. Fields would say,
"I'd rather be here than Philadelphia."
ASCHER: In "Mulholland Drive,"
which might be the most "Wizard of Oz"-y of all of them,
Betty is a perfect innocent who finds herself in sort of
the twin versions of Hollywood, the dream and the nightmare.
I think that in Lynch's duelling realities,
the membranes between layers of reality are thinner
than they were in "The Wizard of Oz."
In many of these movies,
there are characters who hold all the cards,
just like The Wizard of Oz himself.
The man behind the curtain.
Characters whose influence travels between worlds.
We've met before, haven't we?
I don't think so.
Where was it you think we met?
At your house. Don't you remember?
When Lynch was talking about "Inland Empire,"
another story of a woman who moves between
different levels of reality, he once answered,
"We are like the spider.
We weave our life and then move along it.
We are like the dreamer who dreams,
then lives in the dream.
This is true for the entire universe."
Like Mulholland Drive and Winkie's Diner,
that guy is talking about his dream,
and he's afraid that the dream could come true.
And then, soon enough, he finds himself in the nightmare
of having to relive that dream.
He says to a psychiatrist,
"In the dream, I was sitting here,
and you were up there by the cash register,"
and then it panned slowly over to the cash register.
And you see the absence of the psychiatrist.
And it cuts back and then you see the gears
turning in the psychiatrist's head who says,
"Oh, you want to see if it's real."
And then the man can't stop it from happening.
The psychiatrist gets up
and he walks to the register and we pan over.
And now he is exactly in that position.
He's filled the negative space,
and then the man finds himself in his dream
the way Dorothy is transported into her dreams of Oz,
only without a tornado or even a dissolve.
Just in the space of a line of dialogue or two.
That very last scene in "Twin Peaks: The Return"
is the summation of a lot of ideas
that I think about with "Oz" and with Lynch.
The question of dreams versus realities.
Because I read that
the woman who answered the door in the scene
is actually the woman who lives in that house in our world.
Is this your house?
Do you own this house or do you rent this house?
Yes, we own this house.
ASCHER: So it's almost as if,
well, which of the thousands of possible multiple realities
does Cooper land in at the end of the series?
He lands in the same one that you and I are living in
and that the woman who owns the house that they film
"Twin Peaks: The Return" lives in.
And it's more than Cooper and Carrie are able to take.
What year is this?
[ Dramatic music plays]
[ Screams ]
ASCHER: They end that sequence in a complete mental breakdown,
a complete panic,
which was an experience that I really went through
while watching that whole season.
It was shortly after the election
and a lot of us were confused and scared
about what was going to happen in the world.
God bless America.
ASCHER: So it's really nice to return
to the world of "Twin Peaks,"
even if within the show,
there's one unspeakable nightmare after another,
at least it was our unspeakable nightmare.
This is the water.
And this is the well.
Drink full, and descend.
The horse is the white of the eyes,
and dark within.
ASCHER: But the strangeness crossed over into my reality
because I remember episode eight, the big episode,
the one with the atom bomb and the fireman and that lizard.
I've watched that episode twice.
And each time, another horror
would be waiting for me the morning after.
The first time my wife and I watched it,
our cat was acting really strange,
rubbing her head against the TV.
The next morning, we came downstairs,
and the floor was just littered with blood and feathers
of a bird that she had managed to catch
while locked in the house all night.
Maybe she escaped through a window
and maybe she pulled it back inside somehow.
I've got no idea.
But she murdered it while we were sleeping
and scattered its remains all over the floor.
And then two or three weeks later,
I watched it again alone.
And maybe this is in hindsight,
but as I imagined myself walking down the steps the next morning,
I'm feeling a sort of Lynchian dread,
like that guy in "Mulholland Drive"
who's walking back behind Winkie's.
And I come to my desk and on my phone,
there's like 20 new messages
that have just popped in the last hour waiting for me.
My father back in Florida,
he died the night before.
He hadn't been doing well for a while, so it wasn't a shock.
But I don't know, the timing felt really strange.
I don't think I'm going to watch that episode again anytime soon.
I don't want to know what's going to happen.
There's bad juju baked to the bones of that thing.
[ Dramatic music plays]
It is happening again.
ANNOUNCER: Like wildfire in the wheat field,
the fabulous tale of "The Wizard of Oz"
spread from town to city to nation to the entire world.
WATERS: For me, "The Wizard Of OZ"
was the ultimate not just American movie,
movie period that I saw as a child
that made me want to be in show business,
that made me want to create characters,
that made me want to go on adventures
and probably made me take LSD.
[ Mid-tempo music plays ]
I think it was a good influence on me all the way around.
For me, it changed my life when I saw it.
My obsession with it started before television.
My parents took me to see it at the Rex Theatre in Baltimore,
which, oddly enough,
later became the sexploitation nudist camp movie theatre
like 30 years later.
Then the Christmas thing became like the sequel
in my mind as a child.
Every year, we watched it.
I mean, it was a big deal event.
And you always watched it because it didn't come on again.
There was no other way. Nobody could imagine
that you could ever buy a video of something
and watch it whenever you wanted or rewind it.
That's the thing I always thought was kind of against.
You give away the magic trick.
But, you know, the saddest thing I ever heard
was I talked to this young kind of hipster kid,
and we were just talking about movies.
And I said, "Do you like 'The Wizard of 02'?"
And he said, "No, not really.
I mean, it's basically just walking."
I thought, "God, what a blurb."
If a kid watches "The Wizard of Oz" today,
the film completely works.
I think it's the perfect -- like a drug to kids
to get them hooked on movies
for the rest of their young lives.
Well, I don't think that's the only movie
that influenced David Lynch or me,
but certainly he probably --
it was maybe one of the first movies he saw, too.
And whatever those first movies are --
The other one for me was "Cinderella," Walt Disney's,
and I love the stepmother in that movie.
And she was the same to me as the witch.
She was the villain, the one you were supposed to hate.
But I was a puppeteer when I was young.
Was David?
Hello.
We're all very happy to be here tonight.
First of all, I'd like to introduce my boys.
This is Chuckle and this is Buster.
And this is Pete. I'm David Lynch.
And this is Bob and this is Dan.
WATERS: Many, many directors are.
And later in life, your actors always say
"We're not your puppets," you know.
Well, yes, you are.
But I wonder if he was, because it seems like many,
many directors were puppet enthusiasts as children,
and they were their actors
and they told them what to do in a way.
It looks like this. And I got it.
-I got it. -Yeah.
And start bouncing up and down.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bounce around and kissing.
Yeah. Okay.
WATERS: So I think it came from that,
that the villains were always better characters.
They had better outfits.
They're the ones you remembered more, in a way.
Captain Hook in "Peter Pan,"
I mean, that little girl in "The Bad Seed," Patty McCormack.
These were my childhood playmates.
Give me those shoes back.
Oh, no, I got them shoes hid
where no bother or bee can find.
You better give me those shoes.
They're mine. Give them back to me.
WATERS: I wrote Margaret Hamilton in my life,
and she did send me back an autographed picture
and she always signed her autographs
"WWW Margaret Hamilton,"
like the Wicked Witch of the West,
which I prayed she had monogrammed sheets
that said that.
What a performance, what a performance.
Who killed my sister?
Who killed the Witch of the East?
Was it you?
WATERS: And she was so much more fun than the good witch
who dressed like she had gone insane
getting ready for the prom.
Most directors can always tell you
one of the first few movies
that obsessed them when they were a kid.
And that is what led them to pick this as a career forever.
"The Wizard of Oz" is still my favourite movie.
Wicked Witch -- I was in drag only once in my life,
and that was as the Wicked Witch.
And I went to a children's birthday party.
You know, I raised a few parents' eyebrows.
WATERS: I think all my films have been influenced.
Oz was Queen Carlotta, maybe.
I think "Desperate Living" had some "Wizard of Oz" in it.
Bring me her broomstick,
and I'll grant your request.
Now, go.
Loyalty to the Queen sometimes results in reward.
The Munchkins were --
Hey, that was like Mortville, kind of.
"The Wizard of Oz," a special little weird town.
Even Divine was not the Wicked Witch,
but Divine would have hung around with a wicked witch.
They would have gotten along well.
I'm trying to think is there one scene
that was really like "The Wizard of Oz" on purpose?
Like a parody of it?
MAN: ♪ You've got the magic touch ♪
[Warbling ]
Well, if you could just tell me, if you could --
Oof!
[ Dramatic music plays]
[ Indistinct singing ]
WATERS: "Dorothy, the Kansas City Pothead"
was a movie I made that never really got made.
Dorothy smoked pot and then went to -- went to Oz,
which was a psychedelic high.
I don't think we ever got any further than that.
The people that are my heroes or heroines
would have been the villains in other people's movies.
And the villains in my movies are usually people
that are more middle of the road and judgmental
and don't mind their own business.
Now, Miss Gulch didn't mind her own business.
I want to see you and your wife right away about Dorothy.
WATERS: I make the same film. The moral is the same.
Mind your business.
Exaggerate what people use against you.
Turn it into a style and win.
All my movies say that.
We find the defendant not guilty of all charges.
WATERS: They're different characters,
but the moral of all my movies is definitely the same.
David might agree with that with his own movies.
I think David and I both have a love
and a hate for the 1950s in America.
I mean, the '50s was a terrible time.
EDNA: Tracy, I have told you about that hair.
All ratted up like a teenage Jezebel.
Oh, Mother, you're so '50s.
WATERS: I mean, it was the most judgmental,
conformist thing ever.
And not a one of us is going to start eating
until Laura washes her hands.
Wash your hands.
WATERS: That's why rock and roll exploded.
It was the first way to -- to rebel from all that.
God bless Dwight Eisenhower.
PRISONERS: God bless Dwight Eisenhower.
God bless Roy Cohn.
PRISONERS: God bless Roy Cohn.
WATERS: So I think David would probably agree with that,
that we grew up with the same music,
the same censorship in movies
that came falling down over the years.
I don't think that America has changed that much.
People still want to go home.
That's why I never left Baltimore.
This city has great style, I think.
It's sort of like white trash chic.
I did stay here because --
because to me, my real friends were here
and people that didn't care about show business
and -- and we went over the rainbow ourselves here
with -- with my friends when we were young.
And most of those friends, I still have.
MAN: Hey, does that dog have to shit?
[ Laughter]
WATERS: David has gone over the rainbow
from the very first film ever.
He lives in a different reality than you or I do,
and that's quite obvious.
The last TV show he did was --
was my favourite thing he ever did,
because if there was ever, like, being kidnapped
and taken into a Lynchian world
that you didn't even know where you were,
you were so disoriented that it was like "The Wizard of Oz."
And I couldn't wait each week to go there with him on that show.
Somehow he got that through the Hollywood system.
That is amazing to me.
But from the very first moment
I ever saw a David Lynch film, which was "Eraserhead,"
it may have been the first weekend it was ever at Midnight.
And I started raving about it in the press
because it was such an amazing movie.
And of course, it still is.
I've met John Waters many times,
and I always make sure I thank him for that.
WATERS: And that's kind of how we met.
And there is kind of a famous shot of David Lynch
and I meeting out front of Bob's Big Boy.
Have you ever seen that picture?
At that period, David did eat lunch
at Bob Big Boy's, every day, I think.
Can we say you're a creature of habit?
Yes, habit and a daily routine.
And --
And then when there's some sort of order there,
then you're free to mentally go off any -- any place.
You've got a safe sort of foundation
and a place to spring off from.
One day in Bob's,
I saw a man come in to a counter.
Seeing him came a feeling.
And that's where Frank Booth came from.
Let's fuck!
I'll fuck anything that moves!
[Laughs]
[Tires squeal ]
WATERS: And even though I think our films
are very, very different,
I think that we are certainly kindred spirits
and have the same sense of humour.
Wear!
Your seat belt!
It's the law!
[ Screaming ]
Don't you ever fucking tailgate!
-Ever! -Tell him you won't tailgate.
Evefl
WATERS: My favourite thing that David said is that --
that he loves making the movie, he loves editing,
he loves thinking it out.
But then it's released and the heartbreak begins.
[Laughs]
What a great line.
I know the feeling.
I would have loved to have met him with Margaret Hamilton
while she was alive.
That would have been the best.
[ Sombre music plays ]
KUSAMA: I was once a struggling artist in New York City
and waited tables at a diner.
David Lynch would come in as a customer.
I was just so fascinated that he always ordered pancakes
and used a lot of maple syrup.
Short stack of griddle cakes, melt butter, maple syrup,
lightly heated, slice of ham.
Nothing beats the taste sensation
when maple syrup collides with ham.
KUSAMA: He's quite handsome, almost a caricature
of Midwestern courtesy and bluntness,
which I think we see in some of his Q&As.
Do you want some more pie? A whole pie?
Yes, I would, Miss Johnson.
And a piece of paper and a pencil.
I plan on writing an epic poem about
this gorgeous pie.
KUSAMA:In 2001 , I went to see "Mulholland Drive"
at the New York Film Festival,
and then Lynch came out at the end
and he spoke about the movie quite elliptically,
as he is won't to do.
No hay band a.
There is no band.
KUSAMA: I remember somebody had asked him,
"What does the film mean?"
And his response was, "Well, I think you know."
And that was it.
I know you hate saying
what things mean in your films,
but am I right in thinking
that that's at least in the right area?
-No. -[ Laughter]
KUSAMA: And then a guy asked, "Can you talk about
your relationship to 'The Wizard of Oz'
in relation to 'Mulholland Drive'?"
And his response was,
"There is not a day that goes by that
I don't think about 'The Wizard of Oz.'"
I will say that it was one of those watershed moments for me
as a filmmaker to understand his sense of humility
in front of another piece of art.
Because he said it with a kind of childlike wonder,
in all of my subsequent viewings of "Mulholland Drive,"
I've always thought of it as
a companion piece to "Wizard of Oz."
Part of that has to do with perhaps a left turn away from,
"on-the-nose gestures" of a film like "Wild at Heart"
and something more about its structure.
This idea of the dream within the consciousness of a character
essentially comprising two-thirds of the film,
a dreamscape given narrative life.
"Mulholland Drive" is an exploration
of a character named Betty Wilkes,
a fresh-faced aspiring actor
who comes to Hollywood to make it big.
She immediately meets a cast of characters
who are also searching for something themselves,
and she's immediately thrust into mysteries
beyond her comprehension
and romance that's unexpected and somewhat unruly.
And in the process of investigating this mystery,
we learn about another woman
who looks very much like Betty Wilkes
named Diane Selwyn.
And we learn about a kind of shadow world that she lives in
that's very much like Betty's,
but the failed version of Betty's life.
Camilla.
You've come back.
KUSAMA: We're given access to the fantasy and the dreams
and the hopes of Betty's character.
And then by pulling the lid off of that,
we realise that there is a hope for something
that never happened in the character of Diane Selwyn.
It's as if Lynch is saying,
"We're not going to learn as much about this character
by watching her in her dank Hollywood apartment,
planning a murder,
haunted by the odiousness of her own thoughts.
We're going to learn so much more about her
seeing her as the best version of herself."
10 bucks says you're Betty.
Yes, I am, Mrs. Lenoir.
KUSAMA: The most capable, the most talented,
the most hopeful and loving.
Thanks.
Diane.
KUSAMA: And in the process,
we're going to see Diane's imagination
of a better version of her girlfriend,
which is so heartbreaking.
What's your name?
KUSAMA: And the way to get to that better version
of the girlfriend is to strip her of all of her identity.
Diane Selwyn. Maybe that's my name.
There's something so deeply moving about this strategy
because it's saying sometimes we learn more about a character
not from their reality, but from their dreams.
COWBOY: Hey, pretty girl.
Time to wake up.
KUSAMA: "Mulholland Drive" is an inverse of "Oz,"
in that the home we return our Dorothy to,
in this case, Diane Selwyn's,
is not one she wants to return to.
It's a much darker register of the "Oz" narrative.
I was so struck watching the movie again
by how it is such a merciless depiction of Hollywood.
It seems to be such a personal film for Lynch.
You feel a sense of deep, almost anticipatory wounding
in him in his depiction of Hollywood.
There ain't no way that girl is in my movie.
[ Shouts indistinctly]
This is the girl.
Hey. That girl is not in my film.
It's no longer your film.
KUSAMA: And to me, there's nothing more nightmarish
than the moment that the director says,
"This is the girl,"
because you understand he has surrendered his agency
to larger forces as a way to just stay in the game.
There is almost nothing more brutally truthful
about the process of making movies in Hollywood
than that moment.
Might as well be a documentary as far as I'm concerned.
When you don't have final cut,
total creative freedom,
you stand to die the death.
Dying the death.
And died, I did.
KUSAMA: I just think there's so many things in Lynch's work
that are speaking back to "Oz,"
and they show up so profoundly in this film,
like Rebecca del Rio lip-syncing the Spanish version
of Roy Orbison's "Crying."
It's like hearing Judy Garland's incredible recorded real voice
lip-syncing to herself singing "Over the Rainbow."
It's foundational in "Oz,"
but it's also foundational in Lynch
to watch characters lip-synch.
I just feel that as a kid, he must have been aware
that Garland was moving her mouth to a recording
of her own voice.
The drama and the uncanny weirdness
of that Rebecca del Rio performance,
that's all "Oz."
The blue-haired lady, that's all "Oz."
There's a couple of extraordinary moments in "Oz"
where you just get close-ups of the Witch's face,
of the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion,
where you really see the artifice of the makeup.
When Lynch plays with those gestures,
I think they are intentional.
Thinking about movies like "Fire Walk with Me,"
where Lynch will do something so simple as Laura Palmer
talking to her old boyfriend, and he does a hard cut to her
wearing black lipstick and laughing
and then cuts out of it, it is so scary, so shocking.
That kind of simple makeup gesture
truly going back to the origins of theatre.
He's looking back at the green-faced witch
when he puts that black lipstick on Laura Palmer.
And I think the same is true with the man
who I believe is actually a woman
behind Winkie's in "Mulholland Drive."
It's a gesture of theatrical artifice,
but also something emotionally more true
than just seeing a guy back there
roasting hot dogs or squirrels.
That black makeup with the red-ringed eyes.
It's such a strong, strange, deeply bold choice.
And I feel like that kind of choice is directly influenced
by some of the wildness
that we've come to take for granted in "Oz."
What I think is perhaps a through line
between "Oz" and the films Lynch has made
is this kind of unconscious courage
that the character is willing
to keep opening doors they shouldn't be opening,
to keep going to addresses they shouldn't go,
to keep spying on those they should not spy on.
They invite chaos into their life
because they have to know.
I'm involved in a mystery.
I'm in the middle of a mystery.
And it's all secret.
KUSAMA: He applies the quotidian narrative trope of the detective
to many of his films,
characters who are detectives of metaphysical mysteries,
cosmic mysteries, sometimes to their great peril or horror.
Gordon! Gordon!
KUSAMA: And if you think about Dorothy and Oz,
she's a child detective with her dog and a picnic basket.
She's being asked to go on this insane journey
and trust to follow that yellow brick road.
Part of the irony to me when I think about "The Wizard of Oz"
is I think of it as forever coupled, of course,
with "Gone With the Wind,"
these two completely foundational works
made by the same person and released in the same year.
It's a strange statement about the American unconscious.
Home.
I'll go home.
And I'll think of some way to get him back.
KUSAMA: And when you look at Lynch's films,
which are so driven by a law of the unconscious,
why wouldn't "Oz" be the foundational text for him?
I do wonder if he would have found his way
towards some version
of what is his inimitable style over time anyway
but that "Oz" gave him permission to think so big,
to think so wildly and off the map.
I don't think it's so unusual to find new inspiration
or comforting lessons in a single work.
In the same way that we might consult the Bible,
I think "Oz" has served as some kind of foundational text
for Lynch.
I really do.
His body of work is braided with gestures and moments in "Oz,"
which have burned their way into Lynch's creative mind.
My sense is that his work is governed by irrationality
and that he arrives at some of his best ideas
through a trip into his unconscious
as opposed to his conscious mind.
In some of his work, he's proving the theorem
that once we see certain works
and once certain images and story passages
and characters are burned into our brain,
there is no unseeing.
And somehow that work has landed in our DNA.
And for him, there's just a lot more of "Oz" in his DNA
than there is in another filmmaker.
There are so many gestures that I wonder
if Lynch himself would say,
"I love to watch people singing lip-synch songs," for instance,
which happens in at least every other one of his movies
and sometimes within his movies multiple times
as in "Mulho||and Drive," and always in front of curtains.
♪ And I'll see you ♪
♪ And you see me ♪
♪ And I'll see you ♪
KUSAMA: I just wonder if that's his dream of "The Wizard of Oz."
Do you know what I mean?
Like in his dream life,
that's how "The Wizard of Oz" has landed,
as a Dorothy in front of curtains, as a torch singer,
not a 12-year-old farm girl in a gingham dress.
WOMAN: ♪ ...in velvet were I ♪
♪ Somewhere over the rainbow ♪
KUSAMA: But part of what I think is so juicy about this idea
that he is so influenced by the film
is the meta story beyond "The Wizard of Oz."
It's the story of Judy Garland.
Her brilliance, her greatness.
The deep betrayal that she experienced
as a genius in Hollywood.
The tragedy of her life, the wreckage of her life.
You don't know what it's like to watch somebody you love
just crumble away bit by bit,
day by day, in front of your eyes.
KUSAMA: I think that is as influential to Lynch
-as the film itself. -Good night, baby.
KUSAMA: It's the story outside of the story.
And that is so much Lynch to me,
that he's always telling the story
outside of the story and sort of saying,
"But it gets bigger. It expands."
And "Mulholland Drive" to me is one of those movies
where he completely sticks the landing
in terms of proposing
a world of great possibilities and great mystery
and then actually showing it to us the way that "Oz" does.
-Howdy. -Howdy to you.
KUSAMA: The scene that stands out for me
as it relates to Dorothy and "Oz"
is the masterful scene of Betty auditioning.
First watching her play the scene with the Rita character,
reading the lines horribly and being clearly not an actor,
which is its own sort of wish fulfilment
on Diane Selwyn's part.
So get out of here before --
B-Before what?
Before I kill you.
Then they'd put you in jail.
[Laughs]
KUSAMA: There's something so inspirational to me
about watching her transformation
in that audition scene
and playing the character so differently.
Get out of here before...
KUSAMA: Reinterpreting the scene,
giving us another window into what that scene could be.
Before what?
KUSAMA: This is like the crystallization to me
of Lynch's work in a nutshell,
which is this idea of multiple realities,
but also multiple interpretations as the rule,
not the exception.
A multiplicity of possibilities.
[ Breathing heavily ]
Before I kill you.
KUSAMA: It's thrilling to see her become an actor
we had no idea she could be
after watching a kind of meta performance by Naomi Watts
that's almost frustratingly naive and golly gee,
gee whiz in a way that makes it hard to be
in a real kind of relationship to her as a character.
And then to see this unexpected complexity --
that to me felt like a central instinct in Lynch's work.
To say that we quite literally contain multitudes.
And there is so much more to all of us
than we give ourselves credit for.
And part of how I think that relates to "Oz"
are those moments of Dorothy having to summon the courage,
the abject despair of never getting home,
having to be present in Oz,
even though she may never leave Oz.
I'm frightened.
I'm frightened, Auntie Em. I'm frightened.
KUSAMA: And at least she has the Tin Man and Scarecrow
and the Cowardly Lion as friends.
There's something about that journey that is so unexpected
that she becomes such a hero, this little girl, Dorothy Gale.
But I just feel like that must be something that,
in the best way, infected a young David Lynch's mind
and allowed him or inspired him to create characters
with as much possibility in them.
Come on, it'll be just like in the movies.
I'll pretend to be someone else.
KUSAMA: As much as "Mulholland Drive" devastated me
when I first saw it,
and as much as it frightened me --
like, to my core, that movie shook me --
I now see a tremendous amount of hope in it
because I feel like Lynch is giving us, the audience,
access to the best versions of those characters.
The most interesting. The most inspiring.
The most hopeful.
You look like someone else.
KUSAMA: He's actually kind of an optimist to me.
And that movie proves it in my mind.
As dark as it is,
I see it as a very optimistic film.
I really think he identifies with Dorothy.
But who knows? He might be somebody who says,
"And I have the witch in me, too.
And I have the Cowardly Lion.
And I have the sham wizard."
I think he has all of those characters in him.
We all do, I think is what he's saying.
We have all of them in us.
[ Down-tempo music plays ]
BENSON: There are plenty of movies that follow
the Hero's Journey as outlined by Joseph Campbell,
but a number of them more specifically
seem to follow the formula
and the vernacular of "The Wizard of Oz."
I'm melting! Melting!
Shrieks ]
I don't care about money. I'm pulling back the curtain.
I want to meet the wizard.
I want your dog.
[Whines]
Barney?
Give him to me.
BENSON: That film touches almost every single genre
we can think of.
It has adventure...
Seize them!
BENSON: ...musical...
[ Upbeat music plays ]
...comedy...
Oh! Oh!
BENSON: ...drama...
[ Dramatic music plays]
...science fiction...
[ Dramatic music plays]
...even horror.
-[ Flying monkeys hooting ] -Help, help, help!
BENSON: Take "The Big Leb0wski,"
which is this extraordinarily "Wizard of Oz"-ian tale.
It's a comedy and it's a stoner comedy.
Here you have an unwilling protagonist like Dorothy
swept up in a whirlwind that he doesn't understand...
Where's the money, Lebowski?
BENSON: ...into a different world that is so much deeper
and darker than his relatively simple, pedestrian existence.
And he meets a cast of magical characters
that give him secret knowledge that, interestingly,
a lot of them had all along inside themselves.
Sometimes you eat the bar and...
Much obliged.
...sometimes the bar, well, he eats you.
MOORHEAD: And at the other end of the genre spectrum,
we've got films in the realm of sci-fi and horror
and dark fantasy, movies like "Suspiria,"
which actually shares a lot with "The Wizard of Oz."
Here we have a young woman going on a journey
into a surreal, bizarre, even Technicolor world,
meeting several people along the way
who will shape her for the rest of her life.
[ Mystical music plays]
Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth"
and "The Devil's Backbone"
also share a lot of similarities with "The Wizard of Oz."
[ Speaking Spanish ]
MOORHEAD: Here we have young people
going into these dreamlike scenarios,
meeting a series of interesting entities that shape them,
and coming out on the other side changed in some way.
[ Speaking Spanish ]
BENSON: Martin Scorsese's "After Hours"
feels like "The Wizard of Oz."
Would you just give me a break?
I really just want to go home.
I've got to get over that bar,
get my keys so I can get home.
Where do you live?
Can you take me -- Can you take me home?
BENSON: And "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"
is "The Wizard of Oz" in so many ways.
We open on her sepia-toned childhood in Monterey,
and the entire movie is about going back home.
She eventually decides to stay in Tucson,
but the final shot tells us
she found her new home, so she is home.
Even a movie like "Apocalypse Now"
has similarities to "The Wizard of Oz."
But there's no home in "Apocalypse Now."
-I mean, it starts in... -WILLARD: Saigon.
Shit.
I'm still only in Saigon.
BENSON: And he really doesn't want to be there.
So in a sense, he's started in Oz after the tornado.
But he goes on a mystical, psychedelic journey
in a foreign land
meeting a whole bunch of strange people
that help him along the way...
...in order to find someone who is basically a wizard.
Could we, uh, talk to Colonel Kurtz?
Hey, man, you don't -- you don't talk to the Colonel.
Well -- Well, you listen to him.
BENSON: There's this monolithic, powerful,
all-knowing Colonel Kurtz
that everyone speaks about with reverence and fear.
And he turns out to be both the wizard and the witch.
And then there's David Lynch, who is by far the king
of weaving the visual and auditory language,
the thematic and story language of "The Wizard of Oz"
into his own work.
Oh, I had the strangest dream.
You were there.
And you, and you.
MOORHEAD: Taking "Twin Peaks" season three, for example,
he has some spectacular, very modern visual effects,
but he also uses a lot of the same techniques
used in "The Wizard of Oz."
Old-school opacity transitioning that no one uses anymore
unless you were trying to make it look like
it was actually made in the 1950s.
He knows he's choosing an old-school effect.
This is David Lynch showing us where the smoke machine is.
He is the wizard.
Why didn't you want to talk about Judy?
Who is Judy?
Does Judy want something from me?
JEFFRIES: Why don't you ask Judy yourself?
Let me write it down for you.
MOORHEAD: You could say that "The Wizard of Oz"
has been a more powerful tool for Lynch
in making populist surrealist entertainment
than Jesus Christ has been
for other surrealist filmmakers
like Jo do row sky or Bufiuel.
[ Screaming ]
[ Dramatic music plays]
MOORHEAD: But he is way too gifted of an artist
and a filmmaker to just regurgitate "The Wizard of Oz."
What he's doing is he's taking what we all know about it,
and he's breaking it down into its component parts
and remixing them either buried deep down beneath in visuals
and themes and motifs in basically all of his movies
or right at the surface in "Wild at Heart."
Perhaps you might even picture
Toto from "The Wizard of Oz."
In my mind, it hon ours this great film,
"The Wizard of Oz," which is a film
that's caused people to dream now for decades.
And there's something about "The Wizard of Oz"
that's cosmic.
And it talks to human beings
in a deep way.
MOORHEAD: What's interesting about "Wild at Heart" is that
"The Wizard of Oz" exists in the canon
and the mythology of its world.
It's too bad he couldn't...
...visit that old Wizard of Oz and...
...hear some good advice.
There are no Munchkins in the movie now, huh?
Yeah. There was a Munchkin.
MOORHEAD: The characters in "Wild at Heart"
have seen the movie "The Wizard of Oz."
You ever think something
and hear a wind
and see the Wicked Witch of the East
coming flying in?
MOORHEAD: And they use it as the ideal of their own lives
that they can never get.
SAILOR: That kind of money
would get us a long way down that yellow brick road.
Well, I know it ain't exactly Emerald City.
MOORHEAD: They constantly reference that movie,
and their idea of the comfort of home is the idyllic movie
"The Wizard of Oz."
LULA: Oh, I wish I was somewhere over the rainbow.
It's just shit.
MOORHEAD: There's this moment where Laura Dern was
just assaulted by Willem Dafoe, and she clicks her red heels
together three times.
You can't miss it, and everyone knows what should happen next.
But the scene cuts and nothing happens.
She's still in Oz,
and it's because he's not retelling "The Wizard of Oz."
He's using the cultural real estate
that "The Wizard of Oz" occupies in our public consciousness
to say in these people's cases, there just is no home.
All of these virtues that Dorothy collects
in "The Wizard of Oz" are vices
that these characters are collecting.
These vices are going to keep them where they are,
and they need to find a way to live with that
or find some other way out.
Honey, you ain't going to begin worrying now
over what's bad for you.
I mean, here you are crossing state lines
with an A number-one certified murderer.
Manslaughterer, honey, not murderer. Don't exaggerate.
MOORHEAD: There's this strange cultural currency
to using certain almost universally known images
of 1950s celebrities that have become Americana.
In almost every movie that David Lynch has made,
there's some expression of this Americana in it.
We've got Nicolas Cage basically
playing Elvis in "Wild at Heart."
Let's go out into the crazy world of New Orleans.
Go to Rally's and get a fried banana sandwich.
Mm.
Okay.
MOORHEAD: Almost every character in "Blue Velvet"
is a 1950s image --
bad guys wear leather jackets and hang out in nightclubs.
-What kind of beer do you like? -Heineken.
Heineken?! Fuck that shit!
Pabst Blue Ribbon.
MOORHEAD: In "Twin Peaks,"
James literally looks like James Dean,
and Audrey Horne looks a lot like a teenage Ava Gardner.
[ Down-tempo music plays ]
BENSON: And Michael Cera in "Twin Peaks"
is dressed exactly like Marlon Brando in "The Wild One."
MOORHEAD: And Dale Cooper is like a 1950s noir detective
and a very idealised version of one.
He is flawless, almost to the point of satire.
[Whistle toots ]
There's the strong connection
to film noir archetypes in his movies,
which is interesting because a very, very early noir,
"I Wake Up Screaming," obsessively uses the song
"Over the Rainbow" as a motif.
[ "Over the Rainbow" playing ]
So there's a very established connection
between "The Wizard of Oz" and the origins of noir.
Robert, I --
Why, who on earth is that beautiful girl?
BENSON: David Lynch will often style characters
as pin-up girls like a Marilyn Monroe type figure
or a Bettie Page type figure or Jayne Mansfield.
There's a power to these types of images
in that they're almost collective fetishes.
MOORHEAD: Yes, these are '50s Americana archetypes,
but they're also sex icons, all of them.
And he's making a facsimile of them
in order to take us back and prey on our nostalgia.
And it also makes his movies just very enjoyable to watch.
So he's not just a surrealist. He's a populist surrealist.
[ Rock music plays ]
BENSON: But he always shows you the dark underbelly of that.
And it seems like it's an expression of this idea
that the 1950s were a really exciting time
and it must have felt really good for a lot of people.
But there was obviously a subset of society
for whom it wasn't great,
and the neglect of that leads to a certain kind of horror.
And it's just -- it's always ready to come out
and break through the surface.
David Lynch isn't just holding up these two things and saying,
"Hey, look how different they are."
He's way more principled than that.
He's holding up these things and saying that the badness
is actually what gives the good meaning.
And that would be why he has these themes of doppelgangers,
why he has parallel realities,
why he has people with the same name
but completely opposite personalities.
Is that you?
Are both of them you?
BENSON: I think the only things in life for him
that don't have an evil doppelganger
are probably coffee and meditation.
-Coffee. -SHELLY: Agent Cooper?
Shelly, I'm going to let you in on a little secret.
It's called Georgia Coffee -- comes in a can,
tastes as good and rich as any cup of coffee I've ever had.
It's true.
BENSON: Even cigarettes in "Wild at Heart"
are this constant threat,
and everybody knows David Lynch loves cigarettes.
Gordon.
Whoa.
BENSON: "The Wizard of Oz" treats polarisation
in the same way.
There's a black and white Kansas and the Technicolor Oz.
There's the good witch and the bad witch.
One is a dream and one is reality.
And they all have their counterparts in both worlds.
And that's exactly what David Lynch keeps on doing.
There's not a lot of moral
or thematic muddiness in his movies.
It's funny to say that his movies
don't have an enormous amount of muddiness to them
because they're so confounding for most people.
But what he's doing is he's following these things
through light and dark
and through a logic that actually does make sense.
You know, Bob is a force of evil,
but you don't see scenes of Bob where you empathise with him
and wonder how he used to be good.
And Coop is a force of good,
and you don't watch him get tempted by the dark side
unless he's literally possessed by evil.
They're very complex characters.
They're extraordinarily deep characters.
But you just never wonder
if you're supposed to be rooting for Coop.
[Thunder crashes]
MOORHEAD: You know, what's a MAGA hat?
A MAGA hat is basically saying,
"Let's get back to this idea of this thing
that America was that's so much better than now."
I mean, think about where Marty McFly went to
in "Back to the Future."
That 1950s is great.
Everyone's lives are great and everything is fine,
more or less.
But the reality is that nothing's ever been fine.
It was just fine for a few people.
I could run for mayor.
A coloured mayor. That'll be the day.
You wait and see, Mr. Caruthers. I will be mayor.
I'll be the most powerful man in Hill Valley.
And I'm going to clean up this town.
Good. You can start by sweeping the floor.
MOORHEAD: And I think that David Lynch,
who grew up in Boise, Idaho,
and then eventually moved around a lot, you know,
one of the places he ended up was low-income Philadelphia.
And there it's where he sees the flip side of America.
What's beneath the artificial sheen of it all.
LYNCH: I lived in Philadelphia,
and I call "Eraserhead" the true Philadelphia story.
♪ Some day over the rainbow ♪
♪ Way up high ♪
-What is this, Connor? -Now, now, easy, old man.
BENSON: And I don't think that his realisation was
"Ah, man, I was fooled.
The '50s weren't as great as I thought."
I think his realisation is "The beautiful white picket fence
and 'Leave It to Beaver'
and pin-up girl vision of the '50s,
it only existed because of this horrible darkness
that I'm now able to see,
and it's built on the shoulders of it."
So there's America,
and then there's a doppelganger of America.
And the American dream was, in fact, an American myth.
Or perhaps the American dream
walks hand-in-hand with the American myth.
[ Radio playing indistinctly]
The way Lynch usually expresses
showing the underbelly of America
is often through the way women are treated
by the side of society
that is the romanticised portion.
It's the portion that's supposed to be good.
Stay away from me.
BENSON: Laura Palmer's dad is a 1950s ideal,
but he's obviously done awful things to her.
And then in "Blue Velvet," you know,
Jeffrey watches Dorothy Vallens from a closet.
-Hello, baby. -Shut up.
It's Daddy, you shithead. Where's my bourbon?
BENSON: And witnesses how she's treated for a very long time.
[Groaning ]
Don't you fucking look at me!
BENSON: Really that story is about him observing
how this woman has been destroyed
by the society he lives in.
And he had no idea that it was destroying women.
Hold me! I'm falling!
-I'm falling! -[ Siren wailing ]
BENSON: And so there's definitely a huge parallel there
to this old-fashioned idea, and not just of America,
but of the golden age of Hollywood,
the system in which Lynch is now working.
From Hollywood, California,
where stars make dreams
and dreams make stars.
The relationship between Judy Garland
and the character of Dorothy
is highly analogous to heaven and hell.
The American dream versus the American myth.
MOORHEAD: And there's references to characters
named Dorothy in "Blue Velvet"
and in "The Straight Story,"
there's a Garland Avenue in "Lost Highway."
MAN: He lives with his parents, William and Candace Dayton,
at 814 Garland Avenue.
Garland?
Did Windom Earle do this to you?
Garland?
Odd name.
Judy Garland.
BENSON: In "Twin Peaks,"
the idea of Judy comes up all the time,
especially the question of who is Judy?
Where is Judy?
Who is Judy?
JEFFRIES: You've already met Judy.
What do you mean I've met Judy??
BENSON: And Judy's never to be found.
Judy seems to represent the grand mystery.
Gotcha. Can I say hello to my friend Judy?
-Where's she? Sure. -She's a friend. Hello, Judy.
LENO: Now, you say that, now, who is Judy?
-What does she do? -She's just a friend.
LENO: Just a friend. Now, you see --
I mean, is it an open-ended friend?
Open-ended, yeah.
[ Cheers and applause]
Where is Judy now?
She is in America.
BENSON: She's almost her own doppelganger in the sense
that on screen, she's this totally wholesome person.
But in real life, Judy Garland was pigeonholed
into that girl-next-door thing.
She had problems with alcoholism, pill use.
She had an eating disorder. She died very young.
She was only 47 and almost broke.
GARLAND: I wanted,
and I tried my damnedest,
to believe in the rainbow
that I tried to get over.
And I couldn't. So what?
BENSON: So who is Judy? It's an unanswerable question.
It takes an entire lifetime of Judy Garland to answer.
[ Sombre music plays ]
[ Down-tempo music plays ]
LOWERY: I grew up with a black-and-white television.
And so the formal idea that Oz was in colour
was lost on me for many, many years.
The first time I saw it as it was intended was in 1989,
and that was revelatory.
But it also didn't diminish
my previous understanding of the movie,
which kind of proves the extent to which our imagination drives
our understanding of the stories that are being told to us.
DOROTHY: But I feel as if I've known you all the time.
But I couldn't have, could I?
LOWERY: I feel like I must have handled the 35 millimetre print
at some point when I was in high school
when I was a projectionist.
But I could be misremembering this.
It's weird that I can't remember if that was real or not.
[ Cackles ]
I like to remember things my own way.
What do you mean by that?
How I remember them,
not necessarily the way they happened.
LOWERY: Looking at it as an adult,
it feels to me like "The Wizard of Oz"
might be a Quaalude for the proletariat.
Poppies.
Poppies will put them to sleep.
LOWERY: "Everything's just fine the way it is.
Don't strive for anything more."
The fact that the movie reverts to sepia
is a very caustic and suppressive move.
When you look at it this way, it's almost as
if the pioneering spirit of America is being subdued.
That we're being told to stop dreaming,
to stop yearning, and to put down roots.
The American dream is shifting before our eyes
from one ideal to the next.
[ Dramatic music plays]
Every movie is a transportive event.
A cyclone carrying us to another realm.
ROSE: That was Bobby.
Uncle Lyle had a -- a stroke.
[Thunder crashes]
LOWERY: A movie can take us to another world
and then safely return us home.
Or it can offer us a clear
and more vivid perspective of the world around us.
Had enough, asshole?
LOWERY: It can dig in to the world at hand.
Yes, I have.
And I want to apologise to you gentlemen
for referring to you as homosexuals.
I also want to thank you fellas.
You've taught me a valuable lesson in life.
Lola!
[ Uplifting music plays]
LOWERY: Each of these is a different type of journey,
but the common ground is when we watch a movie,
an act of transportation is occurring.
Many children's films are about making peace with the fact
that one must find a way to exist in the world at hand,
that there is not a better place to go.
[ Speaking Japanese ]
LOWERY: We see this in "Peter Pan" with Never land.
One of the crucial points of that tale is discovering
that Never land and the very concept of not growing up
isn't all that it's cracked up to be.
-Oh, Mother, we're back. -Back?
WENDY: All except the Lost Boys.
They weren't quite ready.
-Lost B-- Ready? -To grow up.
That's why they went back to Never land.
-Never land? -Yes, but I am.
Am?
Ready to grow up.
LOWERY: We see it in "Where the Wild Things Are,"
which has a lot in common with both
"The Wizard of Oz" and "Peter Pan."
The idea that there may be a world in which childhood
reigns supreme and where rules don't apply.
Be still!
[ Dramatic music plays]
Why?
LOWERY: And yet, when Max gets there,
he finds that there's a reason we have those rules.
Because...
Why?
Well, because you can't eat me.
You didn't know that,
so I forgive you, but never try it again.
LOWERY: And there's an inevitable disappointment
in this, especially for a young viewer
who wants the fantasy to be maintained.
Come.
Stay.
LOWERY: I remember feeling this very profoundly
as a child with "Beauty and the Beast."
It's me.
LOWERY: When the beast became a human again,
it was innately disappointing
because now he's just a normal human.
Of course, when I really thought about what Belle's life would be
like living with this half-human half-lion
she'd fallen in love with,
all sorts of practical problems emerged.
And they got quite disturbing quite quickly.
[ Speaking French ]
LOWERY: And so in some respect,
these narratives are doing us as children a favour
and gently revealing that what we perceive
as disappointments and discomforts
are in fact necessary in order to both function in the world
and to appreciate it.
Oh, but anyway, Toto, we're home.
Home.
LOWERY: They implicitly promise us
that the journey into adulthood
will not be as bad as we think it is
and that we don't have to leave everything behind.
In "Pete's Dragon," the world that Pete is leaving behind
when he leaves the forest is not going to be lost to him forever.
[ Uplifting music plays]
[ Roars I
LOWERY: And I think that is what we have in "Peter Pan" as well.
The idea that growing up can be just as magical
as living as a child forever,
and perhaps more so because change can occur
and change can be a beautiful thing.
You know, I have the strangest feeling
that I've seen that ship before.
A long time ago when I was very young.
-George, dear. -Father.
LOWERY: Lynch's work definitely functions across that spectrum
of the ways in which a film can transport us.
His understanding of the quotidian is very rooted
in the world in which he grew up.
"The Straight Story,"
in addition to literally being about transportation,
is just as transportive
as "Lost Highway" or "Inland Empire."
But the world that takes us to has a verisimilitude
that is much more graspable, relatable.
You feel like you can dig your fingers into it.
And I think that's why the film ultimately is so gentle.
They look at the stars at the end,
and for a moment you feel that
maybe that's where you're going, too.
But in reality, you know that you're just sitting on the porch
in the country on a planet
that is indeed hurtling through space.
But still you're just on the porch,
and you know what that feels like.
Whereas in "Lost Highway," Fred Madison
disappears into a dark hallway,
and you have no idea what might be on the other side
or whether he's going to emerge in his own house at all.
You're in a seemingly familiar space,
but as you move through it, you lose all bearings on reality.
I do feel that what Lynch is doing in his movies
is indicative of something that occurs
when we watch "The Wizard of Oz" repeatedly over our lives.
"The Wizard of Oz" that I see as a child
is a burst of happiness with very little at stake.
It's a fairy tale with a happy ending.
I don't understand yet the layers
that can be extrapolated from it,
partially because I'm seeing it all in black and white,
but also because I'm a child and I take it at face value.
"The Wizard of Oz" I experienced as a teenager is different.
I'm a little bit more cynical now, as teenagers are.
Oh!
Dorothy? Who's Dorothy?
LOWERY: The idea that you return
to this black-and-white world at the end,
there's something off about it, and I don't know what it is yet,
but I can tell that it's not quite right.
And then later in life,
I began to look at it as a piece of history,
which I think with any movie that has endured,
becomes a part of the text of the film.
At a certain point, you can't separate the film
from its own history,
and you start to understand that the world
in which this film was made was not a happy one.
At first it manifests in bits of trivia,
like the exploits of the Munchkins
in the Culver City Hotel,
that they had these Dionysian parties after hours
and trashed the entire hotel.
There was a lot of them.
Oh, hundreds and thousands.
And they put them all in one hotel room --
not one room, one hotel in Culver City.
And they got smashed every night
and they'd pick them up in butterfly nets.
[ Laughter]
LOWERY: You hear these stories and you laugh
and you think it's funny,
but it also starts to colour your understanding
of this seemingly perfect Technicolor world
in which nothing is necessarily wrong.
We thank you very sweetly for doing it so neatly.
You've killed us so completely that we thank you very sweetly.
LOWERY: The thing that I really got into
was the mythology around the dead person.
A dead stagehand or a dead Munchkin who committed suicide
and is supposedly just barely visible in the finished film,
hanging in the background on the set.
I had the movie on VHS
and I spent a lot of time digging through the tape,
rewinding it, looking for this evidence
that supposedly existed of someone
who had hung themselves in the set of a movie
that was regarded as one of the happiest,
most influential films for children
of the past 40 or 50 years.
The idea that a movie could be a bubble,
that it could be representative of all
that is wholesome in America,
and yet also contain textual evidence
of the darkest depths of human misery really fascinated me.
It's like the story in "3 Men and a Baby."
I had heard that there was supposedly a ghost of a child
who had died on the sound stage visible in the finished film,
and I was determined to find it.
Where the hell is he, milking the cows or something?
LOWERY: I'd heard that this ghost was visible in a shot
where the camera panned past a window.
So I remember renting that tape and rewinding
and fast forwarding and rewinding
and fast forwarding and hitting pause and play
and pause and play, looking for any brightly lit scene
that might have a window in it.
And eventually I found what people were talking about,
and it freaked me out because it looked exactly
like what I feared it might be.
And I also found it in "The Wizard of Oz,"
and that freaked me out, too.
Here I am looking at a movie
that I've seen a million times before,
and suddenly I'm seeing this secret revelation
in these 480 lines of NTSC video that was meant to be hidden,
that we were meant to be protected from.
Now, none of this is true, of course.
It's not actually a dead stagehand
or a dead Munchkin.
It's a bird or an ostrich or something.
And the ghost in "3 Men and a Baby"
is a cardboard cutout.
But once you set aside these facetious myths
about the dark side of "The Wizard of Oz,"
you can actually start to unpack the literal dark side
to the film, which ranges from the incidents
of the Culver City Hotel to Judy Garland's own life story.
And these things colour the movie
in a way that is impossible to unsee.
It is impossible to separate the film from them
once you become aware of them.
And that is what I believe Lynch is doing with his films,
this tarnishing of the American dream
that exists in the text of "The Wizard of Oz."
I think that's something that he's obsessed with.
Here, Scarecrow. Want to play ball?
[ Cackles ]
LOWERY: It's something that he must have gone through himself.
-Here's to Ben. -Here's to Ben.
Hey, neighbour.
Here's to Ben.
Be polite.
Here's to Ben.
LOWERY: I think Lynch accepts the fact
that we are at all times surrounded by dark forces.
But he also believes that they can be subdued.
Goodness will prevail.
He said this very recently in one of his weather reports.
Great things, beautiful things are afoot.
I think this is what he's working towards,
both in his movies but also in life.
Right now, the thorns of negativity
are making their last desperate stand.
But soon they're going to wither and fall away.
They're going to rot and disappear.
So don't despair.
Great times are coming for the United States
and for the whole world family.
LOWERY: I wonder if ingesting these --
you call them totems,
but I would also just call them symbols or motifs
from "The Wizard of Oz," if he's just regurgitating them
because they've become embedded in his own cultural lexicon.
[ Sombre music plays ]
What did I tell you? Magic.
LOWERY: As a filmmaker, that's something I know I certainly do.
In "Pete's Dragon," I was constantly telling the actors,
"Look up at the sky with a look of wonder.
What are you looking at? Doesn't matter.
I'll figure it out later.
Just give me that look of wonder."
And all I'm doing there is recapitulating
the Spielberg face,
which has become embedded in my own psyche
throughout the years of me loving Spielberg movies
and understanding that a certain expression can convey
a certain feeling to the audience.
And if you use it at just the right time,
you'll achieve an emotional apex
that is almost universally understood
to mean one thing, which in this case is wonder.
So if a character in one of Lynch's movies
is wearing red shoes,
whether or not we're consciously processing it,
there's a symbolism at hand
that goes further than his own work.
It goes into our own understanding
of what those ruby slippers might have meant
when we first saw them as a child.
I'm not going to talk about Judy.
In fact, we're not going to talk about Judy at all.
We're going to keep her out of it.
-Gordon. -I know, Coop.
LOWERY: The first movie I saw that wasn't an animated film
at the movie theatre was "E.T.,"
and I'm still recycling the things I got from that film.
The first movie I saw in a cinema at all was "Pinocchio."
♪ I got no strings to hold me d-- ♪
LOWERY: The journey of "Pinocchio."
The lessons of "Pinocchio."
[GULPS]
LOWERY: The darkness of "Pinocchio."
Mama! Mama!
[ Braying ]
LOWERY: Those are things that I consistently am coming back to.
[Tense music plays]
Putting together a list of the movies
that I think had a seismic effect on the work that I do,
it's not a long list.
Those impressions run deep and are hard to escape,
and they're so hard to escape that I think the majority of us
as storytellers don't try to escape them.
We just dig in deeper.
And in so much as we're doing that,
we are making the same movie
and telling the same story repeatedly.
"Lost Highway" is a step towards "Mulholland Drive,"
which is a step towards "Inland Empire,"
which is a step towards "Twin Peaks: The Return."
[ Sombre music plays ]
He's working his way towards that in the same way
that Terrence Ma lick was working his way
towards "The Tree of Life" from day one of his career.
[ Mid-tempo music plays ]
And once you realise what they're digging towards,
you can appreciate their body of work in a new light
because you understand what matters to them.
I love the idea of digging in deeper
and hitting the boundaries within the work
that we've created for ourselves,
rather than trying to expand the horizons around us.
I like the comfort of knowing
that there's always further inward I can go.
The themes and images that compel us
are ones we'll keep revisiting,
re-exploring, reinvestigating, recontextualising, re-everything
because they're the things that compel us
to be storytellers in the first place.
We look to the past while also looking into the future,
and that is a valuable thing for the culture.
[ Mid-tempo music plays ]
The fact that "The Wizard of Oz" and David Lynch
can go hand in hand and communicate with one another,
the fact that we can have this conversation
about ruby slippers and "Twin Peaks"
is one of the most beautiful things about this medium.
LYNCH: We go way, way out.
And we get lost in the field of relativity.
And the trick is to find your way home.
You're a beautiful bunch. Here we go.
On your mark.
Get set. Go.
-Auntie Em! -Auntie Em?
I must have been dreaming.
It was horrible. We were on Saturdays.
Andy, you were there.
The log lady was there.
And the Man from Another Place was there, too.
-Saturdays. That is a bad dream. -Ohh.
Diane, Thursdays at 9:00, 8:00 Central.
There's no place like home.
LYNCH: Cut it. Off.
[ Mid-tempo music plays ]
MAN: There's no place like home.
There's no place like home.
[ Music continues ]
[ Down-tempo music plays ]