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♪♪ [haunting ambient]
♪♪ [chaotic orchestral]
[electricity buzzing, crackling]
[rhythmic thumping]
Ladies and gentlemen...
Lynch/Oz.
♪♪ [haunting ambient]
[wind howling]
♪♪ [ambient guitar]
[Amy] When you look at the grand scope of American storytelling..,
in this strange...
mixed-up, argumentative, polarized 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 gonna see the world.
Get me back!
I don't care what happens to me.
There's no place like home.
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.
["Somewhere Over the Rainbow" playing]
Fifty percent 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.., ♪
But even beyond that, what makes it special
is this is a movie that we have had that every generation of kids has watched
for eight decades.
[guards chanting]
What's that? What's that?
There's just something in the shared candy-colored 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.
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... ♪
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 ♪
[audience screaming]
♪ Beg and steal ♪
♪ Just to feel ♪
♪ Your heart... ♪
And the band magically knows the notes,
and everybody else who's also at this metal bar
magically sings along.
♪ So close to mine ♪
David Lynch must have been 4 or 5 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.
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,
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.
[woman] 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'd better close your eyes, my child, for a moment,
in order to be better in tune with the infinite.
[Amy] 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.
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.
There's this very small detail at the opening of The Wizard of OZ.
Right when the title comes up on screen, 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, "Whoo."
[chorus mimicking wind]
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 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.
[Lynch] I was painting a painting about 4 foot square,
and I was sitting back, probably taking a smoke,
looking at it.,.
And from the painting, I heard a wind.
[Amy] 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 howling]
And I love that he talks about wind as this 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 camerawork 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.
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 grove of apple trees just looks like apple trees?
I would look again. That grove of apple trees is actually alive."
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.
Two powerful women die in The Wizard of Oz,
at the hands of a young girl who is pretty okay with it.
Does Alice go into Wonderland
and just start murdering people left and right?
I'm melting! Melting!
She's dead. You've killed her.
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 gonna write a story that does not have that horror."
But he didn't really do that.
I think if there is a driving question
or a 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... I'm not...
I'm not me.
I'm not...
I'm not me.
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,
One hundred percent.
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 is grateful.
The only way to get Dorothy back to Kansas is for me to take her there myself.
Oh, will you? Could you?
Oh!
And when people are mean, she's like, "Well, you're mean,"
Shame on you!
What did you do that for?
But yet she is 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.
They can only be approached with the right attitude.
A man's attitude...
A man's attitude goes some ways to the way his life will be.
Is that something you might agree with?
Sure.
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 favors theatrical curtains.
The kind of curtains that belong to magicians and movie theaters,
The kind of curtains that you only use when you are framing a performance,
The kind of curtains he would've 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.
[Oz]...think yourselves lucky that I'm...
Uh... I am the great and powerful Wizard of Oz.
You're a very bad man.
And you see on the Wizard's face this disappointment,
because he has disappointed them,
I'm just a very bad wizard.
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 like that.
Sometimes when you see a filmmaker make an allusion to a film they love,
they're doing it for this reason of saying,
"This film was an influence on me. Go watch it, 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.
[Cooper] 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 ♪
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 humor, and romance,
to take this crazy, like, mother figure, with her red dress and nails,
and keep associating her with the Wicked Witch
is almost a way of giving that character a parallel.
Look out!
I'm going!
[whimpers]
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. - Capture, and incarcerate.
Let's hit the road.
[wind howling]
[Rodney] 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 Anytown, USA, who travels magically to another world,
in this case, his own past,
This has gotta be a dream.
Where he encounters doppelgängers 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 all right?
You guys... You guys look great.
Oh, Auntie Em, it's you.
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] In dreams, I talk to you.
In dreams, you're mine.
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 experience, huh?
I'll drink to that.
He crosses over when he sneaks into Dorothy Vallens'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, that scene with the robin,
with Jeffrey and his family gathered around the window.
[Dorothy] Jeffrey, lunch is ready.
Okay.
Looks an awful lot like Dorothy in her bed,
surrounded by her loving family,
It's a strange world, isn't it?
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 colorful 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.
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 the similarities
were necessarily directly inspired by Oz.
They could be.
Desiring an idea is like a bait on a hook.
- Yeah. - It 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.
[audience laughs]
Based on Glinda'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.
It's certainly something that's important to him.
I'm gonna play "Somewhere Over the Rainbow,"
and, um-- Try to, anyway.
[playing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"]
♪♪ [blues guitar]
A lot of people 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 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, or having multiple doppelgängers,
even the man behind the curtain,
sort of sinister power figure at the center of the narrative,
one who has two faces,
well, it 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.
It's 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.
[gunshots]
.., 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 Hellen 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,
grabbing 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, a little sad,
felt very Lynchian.
She'll be all right in a minute.
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.
Lasts a minute, a 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 very nostalgic.
An American icon of a film,
But anyway, Toto, we're home.
Home. And this is my room.
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 the watch The Wizard of Oz on a perfect day,
at the perfect time as a child,
and it's 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?
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.
[men cheering]
[speaking in German]
[men laughing]
Hey, talk in a civilized 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?
[all chuckling]
Where the rainbow ends.
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.
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.
Lolita is a girl who's forced to live in multiple worlds,
the normal one of teenagers, but also a darker adult one.
Do you wanna stay with this filthy boy?
Yes!
- Why did you leave me alone? - Shut your filthy mouth!
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"?
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 crashes]
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.
That's a question that people play with in countless movies influenced by it.
In 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.
I've never seen so many trees in my life.
As W.C. Fields would say, "I'd rather be here than Philadelphia."
In Mulholland Drive,
which might be the most Wizard of Oz-y of all of them,
Betty's 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 dueling 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, in 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 his psychiatrist,
"In the dream, I was sitting here,
and you were up there by the cash register."
And then it pans 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 wanna see if it's real?"
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 this scene
was actually the woman who lives in that house in our world,
This is your house?
Do you own this house or do you rent this house?
Yes, we own this house.
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 filmed Twin Peaks: The Return lives in,
And it's more than Cooper and Carrie are able to take.
What year is this?
[screaming]
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.
[Biff] God bless America.
[Rodney] 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.
But the strangeness crossed over into my reality,
because I remember Episode 8, 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 imagine 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, you know, the timing felt really strange.
I don't think I'm gonna watch that episode again any time soon,
I don't wanna know what's gonna happen.
There's bad juju baked to the bones of that thing.
It is happening again.
♪♪ [ambient]
[TV narrator] Like wildfire in a wheat field,
the fabulous tale of The Wizard of Oz spread from town to city
to nation to the entire world,
[John] For me, The Wizard of Oz was the ultimate,
not just American movie-- Movie, period,
that I saw as a child that made me wanna 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.
♪♪ [dramatic orchestral]
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 The Wizard of OZ started before television.
My parents took me to see it at the Rex Theater in Baltimore,
which, oddly enough,
later became the sexploitation nudist camp movie theater, 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,
or watch it whenever you wanted, or rewind it.
That's the thing I always 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,
We were talking about movies. I said, "Do you like The Wizard of Oz?"
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,
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 loved 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.
Um, first of all, I'd like to introduce my boys.
This is Chuck-O,
and this is Buster, and this is Pete.
I'm David Lynch, and this is Bob, and this is Dan.
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's like this:
And then, "I got it."
- "I got it." - Yeah.
And then start bouncing up and down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
Bounce around, and kissing.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
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 and Peter Pan,
I mean, the little girl in The Bad Seed, Patty McCormack,
These were my childhood playmates,
Give me those shoes back.
Oh, no, I got them shoes here,
where nobody but me can find them.
You better give me those shoes.
They're mine. Give them back to me.
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.
Who killed my sister?
Who killed the Witch of the East?
Was it you?
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 favorite movie.
The 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.
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 requests.
Now go.
Loyalty to the queen sometimes results in rewards.
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've hung around with a wicked witch,
They would've gotten along well.
I'm trying to think of, is there one scene
that was really like The Wizard of Oz on purpose?
Like a parody of it?
♪ You've got the magic touch ♪
if you could just help me--
[dreamy music playing]
Dorothy, the Kansas City Pot Head
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've 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, Ms, Gulch didn't mind her own business,
I want to see you and your wife right away about Dorothy.
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.
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,
Tracy, I have told you about that hair, all ratted up like a teenage Jezebel.
Oh, Mother, you're so '50s.
I mean, it was the most judgmental, conformist thing ever,
But not a one of us is going to start eating
until Laura washes her hands.
Wash your hands!
That's why rock 'n' roll exploded,
It was the first way to rebel from all that.
God bless Dwight Eisenhower.
[inmates] God bless Dwight Eisenhower.
God bless Roy Cohn.
[inmates] God bless Roy Cohn.
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 wanna go home. That's why I never left Baltimore,
The city has great style, I think. It's sort of like white trash chic.
I did stay here because, to me, my real friends were here,
and people that didn't care about show business,
and we went over the rainbow ourselves here
with my friends when we were young.
And most of those friends, I still have.
- [John] Hey, does that dog have to shit? - [people chuckle]
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 my favorite 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.
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.
Uh, habit in a daily routine.
And, uh... And then, when there's some sort of order there,
then you're free to mentally go off any place.
You've got a safe sort of foundation, and a place to spring off from.
[Lynch] 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]
[car tires screeching]
[John] 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 humor,
Wear your seatbelt!
It's the law!
[man screaming]
Don't you fucking tailgate!
- Ever! - Tell him you won't tailgate.
Ever!
My favorite thing that David said is that he loves making the movie.
He loves editing. He loves thinking it up.
But then it's released, and the heartbreak begins.
[John chuckling]
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,
[wind blowing]
[Karyn] 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,
melted butter, maple syrup, lightly heated, and a slice of ham.
Nothing beats the taste sensation when maple syrup collides with ham.
He's quite handsome,
almost a caricature of Midwestern courtesy and bluntness,
which I think we see in some of his Q&A's,
Do you want some more pie? A whole pie?
Yes, I would, Ms. Johnson.
And a piece of paper and a pencil.
I plan on writing an epic poem about this gorgeous pie.
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.
[speaks in Spanish]
[in English] There is no band.
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.
[audience laughing]
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, quote,
"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.
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 realize 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."
Ten bucks says you're Betty.
Yes, I am, Mrs. Lenoix.
The most capable, the most talented, the most hopeful and loving,
Thanks.
Diane.
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?
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.
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 is no way that girl is in my movie.
[yelling]
This is the girl.
Hey, that girl is not in my film!
It's no longer your film.
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.
Die the death.
And died I did.
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 Rebekah Del Rio lip-synching
the Spanish version of Roy Orbison's "Crying,"
It's like hearing Judy Garland's incredible recorded real voice
lip-synching 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 Rebekah 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 theater,
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.
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!
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.
♪♪ [dramatic orchestral]
I'll go home.
And I'll think of some way to get him back.
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've 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 Mulholland Drive, and always in front of curtains,
♪ And I'll see you ♪
♪ And you'll see me ♪
♪ And I'll see you.., ♪
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 Dorothy in front of curtains as a torch singer,
not a 12-year old farm girl in a gingham dress,
♪ Somewhere ♪
♪ Over the rainbow.,. ♪
But part of what I think is so juicy about this idea
that he is so influenced by the film is the metastory 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 and day by day
in front of your eyes.
I think that is as influential to Lynch as the film itself.
Good night, baby.
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.
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 fulfillment on Diane Selwyn's part.
So get out of here before...
Before what?
Before... I kill you.
Then they'd put you in jail.
There's something so inspirational to me
about watching her transformation in that audition scene
and playing the character so differently,
So get out of here before...
Reinterpreting the scene,
giving us another window into what that scene could be.
Before what?
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.
Before...
I kill you.
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!
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,
that 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.
We'll pretend to be someone else.
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.
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.
♪♪ [haunting ambient]
[narrator] 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.
♪♪ [dramatic orchestral]
I'm melting! Melting!
[screaming]
I don't care about money. I'm pulling back the curtain.
I wanna meet the Wizard.
I want your dog.
[whines]
Barney?
Give him to me.
That film touches almost every single genre we can think of.
It has adventure.
Seize them! Seize them!
Musical,
♪♪ [orchestral]
Comedy.
Drama.
Science fiction.
Even horror.
Take The Big Lebowski,
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?
.., 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.
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.
[man] Witch!
Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone
also share similarities with The Wizard of Oz.
[in Spanish] When I was a kid...
I'd stand here...
in the middle of the yard...
and I'd look up at the sky.
I dreamed of getting out of here.
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.
[in Spanish] You have spilled your own blood rather than that of an innocent.
That was the final task, and the most important.
Martin Scorsese's After Hours feels like The Wizard of Oz.
Would you give me a break? I just wanna go home.
I've gotta get over to that bar, get my keys so I can get home.
Where do you live? Can you take me...?
Can you take me home?
And Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is The Wizard of Oz in so many ways,
We open on her sepia-tone 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 when he starts in--
[Willard] Saigon.
Shit,
I'm still only in Saigon,
[narrator] And he really doesn't wanna 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 helped 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 talk to the colonel.
Well, you listen to him.
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.
And you were there.
And you.
Taking Twin Peaks Season 3, 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 made in the 1950s.
He knows he's using an old-school effect.
This is David Lynch showing us where the smoke machine is.
He is the Wizard,
Why didn't you wanna talk about Judy?
Who is Judy?
Does Judy want something from me?
[tinny voice] Why don't you ask Judy yourself?
Let me write it down for you.
[narrator] 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 Jodorowsky or Buñuel,
[yelling]
♪♪ [classical]
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 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 honors 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.
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...
get some good advice.
There are no Munchkins in the movie now, huh?
- [woman] I don't think so. - Yeah, there was a Munchkin.
Um... [chuckles]
There was a Munchkin.
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?
And they use it as the ideal of their own lives that they can never get.
That kind of money...
will get us a long way down that Yellow Brick Road.
Well, I know it ain't exactly Emerald City.
They constantly referenced 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 that rainbow.
It's just shit!
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 these virtues that Dorothy collects in The Wizard of Oz
are vices that these characters are collecting.
And 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 gonna 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.
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 Ronnie's and get a fried banana sandwich.
Okay.
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!
In Twin Peaks, James literally looks like James Dean,
and Audrey Horne looks a lot like a teenage Ava Gardner.
And Michael Cera in Twin Peaks
is dressed exactly like Marlon Brando in The Wild One.
And Dale Cooper is like a 1950s noir detective,
and a very idealized version of one.
He is flawless, almost to the point of satire.
[whistle toots]
There's this 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.
[orchestral renditions of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" playing]
So there's a very established connection
between The Wizard of Oz and the origins of noir.
Robin, I--
Why, who on earth is that beautiful girl?
David Lynch will often style characters as pinup girls,
like a Marilyn Monroe-type figure,
or a Bettie Page-type figure, or a Jayne Mansfield.
There's a power to these types of images,
and that they're almost collective fetishes,
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.
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 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 always ready to come out and break through the surface,
David Lynch isn't 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 doppelgängers,
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?
The only things in life for him that don't have an evil doppelgänger
are probably coffee and meditation.
Coffee.
- Agent Cooper. - Shelly.
I'll let you in on a secret. It's called Georgia Coffee.
It comes in a can, tastes as good and rich
- as any coffee I've ever had. - It's true.
Even cigarettes in Wild at Heart are these constant thread,
and everybody knows David Lynch loves cigarettes.
Gordon.
Whoa.
The Wizard of Oz treats polarization in the same way,
There's a black-and-white Kansas and a 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 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 empathize with him
and wonder how he used to be good.
And Coop is a force of good, and, you know,
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 never wonder if you're supposed to be rooting for Coop.
[thunder crashes]
You know, what's a MAGA hat?
A MAGA hat is basically saying,
"Let's get back to this idea, 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 colored mayor? That'll be the day.
You wait and see, Mr. Carruthers. I will be mayor.
I'll be the most powerful man in Hill Valley.
And I'm gonna clean up this town.
Good. You can start by sweeping the floor.
I think that David Lynch, who grow up in Boise, Idaho,
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.
♪ Someday, over the rainbow ♪
♪ Way up high ♪
- What is this, Connor? - Easy, old man.
[narrator] And I don't think that his realization was,
"Oh, man, I was fooled, The '50s weren't as great as I thought."
I think his realization is,
the beautiful white picket fence, and Leave it to Beaver,
and pinup-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 doppelgänger 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.
♪ But in my heart there'll always be... ♪
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 romanticized portion.
It's the portion that's supposed to be good,
Stay away from me.
Laura Palmer's dad is a 1950s ideal,
but he's obviously done awful things to her,
And 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?
.., and witnesses how she's treated for a very long time.
Don't you fucking look at me!
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.
- [siren wailing] - Hold me! I'm falling!
I'm falling! Hold me!
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.
[audience cheering]
The relationship between Judy Garland and the character of Dorothy
is highly analogous to heaven and hell,
the American dream versus the American myth.
There's references to characters named Dorothy in Blue Velvet
and in The Straight Story.
There's a Garland Avenue in Lost Highway.
He lives with his parents, William and Candace Dayton,
at 814 Garland Ave,
Garland,
did Windom Earle do this to you?
Garland?
Oh, no.
Judy Garland?
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?
[tinny voice] You've already met Judy.
What do you mean I've met Judy?
[narrator] And Judy's never to be found. Judy seems to represent the grand mystery.
- Gotcha. Can I say hello to Judy? - Where's Judy? Sure.
She's a friend. Hello, Judy.
You see? That's right. Now, who is Judy? What does she do?
She's just a friend.
Just a friend. Now, you see?
I mean, is it an open-ended friend?
Open-ended, yeah.
[audience cheering]
Where is Judy now?
She lives in America.
She's almost her own doppelgänger
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?
So who is Judy?
It's an unanswerable question.
It takes an entire lifetime of Judy Garland to answer.
♪♪ [dark ambient]
[wind blowing]
[David] I grew up with a black-and-white television,
and so the formal idea that Oz was in color
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?
[David] I feel like I must have handled the 35 millimeter 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,
I like to remember things my own way.
What do you mean by that?
How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.
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.
Everything is 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.
They were 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.
Every movie is a transportive event, a cyclone carrying us to another realm.
[woman] That was... Bobby.
Uncle Lyle had a...
A stroke.
[thunder crashes]
A movie can take us to another world and then safely return us home,
or it can offer a clearer and more vivid perspective of the world around us.
Had enough, asshole?
It can dig into the world at hand.
Yes, I have.
And I want to apologize 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.
Lula!
♪♪ [dramatic orchestral]
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.
[in Japanese] Mom!
Dad!
You shouldn't run off like that, honey.
You could get in big trouble.
We see this in Peter Pan with Neverland.
One of the crucial points of that tale is discovering that Neverland
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...? Ready?
To grow up. That's why they went back to Neverland.
Neverland?
- Yes, but I am. - Uh, "am"?
Uh, ready to grow up.
We see it in Where the Wild Things Are,
which has a lot in common with both 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!
Why?
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.
And there's an inevitable disappointment, especially for a young viewer
who wants the fantasy to be maintained.
Come.
♪♪ [dramatic orchestral]
Stay.
I remember feeling this very profoundly as a child with Beauty and the Beast.
It's me.
When the Beast became a human again,
it was innately disappointing because now he's just a normal human.
When I 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.
[in French] You stroke me
the way one strokes an animal.
But you are an animal.
And so in some respect,
these narratives are doing us, as children, a favor
in 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.
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,
♪♪ [dramatic orchestral]
[roars]
And 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.
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 are 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 in black and white,
but also because I'm a child and I take it at face value.
The Wizard of Oz I experience as a teenager is different.
I'm a bit more cynical, as teenagers are.
[Dorothy gasps]
Dorothy? Who's Dorothy?
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 it's not quite right.
Then later in life, I began to look at it as a piece of history,
which, 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 of thousands.
And they put them all in one hotel room--
- Not one room, one hotel, in Culver City. - Yeah?
And they got smashed every night, and they'd pick them up in butterfly nets.
[audience laughing]
You hear these stories, and you laugh, and you think it's funny,
but it also starts to color 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 her so completely that we thank you very sweetly.
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 on 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 Three 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?
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,
rewinding and fast-forwarding, hitting pause and play, 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 Three 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 at the Culver City Hotel
to Judy Garland's own life story,
And these things color 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 is obsessed with.
Here, Scarecrow. Wanna play ball?
[Wicked Witch cackles]
It's something that he must have gone through himself.
- Here's to Ben! - Here's to Ben.
Fuck you, neighbor.
Here's to Ben.
- Here's to Ben. - Be polite!
Here's to Ben.
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 gonna wither and fall away.
They're gonna rot and disappear.
So don't despair.
Great times are coming for the United States
and for the whole world family.
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.
Well, I tell you... magic.
As a filmmaker, that's something I know I certainly do.
In Pete's Dragon, I was constantly telling the actors,
"Look up 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
could 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 are 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 gonna keep her out of it. - Gordon.
I know, Coop.
The first movie I saw that wasn't an animated film
at the movie theater 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-- ♪
The journey of Pinocchio,
the lessons of Pinocchio...
the darkness of Pinocchio...
[Lampwick] Mama!
Mama!
[braying]
.., those are things that I consistently am coming back to.
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,
♪♪ [ambient guitar]
Lost Highway is a step towards Mulholland Drive,
which is a step towards Inland Empire,
and which is a step towards Twin Peaks: The Return.
He's working his way towards that
in the same way Terrence Malick was working his way
towards The Tree of Life from day one of his career.
And once you realize 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 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 will keep revisiting,
reexploring, reinvestigating, recontextualizing, re-everything,
because they are 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.
♪♪ [ambient guitar]
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 in 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.
[Lynch, on set] You're a beautiful bunch. Here we go.
On your mark, get set, go!
- [gasps] 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.
Diane. Thursdays at 9/8 Central.
There's no place like home.
[Lynch] Cut it.
[tail sync beeps]
♪♪ [ambient guitar]
[Cooper] There's no place like home.
There's no place like home.
♪♪ [ambient guitar]