Lynch/Oz

Just like nearly all great masters of cinema, David Lynch spent his entire life making the same film over and over again. But what if that movie was, in fact, a slightly mad remake of The Wizard of Oz? This seemingly far-fetched theory was put forward once by Lynch himself, who admitted during a Q&A that not a daywent bywithout him thinking about Victor Fleming’s classic. Alexandre O. Philippe assembled a team of like-minded enthusiasts set out on a journey to investigate Lynch’s oeuvre in search of less or more direct references to the iconic film. The result is a brilliant six-chapter essay in which meticulous analyses of individual scenes and reflections on the transformations of American morals accompany vivid anecdotes from the life of the filmmaking milieu. Karyn Kusama, John Waters and David Lowery tell us for instance how to spot the optimism in Mulholland Drive, whom and how The Wizard of Oz encouraged to experiment with LSD, what role rituals played in David Lynch’s life, and what that has to do with regular overdosing on maple syrup.