'Lynch / Oz' Review: Alexandre O. Philippe Curates A Deep Dive Into David Lynch's 'Wizard Of Oz' Obsession [Tribeca]

“The Wizard of Oz” is the all-movie; in my film school days, professors would use King Vidor’s canon cornerstone as a teachable exemplar for just about everything, from the usage of color to the dream-logic of cinema to the mechanisms of Golden Age Hollywood manufacturing. The new documentary “Lynch / Oz” applies this lens as a way of seeing the works of David Lynch with greater clarity and understanding, and in doing so, draws on the seemingly infinite number of angles from which the foundational fantasy can be analyzed. More than the simple unpacking of visual references in the number-one superfan’s oeuvre, this compendium of video essays attempts to get under the skin of a cinema that does the same to its viewers, illustrating in digestible terms how every aspect of Dorothy’s odyssey out of Kansas has bled into the fabric of Lynch’s improbably disturbing tributes. A mite repetitive at nearly two hours, it’s still an edifying intermediate-level study compressing academic insight into personal reflection, and vice versa.

READ MORE: Tribeca 2022 Festival Preview: 24 Films & TV Series To Watch

Avowed cinephile-cineaste Alexandre O. Philippe is credited as writer and director, though the nature of his contributions (aside from an awkward opening prelude shot at Colorado’s suitably atmospheric Central City Opera House, in which a “Lounge Wizard” played by area oddball Sid Pink announces the title) don’t extend far beyond the curatorial. While this deep-tissue dissection follows up and expands upon the Hitchcock breakdowns of his 2017 doc “78/52,” Philippe cedes authorship to the segment creators supplying their own commentary. Arranged as chapters with one-word titles, each package of voiceover narration and eclectically cherrypicked archival clips mixed with the occasional home-movie artifact follows the same format, and reach some of the same conclusions in their broad strokes. In their more granular observations, however, each one contains at least a few pearls of inspired wisdom.

The most academic in tone and rigor comes first, from critic Amy Nicholson, whose wide-spanning walkthrough lays a bedrock for a lot of the Big Ideas to be developed in diverging directions. Just as a slumbering Dorothy Gale adventures through an Oz populated by avatars for her acquaintances in waking life, so too do Lynch’s heroines stumble through oneiric worlds of doubles and echoes; the gleaming Technicolor artifice of the Emerald City’s utopian promise would be recreated by Lynch’s oversaturated Americana just so he could puncture it, revealing the rot underneath. The like-minded contributions from Rodney Ascher and Karyn Kusama (one-time coffee-pourer for Lynch himself back when he frequented the diner she worked at prior to her big break) tread some of the same ground, albeit with sharper probing. Ascher lays out an airtight shot-by-shot analysis of the Winkie’s set-piece — its very name a nod to Oz — from “Mulholland Dr.” And how could we have missed that the lane markers speeding by in the credits to “Lost Highway” constitute a Yellow Brick Road of sorts?

The duo of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead train their focus on Judy Garland, framing Lynch’s entire filmography as a futile campaign to save the tragic star now long past the point of salvation, with “Twin Peaks: the Return” as the apotheosis in this search for a mythic phantom ‘Judy.’ But the most entertaining passages come from a more candid and intimate place, in particular John Waters’ typically spellbinding monologue. With his inimitable brand of candor and arch levity, he recalls the revelatory boyhood viewings that led him to direct his early short “Dorothy, the Kansas City Pot Head,” and his cherished gab seshes with a young Lynch over burgers at Big Boy. Where he goes borderline dishy, David Lowery goes rhapsodical in his inward turns, taking Lynch’s lifelong preoccupation as a method of charting time, growth, and in some cases, the refusal to allow yourself to be changed.

Even if all involved could’ve stood to bring their omnivorous curiosity to the permissive form of the experimental documentary, both the Campbellian “Oz” narrative and Lynch’s corpus are rich enough to sustain this much chatter. You’d be hard-pressed to find a topic more endlessly discussable than this one, in part due to the fact that — as Nicholson astutely notes — the perennial TV staple may be the last piece of the monoculture uniting every living person. It’s a deep-seated piece of the collective psyche, the flying monkeys lodged in our formative juvenile nightmares. Philippe’s curriculum lands some of its sagest moments when its roster of experts acknowledge the primal unknowable going against the spirit of exegesis that motivates the at-times schematic enterprise. There’s a howling enigma at the heart of both subjects, an alien and disquieting core that the film’s unseen talking heads comprehend all too well, but can’t hope to access themselves.  [B]

Follow along with all our coverage of the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival.