‘Lynch/Oz’ Review: The Yellow Brick Road to ‘Blue Velvet’

The novelist J.G. Ballard as soon as noticed that David Lynch’s 1986 freakout “Blue Velvet” is “‘The Wizard of Oz’ reshot with a script by Kafka and décor by Francis Bacon.” Lynch-lovers have lengthy identified that the filmmaker has a factor for “Oz” and its various realities: In “Blue Velvet,” a tragic girl named Dorothy wears crimson sneakers; in Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” (1990), a Good Witch floats down from the sky in a bubble-gum pink orb à la Oz’s Glinda. “If you’re truly wild at heart,” the Good Witch declares to the movie’s ultraviolent hero, “you’ll fight for your dreams” — recommendation that feels like an announcement of Lynchian creative perception.

In his irritating documentary “Lynch/Oz,” the writer-director Alexandre O. Philippe explores with scattershot outcomes how “The Wizard of Oz” figures into Lynch’s oeuvre. Divided into six chapters narrated and “hosted” (because the credit put it) by some half-dozen particular person contributors, the film is successfully an auteurist research in a boosterish key. (The movie critic Amy Nicholson, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, is likely one of the hosts.) Outside of some initially shot materials of an ornate theater, the visuals consist nearly solely of archival footage, primarily from Lynch’s filmography in addition to from interviews, advertisements, and many others. — and what quickly begins to really feel like each single film made because the daybreak of movement footage.

Each of the chapters in “Lynch/Oz” successfully capabilities as a mini-essay on the documentary’s topic, with the hosts discoursing on narrative prototypes, the unconscious, visible methods, Lynch’s work and infrequently their very own. The filmmaker Rodney Ascher opens Chapter 2, “Membranes,” for example, considerably confusingly by drawing traces between “Oz” and the Robert Zemeckis movie “Back to the Future” (1985) because the cut up display screen fills with snippets from each motion pictures. Ascher says he doesn’t know if “Oz” truly impressed “Back to the Future.” Even so, “The Wizard of Oz” is “a really sturdy template,” he continues, including that it’s “a provocative lens to look at, you know, a lot of different stories through.”

In “Lynch/Oz,” that lens will get smudged awfully quick. One drawback is that the documentary restlessly circles again to a handful of movies fairly than, say, going deep on a single title. Ascher discusses “Mulholland Drive” (2001), and the director Karyn Kusama does the identical in Chapter 4 (“Multitudes”). Ascher additionally talks about “Blue Velvet,” a touchstone that the filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead return to in Chapter 5 (“Judy”). Even when a bunch doesn’t particularly point out a Lynch film, Philippe typically inserts a clip from one as if for example some extent, as when he contains eating scenes from totally different Lynch works to accompany a narrative Kusama tells about watching him eat syrupy pancakes when she waited tables.

It’s amusing to listen to John Waters discuss Lynch (in Chapter 3, “Kindred”), a up to date he clearly admires. (Waters’s part feels like excerpts from a taped interview, whereas different chapters sound scripted.) And I might have fortunately listened loads longer to Kusama, who sums up the Lynch-Oz nexus in a single sentence: “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?” Yet because the documentary repetitiously circles its topic and piles on larger numbers of clips — greater than 50 motion pictures are dropped into the 20-minute last chapter (“Dig”), hosted by the director David Lowery — no matter factors Philippe is attempting to make have been hopelessly misplaced.

Lynch/Oz
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters.