Where does Lynch fit into this? For a while, Philippe fills the screen with Oz-like clips from Star Wars (1977), O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), and A Matter of Life and Death (1946) before Nicholson finally cuts to the chase and talks about Wild at Heart (1990), the Lynch film that most overtly and gratuitously references Oz - and not in a good way. And so on.īut so much for It’s a Wonderful Life. In Oz, Dorothy longs to escape the monochrome of Kansas for somewhere over the rainbow in Life George vows to shake off the dust of his crummy town and see the world.
Both were given a second life when they were rereleased in theaters and on TV as annual events celebrating the holidays. Nonetheless, as Nicholson observes, both films were “flops” when they opened (a bit harsh for Oz, not so for Life, which more or less ended Capra’s career). But if it had been it would probably have provided a more entertaining immersion into the debased, Twin Peaks-like, non-George Bailey Bedford Falls of Pottersville. Unfortunately, the film is not by the perversely Capra-esque Lynch (though, for Barthes, authors do not really exist, let alone auteurs).
The latter, Amy Nicholson of the Unspooled podcast, opens the proceedings with a fascinating if wayward insight into the parallels between Oz and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Which is what you might expect when asking for input from six filmmakers and one film critic. It wanders afield from its titular topic - the intertextuality of David Lynch’s oeuvre and the Wizard of Oz (1939) - to digressions of varying relevance and interest. But it lacks that work’s rigor and focus, not to mention that of Philippe’s own Memory: The Origins of Alien(2019).
Philippe’s chatty, split-screen- and clip-heavy Lynch/Oz (2023 at the Brattle Theatre July 7-10) partakes of the late post-structuralist’s disruptive spirit. Though the title might not allude to Roland Barthes’s S/Z, a 1973 deconstruction of the Honoré de Balzac story “ Sarrasine,” Alexandre O.
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