Original subtitles

[ Dramatic music plays]

[ Electricity buzzes]

Ladies and gentlemen.

"Lynch.

Oz."

[ Down-tempo music plays ]

NICHOLSON: When you look at the grand scope

of American storytelling...

in this strange,

mixed-up, argumentative, polarised 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 going to see the world.

Get me back!

Get me back! I don't care what happens to me.

There's no place like home.

There's no place like home.

NICHOLSON: 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.

50% 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 ♪

NICHOLSON: But even beyond that, what makes it special

is this is a movie that we've had

that every generation of kids has watched for eight decades.

[ Chanting indistinctly]

There's just something in the shared

candy-coloured 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.

NICHOLSON: 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... ♪

NICHOLSON: 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 ♪

♪ Just to feel ♪

♪ Just to feel ♪

♪ Your heart ♪

NICHOLSON: And the band magically knows the notes

and everybody else who's also at this metal bar

magically sings along.

♪ So close to mine ♪

NICHOLSON: David Lynch must have been four or five 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.

[ Down-tempo music plays ]

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.

[ Down-tempo music plays ]

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.

MERRICK'S MOTHER: 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, uh -- You'd better close your eyes,

my child, for a moment, in order to be

better in tune with the infinite.

NICHOLSON: 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.

NICHOLSON: 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.

NICHOLSON: There's this very small detail

at the opening of "The Wizard of Oz."

Right when the title comes up onscreen,

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 "Woooh."

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 an 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.

PEOPLE: Woooh! Woooh!

LYNCH: I was painting a painting

about four-foot square.

And I was sitting back,

probably taking a smoke,

and looking at it.

And from the painting, I heard a wind.

NICHOLSON: 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 rushing ]

And I love that he talks about wind as the 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 camera work 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.

NICHOLSON: 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 group of apple trees

just looks like apple trees? I would look again.

That grove of apple trees is actually alive."

Ouch!

NICHOLSON: 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.

NICHOLSON: Two powerful women die in "The Wizard of Oz"

at the hands of a young girl who is pretty okay with it.

Like, does Alice go into Wonderland

and just start murdering people left and right?

I'm melting! Melting!

She's dead. You killed her.

NICHOLSON: 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 going to write a story

that does not have that horror."

But he didn't really do that.

NICHOLSON: I think if there is a driving question or 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 not.

I'm not me.

I'm not. I'm not me.

[ Gasping ]

NICHOLSON: 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.

100%.

NICHOLSON: 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's grateful.

The only way to get Dorothy back to Kansas

is for me to take her there myself.

[ Gasps ]

Oh, will you? Could you? Oh!

NICHOLSON: And when people are mean, she's like,

"Well, you're mean."

Shame on you.

[ Crying 1 What did you do that for?

NICHOLSON: But yet she's 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.

NICHOLSON: They can only be approached

with the right attitude.

A man's attitude -- A man's attitude go some ways.

The way his life will be.

Is that something you might agree with?

Sure.

NICHOLSON: 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 favours theatrical curtains,

the kind of curtains that belong to magicians and movie theatres,

you know, the kind of curtains that you only use

when you are framing a performance.

The kind of curtains he would have 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.

WIZARD: Think yourself lucky.

Oh, ah, I -- I am the great and powerful Wizard of Oz.

You're a very bad man.

NICHOLSON: And you see on the Wizard's face

this disappointment

because he has disappointed them.

I'm just a very bad wizard.

NICHOLSON: 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 -- leave it like that.

NICHOLSON: Sometimes when you see a filmmaker make an allusion

to a film that they love, they're doing it for this reason

of saying "This film was an influence on me.

You know, go watch it, go 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.

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 ♪

NICHOLSON: 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 humour and romance,

to take this crazy, like, mother figure

with her red press-on nails

and keep associating her with the Wicked Witch

is almost a way of giving that character a parallel.

Look out!

I'm going! Ohhh!

NICHOLSON: 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.

Let's hit the road.

[ Dramatic music plays]

ASCHER: 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 Any town, USA,

who travels magically to another world,

in this case, his own past.

This has got to be a dream.

ASCHER: Where he encounters doppelgangers 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 alright?

You guys -- you guys look great.

Auntie Em, it's you.

ASCHER: 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: Dreams talk to you.

ORBISON: ♪ In dreams ♪

In dreams, you're mine.

ASCHER: 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 expeflence,huh?

I'll drink to that.

ASCHER: He crosses over when he sneaks into

Dorothy Va||en'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 of that scene with the robin,

with Jeffrey and his family gathered around the window...

MRS. BEAUMONT: Jeffrey, lunch is ready.

Okay.

ASCHER: ...looks an awful lot like Dorothy in her bed,

surrounded by her loving family.

It's a strange world.

Isn't it?

ASCHER: 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 colourful 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.

ASCHER: 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 of those similarities

were necessarily directly inspired by "Oz."

They could be.

Desiring an idea is like a bait on a hook.

-MAN: Yeah. -You 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.

ASCHER: Based on G|inda'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.

Certainly something that's important to him.

I'm going to play "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."

And try to, anyway-

ASCHER: A lot 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, I mean,

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, having multiple doppelgangers,

even the man behind the curtain,

sort of a sinister power figure at the centre of the narrative,

one who has two faces --

Well, 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.

"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.

ASCH ER: 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 Helen 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,

growling 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 and a little sad,

it felt very Lynchian.

She'll be alright in a minute.

ASCHER: 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

that lasts a minute, 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 a very nostalgic American icon of a film.

But anyway, Toto, we're home.

Home. And this is my room.

ASCHER: 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 he watch "The Wizard of Oz" on a perfect day

at the perfect time as a child

and it 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?

[ Dramatic music plays]

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.

[ Speaks German ]

-Guten tag. -[ Laughter]

Hey, talk in a civilised 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? -[ Laughter]

Where the rainbow ends.

Where the rainbow ends.

ASCHER: 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.

ASCHER: 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.

ASCHER: Lolita is a girl who's forced to live

in multiple worlds,

the normal one of teenagers,

but also a darker adult one.

You want to stay with this filthy boy?

-That's what it is, isn't it? -Yes!

-Why don't you leave me alone? -Shut your filthy mouth.

ASCHER: 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?

ASCHER: 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 rumbles] -ASCHER: 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.

ASCHER: That's a question that people play with

in countless movies that have been influenced by it,

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.

Never seen so many trees in my life.

W.C. Fields would say,

"I'd rather be here than Philadelphia."

ASCHER: In "Mulholland Drive,"

which might be the most "Wizard of Oz"-y of all of them,

Betty is 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 duelling 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 and 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 a psychiatrist,

"In the dream, I was sitting here,

and you were up there by the cash register,"

and then it panned 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 want to see if it's real."

And 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 the scene

is actually the woman who lives in that house in our world.

Is this your house?

Do you own this house or do you rent this house?

Yes, we own this house.

ASCHER: 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 film

"Twin Peaks: The Return" lives in.

And it's more than Cooper and Carrie are able to take.

What year is this?

[ Dramatic music plays]

[ Screams ]

ASCHER: 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.

God bless America.

ASCHER: 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.

ASCHER: But the strangeness crossed over into my reality

because I remember episode eight, 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 imagined 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 I don't know, the timing felt really strange.

I don't think I'm going to watch that episode again anytime soon.

I don't want to know what's going to happen.

There's bad juju baked to the bones of that thing.

[ Dramatic music plays]

It is happening again.

ANNOUNCER: Like wildfire in the wheat field,

the fabulous tale of "The Wizard of Oz"

spread from town to city to nation to the entire world.

WATERS: For me, "The Wizard Of OZ"

was the ultimate not just American movie,

movie period that I saw as a child

that made me want to 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.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ]

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 it started before television.

My parents took me to see it at the Rex Theatre in Baltimore,

which, oddly enough,

later became the sexploitation nudist camp movie theatre

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

and watch it whenever you wanted or rewind it.

That's the thing I always thought 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,

and we were just talking about movies.

And I said, "Do you like 'The Wizard of 02'?"

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.

Well, 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 love 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.

First of all, I'd like to introduce my boys.

This is Chuckle and this is Buster.

And this is Pete. I'm David Lynch.

And this is Bob and this is Dan.

WATERS: 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 looks like this. And I got it.

-I got it. -Yeah.

And start bouncing up and down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bounce around and kissing.

Yeah. Okay.

WATERS: 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 in "Peter Pan,"

I mean, that little girl in "The Bad Seed," Patty McCormack.

These were my childhood playmates.

Give me those shoes back.

Oh, no, I got them shoes hid

where no bother or bee can find.

You better give me those shoes.

They're mine. Give them back to me.

WATERS: 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, what a performance.

Who killed my sister?

Who killed the Witch of the East?

Was it you?

WATERS: 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 favourite movie.

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.

WATERS: 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 request.

Now, go.

Loyalty to the Queen sometimes results in reward.

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 have hung around with a wicked witch.

They would have gotten along well.

I'm trying to think is there one scene

that was really like "The Wizard of Oz" on purpose?

Like a parody of it?

MAN: ♪ You've got the magic touch ♪

[Warbling ]

Well, if you could just tell me, if you could --

Oof!

[ Dramatic music plays]

[ Indistinct singing ]

WATERS: "Dorothy, the Kansas City Pothead"

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 have 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, Miss Gulch didn't mind her own business.

I want to see you and your wife right away about Dorothy.

WATERS: 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.

WATERS: 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.

EDNA: Tracy, I have told you about that hair.

All ratted up like a teenage Jezebel.

Oh, Mother, you're so '50s.

WATERS: I mean, it was the most judgmental,

conformist thing ever.

And not a one of us is going to start eating

until Laura washes her hands.

Wash your hands.

WATERS: That's why rock and roll exploded.

It was the first way to -- to rebel from all that.

God bless Dwight Eisenhower.

PRISONERS: God bless Dwight Eisenhower.

God bless Roy Cohn.

PRISONERS: God bless Roy Cohn.

WATERS: 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 want to go home.

That's why I never left Baltimore.

This city has great style, I think.

It's sort of like white trash chic.

I did stay here because --

because to me, my real friends were here

and people that didn't care about show business

and -- and we went over the rainbow ourselves here

with -- with my friends when we were young.

And most of those friends, I still have.

MAN: Hey, does that dog have to shit?

[ Laughter]

WATERS: 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 --

was my favourite 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.

WATERS: 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, habit and a daily routine.

And --

And then when there's some sort of order there,

then you're free to mentally go off any -- any place.

You've got a safe sort of foundation

and a place to spring off from.

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]

[Tires squeal ]

WATERS: 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 humour.

Wear!

Your seat belt!

It's the law!

[ Screaming ]

Don't you ever fucking tailgate!

-Ever! -Tell him you won't tailgate.

Evefl

WATERS: My favourite thing that David said is that --

that he loves making the movie, he loves editing,

he loves thinking it out.

But then it's released and the heartbreak begins.

[Laughs]

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.

[ Sombre music plays ]

KUSAMA: 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, melt butter, maple syrup,

lightly heated, slice of ham.

Nothing beats the taste sensation

when maple syrup collides with ham.

KUSAMA: He's quite handsome, almost a caricature

of Midwestern courtesy and bluntness,

which I think we see in some of his Q&As.

Do you want some more pie? A whole pie?

Yes, I would, Miss Johnson.

And a piece of paper and a pencil.

I plan on writing an epic poem about

this gorgeous pie.

KUSAMA: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.

No hay band a.

There is no band.

KUSAMA: 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. -[ Laughter]

KUSAMA: 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,

"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.

KUSAMA: 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 realise 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."

10 bucks says you're Betty.

Yes, I am, Mrs. Lenoir.

KUSAMA: The most capable, the most talented,

the most hopeful and loving.

Thanks.

Diane.

KUSAMA: 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?

KUSAMA: 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.

KUSAMA: "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 ain't no way that girl is in my movie.

[ Shouts indistinctly]

This is the girl.

Hey. That girl is not in my film.

It's no longer your film.

KUSAMA: 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.

Dying the death.

And died, I did.

KUSAMA: 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 Rebecca del Rio lip-syncing the Spanish version

of Roy Orbison's "Crying."

It's like hearing Judy Garland's incredible recorded real voice

lip-syncing 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 Rebecca 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 theatre.

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.

KUSAMA: 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!

KUSAMA: 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.

I'll go home.

And I'll think of some way to get him back.

KUSAMA: 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 have 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 "Mulho||and Drive," and always in front of curtains.

♪ And I'll see you ♪

♪ And you see me ♪

♪ And I'll see you ♪

KUSAMA: 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 a Dorothy in front of curtains, as a torch singer,

not a 12-year-old farm girl in a gingham dress.

WOMAN: ♪ ...in velvet were I ♪

♪ Somewhere over the rainbow ♪

KUSAMA: But part of what I think is so juicy about this idea

that he is so influenced by the film

is the meta story 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,

day by day, in front of your eyes.

KUSAMA: I think that is as influential to Lynch

-as the film itself. -Good night, baby.

KUSAMA: 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.

KUSAMA: 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 fulfilment

on Diane Selwyn's part.

So get out of here before --

B-Before what?

Before I kill you.

Then they'd put you in jail.

[Laughs]

KUSAMA: There's something so inspirational to me

about watching her transformation

in that audition scene

and playing the character so differently.

Get out of here before...

KUSAMA: Reinterpreting the scene,

giving us another window into what that scene could be.

Before what?

KUSAMA: 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.

[ Breathing heavily ]

Before I kill you.

KUSAMA: 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.

KUSAMA: 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.

But 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.

I'll pretend to be someone else.

KUSAMA: 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.

KUSAMA: 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.

[ Down-tempo music plays ]

BENSON: 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."

I'm melting! Melting!

Shrieks ]

I don't care about money. I'm pulling back the curtain.

I want to meet the wizard.

I want your dog.

[Whines]

Barney?

Give him to me.

BENSON: That film touches almost every single genre

we can think of.

It has adventure...

Seize them!

BENSON: ...musical...

[ Upbeat music plays ]

...comedy...

Oh! Oh!

BENSON: ...drama...

[ Dramatic music plays]

...science fiction...

[ Dramatic music plays]

...even horror.

-[ Flying monkeys hooting ] -Help, help, help!

BENSON: Take "The Big Leb0wski,"

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?

BENSON: ...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.

MOORHEAD: 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.

[ Mystical music plays]

Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth"

and "The Devil's Backbone"

also share a lot of similarities with "The Wizard of Oz."

[ Speaking Spanish ]

MOORHEAD: 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.

[ Speaking Spanish ]

BENSON: Martin Scorsese's "After Hours"

feels like "The Wizard of Oz."

Would you just give me a break?

I really just want to go home.

I've got to get over that bar,

get my keys so I can get home.

Where do you live?

Can you take me -- Can you take me home?

BENSON: And "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"

is "The Wizard of Oz" in so many ways.

We open on her sepia-toned 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."

-I mean, it starts in... -WILLARD: Saigon.

Shit.

I'm still only in Saigon.

BENSON: And he really doesn't want to 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 help 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 -- you don't talk to the Colonel.

Well -- Well, you listen to him.

BENSON: 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.

You were there.

And you, and you.

MOORHEAD: Taking "Twin Peaks" season three, 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 actually made in the 1950s.

He knows he's choosing an old-school effect.

This is David Lynch showing us where the smoke machine is.

He is the wizard.

Why didn't you want to talk about Judy?

Who is Judy?

Does Judy want something from me?

JEFFRIES: Why don't you ask Judy yourself?

Let me write it down for you.

MOORHEAD: 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 Jo do row sky or Bufiuel.

[ Screaming ]

[ Dramatic music plays]

MOORHEAD: 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 he's 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 hon ours 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.

MOORHEAD: 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...

...hear some good advice.

There are no Munchkins in the movie now, huh?

Yeah. There was a Munchkin.

There was a Munchkin.

MOORHEAD: 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?

MOORHEAD: And they use it as the ideal of their own lives

that they can never get.

SAILOR: That kind of money

would get us a long way down that yellow brick road.

Well, I know it ain't exactly Emerald City.

MOORHEAD: They constantly reference 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 the rainbow.

It's just shit.

MOORHEAD: 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 of these virtues that Dorothy collects

in "The Wizard of Oz" are vices

that these characters are collecting.

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 going to 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.

MOORHEAD: 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 Rally's and get a fried banana sandwich.

Mm.

Okay.

MOORHEAD: 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.

MOORHEAD: In "Twin Peaks,"

James literally looks like James Dean,

and Audrey Horne looks a lot like a teenage Ava Gardner.

[ Down-tempo music plays ]

BENSON: And Michael Cera in "Twin Peaks"

is dressed exactly like Marlon Brando in "The Wild One."

MOORHEAD: And Dale Cooper is like a 1950s noir detective

and a very idealised version of one.

He is flawless, almost to the point of satire.

[Whistle toots ]

There's the 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.

[ "Over the Rainbow" playing ]

So there's a very established connection

between "The Wizard of Oz" and the origins of noir.

Robert, I --

Why, who on earth is that beautiful girl?

BENSON: David Lynch will often style characters

as pin-up girls like a Marilyn Monroe type figure

or a Bettie Page type figure or Jayne Mansfield.

There's a power to these types of images

in that they're almost collective fetishes.

MOORHEAD: 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.

[ Rock music plays ]

BENSON: 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 really 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 just -- it's always ready to come out

and break through the surface.

David Lynch isn't just 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 doppelgangers,

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?

BENSON: I think the only things in life for him

that don't have an evil doppelganger

are probably coffee and meditation.

-Coffee. -SHELLY: Agent Cooper?

Shelly, I'm going to let you in on a little secret.

It's called Georgia Coffee -- comes in a can,

tastes as good and rich as any cup of coffee I've ever had.

It's true.

BENSON: Even cigarettes in "Wild at Heart"

are this constant threat,

and everybody knows David Lynch loves cigarettes.

Gordon.

Whoa.

BENSON: "The Wizard of Oz" treats polarisation

in the same way.

There's a black and white Kansas and the 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 that 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 empathise with him

and wonder how he used to be good.

And Coop is a force of good,

and 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 just never wonder

if you're supposed to be rooting for Coop.

[Thunder crashes]

MOORHEAD: You know, what's a MAGA hat?

A MAGA hat is basically saying,

"Let's get back to this idea of 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 coloured mayor. That'll be the day.

You wait and see, Mr. Caruthers. I will be mayor.

I'll be the most powerful man in Hill Valley.

And I'm going to clean up this town.

Good. You can start by sweeping the floor.

MOORHEAD: And I think that David Lynch,

who grew up in Boise, Idaho,

and 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.

♪ Some day over the rainbow ♪

♪ Way up high ♪

-What is this, Connor? -Now, now, easy, old man.

BENSON: And I don't think that his realisation was

"Ah, man, I was fooled.

The '50s weren't as great as I thought."

I think his realisation is "The beautiful white picket fence

and 'Leave It to Beaver'

and pin-up 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 doppelganger 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.

[ Radio playing indistinctly]

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 romanticised portion.

It's the portion that's supposed to be good.

Stay away from me.

BENSON: Laura Palmer's dad is a 1950s ideal,

but he's obviously done awful things to her.

And then 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?

BENSON: And witnesses how she's treated for a very long time.

[Groaning ]

Don't you fucking look at me!

BENSON: 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.

Hold me! I'm falling!

-I'm falling! -[ Siren wailing ]

BENSON: 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.

The relationship between Judy Garland

and the character of Dorothy

is highly analogous to heaven and hell.

The American dream versus the American myth.

MOORHEAD: And there's references to characters

named Dorothy in "Blue Velvet"

and in "The Straight Story,"

there's a Garland Avenue in "Lost Highway."

MAN: He lives with his parents, William and Candace Dayton,

at 814 Garland Avenue.

Garland?

Did Windom Earle do this to you?

Garland?

Odd name.

Judy Garland.

BENSON: 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?

JEFFRIES: You've already met Judy.

What do you mean I've met Judy??

BENSON: And Judy's never to be found.

Judy seems to represent the grand mystery.

Gotcha. Can I say hello to my friend Judy?

-Where's she? Sure. -She's a friend. Hello, Judy.

LENO: Now, you say that, now, who is Judy?

-What does she do? -She's just a friend.

LENO: Just a friend. Now, you see --

I mean, is it an open-ended friend?

Open-ended, yeah.

[ Cheers and applause]

Where is Judy now?

She is in America.

BENSON: She's almost her own doppelganger 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?

BENSON: So who is Judy? It's an unanswerable question.

It takes an entire lifetime of Judy Garland to answer.

[ Sombre music plays ]

[ Down-tempo music plays ]

LOWERY: I grew up with a black-and-white television.

And so the formal idea that Oz was in colour

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?

LOWERY: I feel like I must have handled the 35 millimetre 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.

[ Cackles ]

I like to remember things my own way.

What do you mean by that?

How I remember them,

not necessarily the way they happened.

LOWERY: 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.

LOWERY: "Everything's 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.

That we're 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.

[ Dramatic music plays]

Every movie is a transportive event.

A cyclone carrying us to another realm.

ROSE: That was Bobby.

Uncle Lyle had a -- a stroke.

[Thunder crashes]

LOWERY: A movie can take us to another world

and then safely return us home.

Or it can offer us a clear

and more vivid perspective of the world around us.

Had enough, asshole?

LOWERY: It can dig in to the world at hand.

Yes, I have.

And I want to apologise 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.

Lola!

[ Uplifting music plays]

LOWERY: 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.

[ Speaking Japanese ]

[ Speaking Japanese ]

[ Speaking Japanese ]

LOWERY: We see this in "Peter Pan" with Never land.

One of the crucial points of that tale is discovering

that Never land 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 B-- Ready? -To grow up.

That's why they went back to Never land.

-Never land? -Yes, but I am.

Am?

Ready to grow up.

LOWERY: We see it in "Where the Wild Things Are,"

which has a lot in common with both

"The 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!

[ Dramatic music plays]

Why?

LOWERY: 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.

LOWERY: And there's an inevitable disappointment

in this, especially for a young viewer

who wants the fantasy to be maintained.

Come.

Stay.

LOWERY: I remember feeling this very profoundly

as a child with "Beauty and the Beast."

It's me.

LOWERY: When the beast became a human again,

it was innately disappointing

because now he's just a normal human.

Of course, when I really 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.

[ Speaking French ]

[ Speaking French ]

LOWERY: And so in some respect,

these narratives are doing us as children a favour

and 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.

LOWERY: 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.

[ Uplifting music plays]

[ Roars I

LOWERY: And I think 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.

LOWERY: 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're 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 all in black and white,

but also because I'm a child and I take it at face value.

"The Wizard of Oz" I experienced as a teenager is different.

I'm a little bit more cynical now, as teenagers are.

Oh!

Dorothy? Who's Dorothy?

LOWERY: 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 that it's not quite right.

And then later in life,

I began to look at it as a piece of history,

which I think 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 and thousands.

And they put them all in one hotel room --

not one room, one hotel in Culver City.

And they got smashed every night

and they'd pick them up in butterfly nets.

[ Laughter]

LOWERY: You hear these stories and you laugh

and you think it's funny,

but it also starts to colour 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 us so completely that we thank you very sweetly.

LOWERY: 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 in 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 "3 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?

LOWERY: 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 and rewinding

and fast forwarding and hitting pause and play

and 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 "3 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

of the Culver City Hotel to Judy Garland's own life story.

And these things colour 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's obsessed with.

Here, Scarecrow. Want to play ball?

[ Cackles ]

LOWERY: It's something that he must have gone through himself.

-Here's to Ben. -Here's to Ben.

Hey, neighbour.

Here's to Ben.

Here's to Ben.

Be polite.

Here's to Ben.

LOWERY: 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 going to wither and fall away.

They're going to rot and disappear.

So don't despair.

Great times are coming for the United States

and for the whole world family.

LOWERY: 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.

[ Sombre music plays ]

What did I tell you? Magic.

LOWERY: As a filmmaker, that's something I know I certainly do.

In "Pete's Dragon," I was constantly telling the actors,

"Look up at the sky 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 can 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're 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 going to keep her out of it.

-Gordon. -I know, Coop.

LOWERY: The first movie I saw that wasn't an animated film

at the movie theatre 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 d-- ♪

LOWERY: The journey of "Pinocchio."

The lessons of "Pinocchio."

[GULPS]

LOWERY: The darkness of "Pinocchio."

Mama! Mama!

[ Braying ]

LOWERY: Those are things that I consistently am coming back to.

[Tense music plays]

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.

"Lost Highway" is a step towards "Mulholland Drive,"

which is a step towards "Inland Empire,"

which is a step towards "Twin Peaks: The Return."

[ Sombre music plays ]

He's working his way towards that in the same way

that Terrence Ma lick was working his way

towards "The Tree of Life" from day one of his career.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ]

And once you realise 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

that 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'll keep revisiting,

re-exploring, reinvestigating, recontextualising, re-everything

because they're 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.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ]

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 and "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.

You're a beautiful bunch. Here we go.

On your mark.

Get set. Go.

-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. -Ohh.

Diane, Thursdays at 9:00, 8:00 Central.

There's no place like home.

LYNCH: Cut it. Off.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ]

MAN: There's no place like home.

There's no place like home.

There's no place like home.

[ Music continues ]

[ Down-tempo music plays ]