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♪♪ [haunting ambient]

♪♪ [chaotic orchestral]

[electricity buzzing, crackling]

[rhythmic thumping]

Ladies and gentlemen...

Lynch/Oz.

♪♪ [haunting ambient]

[wind howling]

♪♪ [ambient guitar]

[Amy] When you look at the grand scope
of American storytelling..,

in this strange...

mixed-up, argumentative,
polarized 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 gonna 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.

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.

["Somewhere Over the Rainbow" playing]

Fifty percent
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.., ♪

But even beyond that,
what makes it special

is this is a movie that we have had
that every generation of kids has watched

for eight decades.

[guards chanting]

What's that? What's that?

There's just something in the shared
candy-colored 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.

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... ♪

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 ♪

[audience screaming]

♪ Beg and steal ♪

♪ Just to feel ♪

♪ Just to feel ♪

♪ Your heart... ♪

And the band magically knows the notes,

and everybody else
who's also at this metal bar

magically sings along.

♪ So close to mine ♪

David Lynch must have been
4 or 5 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.

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,

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.

[woman] 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'd better close your eyes,
my child, for a moment,

in order to be better in tune
with the infinite.

[Amy] 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.

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.

There's this very small detail
at the opening of The Wizard of OZ.

Right when the title comes up on screen,
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, "Whoo."

[chorus mimicking wind]

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 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.

[Lynch] I was painting
a painting about 4 foot square,

and I was sitting back,
probably taking a smoke,

looking at it.,.

And from the painting, I heard a wind.

[Amy] 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 howling]

And I love that he talks about wind
as this 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 camerawork 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.

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 grove of apple trees
just looks like apple trees?

I would look again. That grove
of apple trees is actually alive."

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.

Two powerful women die
in The Wizard of Oz,

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

Does Alice go into Wonderland

and just start murdering people
left and right?

I'm melting! Melting!

She's dead. You've killed her.

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 gonna write a story
that does not have that horror."

But he didn't really do that.

I think if there is a driving question

or a 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... I'm not...

I'm not me.

I'm not...

I'm not me.

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,

One hundred percent.

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 is grateful.

The only way to get Dorothy back to Kansas
is for me to take her there myself.

Oh, will you? Could you?

Oh!

And when people are mean,
she's like, "Well, you're mean,"

Shame on you!

What did you do that for?

But yet she is 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.

They can only be approached
with the right attitude.

A man's attitude...

A man's attitude goes some ways
to the way his life will be.

Is that something you might agree with?

Sure.

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 favors theatrical curtains.

The kind of curtains that belong
to magicians and movie theaters,

The kind of curtains that you only use
when you are framing a performance,

The kind of curtains he would've 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.

[Oz]...think yourselves lucky that I'm...

Uh... I am the great and powerful
Wizard of Oz.

You're a very bad man.

And you see on the Wizard's face
this disappointment,

because he has disappointed them,

I'm just a very bad wizard.

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 like that.

Sometimes when you see a filmmaker
make an allusion to a film they love,

they're doing it
for this reason of saying,

"This film was an influence on me.
Go watch it, 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.

[Cooper] 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 ♪

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 humor, and romance,

to take this crazy, like, mother figure,
with her red dress and nails,

and keep associating her
with the Wicked Witch

is almost a way
of giving that character a parallel.

Look out!

I'm going!

[whimpers]

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.
- Capture, and incarcerate.

Let's hit the road.

[wind howling]

[Rodney] 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 Anytown, USA,
who travels magically to another world,

in this case, his own past,

This has gotta be a dream.

Where he encounters doppelgängers
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 all right?

You guys... You guys look great.

Oh, Auntie Em, it's you.

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] In dreams, I talk to you.

In dreams, you're mine.

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 experience, huh?

I'll drink to that.

He crosses over when he sneaks
into Dorothy Vallens'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,
that scene with the robin,

with Jeffrey and his family
gathered around the window.

[Dorothy] Jeffrey, lunch is ready.

Okay.

Looks an awful lot
like Dorothy in her bed,

surrounded by her loving family,

It's a strange world, isn't it?

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 colorful 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.

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 the similarities

were necessarily directly inspired by Oz.

They could be.

Desiring an idea is like a bait on a hook.

- Yeah.
- It 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.

[audience laughs]

Based on Glinda'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.

It's certainly something
that's important to him.

I'm gonna play
"Somewhere Over the Rainbow,"

and, um-- Try to, anyway.

[playing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"]

♪♪ [blues guitar]

A lot of people 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 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,
or having multiple doppelgängers,

even the man behind the curtain,

sort of sinister power figure
at the center of the narrative,

one who has two faces,

well, it 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.

It's 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.

[gunshots]

.., 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 Hellen 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,

grabbing 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,
a little sad,

felt very Lynchian.

She'll be all right in a minute.

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.

Lasts a minute, a 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 very nostalgic.

An American icon of a film,

But anyway, Toto, we're home.

Home. And this is my room.

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 the watch The Wizard of Oz
on a perfect day,

at the perfect time as a child,

and it's 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?

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.

[men cheering]

[speaking in German]

[men laughing]

Hey, talk in a civilized 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?

[all chuckling]

Where the rainbow ends.

Where the rainbow ends.

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.

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.

Lolita is a girl who's forced
to live in multiple worlds,

the normal one of teenagers,
but also a darker adult one.

Do you wanna stay with this filthy boy?

Yes!

- Why did you leave me alone?
- Shut your filthy mouth!

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"?

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 crashes]

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.

That's a question that people play with
in countless movies influenced by it.

In 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.

I've never seen so many trees in my life.

As W.C. Fields would say,
"I'd rather be here than Philadelphia."

In Mulholland Drive,

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

Betty's 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 dueling 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, in 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 his psychiatrist,

"In the dream, I was sitting here,

and you were up there
by the cash register."

And then it pans 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 wanna see if it's real?"

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 this scene

was actually the woman
who lives in that house in our world,

This is your house?

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

Yes, we own this house.

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 filmed
Twin Peaks: The Return lives in,

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

What year is this?

[screaming]

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.

[Biff] God bless America.

[Rodney] 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.

But the strangeness crossed over
into my reality,

because I remember Episode 8,
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 imagine 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, you know,
the timing felt really strange.

I don't think I'm gonna watch
that episode again any time soon,

I don't wanna know what's gonna happen.

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

It is happening again.

♪♪ [ambient]

[TV narrator] Like wildfire
in a wheat field,

the fabulous tale of The Wizard of Oz
spread from town to city

to nation to the entire world,

[John] For me, The Wizard of Oz
was the ultimate,

not just American movie-- Movie, period,

that I saw as a child that made me
wanna 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.

♪♪ [dramatic orchestral]

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 The Wizard of OZ
started before television.

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

which, oddly enough,

later became the sexploitation nudist camp
movie theater, 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,

or watch it whenever you wanted,
or rewind it.

That's the thing
I always 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,

We were talking about movies.
I said, "Do you like The Wizard of Oz?"

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,

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 loved 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.

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

This is Chuck-O,

and this is Buster, and this is Pete.

I'm David Lynch, and this is Bob,
and this is Dan.

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's like this:

And then, "I got it."

- "I got it."
- Yeah.

And then start bouncing up and down.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Bounce around, and kissing.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

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 and Peter Pan,

I mean, the little girl
in The Bad Seed, Patty McCormack,

These were my childhood playmates,

Give me those shoes back.

Oh, no, I got them shoes here,

where nobody but me can find them.

You better give me those shoes.

They're mine. Give them back to me.

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?

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 favorite movie.

The 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.

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 requests.

Now go.

Loyalty to the queen
sometimes results in rewards.

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've hung around
with a wicked witch,

They would've gotten along well.

I'm trying to think of, is there one scene

that was really like
The Wizard of Oz on purpose?

Like a parody of it?

♪ You've got the magic touch ♪

if you could just help me--

[dreamy music playing]

Dorothy, the Kansas City Pot Head

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've 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, Ms, Gulch
didn't mind her own business,

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

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.

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,

Tracy, I have told you about that hair,
all ratted up like a teenage Jezebel.

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

I mean, it was the most judgmental,
conformist thing ever,

But not a one of us
is going to start eating

until Laura washes her hands.

Wash your hands!

That's why rock 'n' roll exploded,

It was the first way
to rebel from all that.

God bless Dwight Eisenhower.

[inmates] God bless Dwight Eisenhower.

God bless Roy Cohn.

[inmates] God bless Roy Cohn.

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 wanna go home.
That's why I never left Baltimore,

The city has great style, I think.
It's sort of like white trash chic.

I did stay here because, to me,
my real friends were here,

and people that didn't care
about show business,

and we went
over the rainbow ourselves here

with my friends when we were young.

And most of those friends, I still have.

- [John] Hey, does that dog have to shit?
- [people chuckle]

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 my favorite 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.

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.

Uh, habit in a daily routine.

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

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

You've got a safe sort of foundation,
and a place to spring off from.

[Lynch] 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]

[car tires screeching]

[John] 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 humor,

Wear your seatbelt!

It's the law!

[man screaming]

Don't you fucking tailgate!

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

Ever!

My favorite thing that David said
is that he loves making the movie.

He loves editing. He loves thinking it up.

But then it's released,
and the heartbreak begins.

[John chuckling]

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,

[wind blowing]

[Karyn] 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,

melted butter, maple syrup,
lightly heated, and a slice of ham.

Nothing beats the taste sensation
when maple syrup collides with ham.

He's quite handsome,

almost a caricature
of Midwestern courtesy and bluntness,

which I think we see
in some of his Q&A's,

Do you want some more pie? A whole pie?

Yes, I would, Ms. Johnson.

And a piece of paper and a pencil.

I plan on writing an epic poem
about this gorgeous pie.

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.

[speaks in Spanish]

[in English] There is no band.

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.

[audience laughing]

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, quote,

"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.

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 realize 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."

Ten bucks says you're Betty.

Yes, I am, Mrs. Lenoix.

The most capable, the most talented,
the most hopeful and loving,

Thanks.

Diane.

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?

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.

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 is no way that girl is in my movie.

[yelling]

This is the girl.

Hey, that girl is not in my film!

It's no longer your film.

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.

Die the death.

And died I did.

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 Rebekah Del Rio lip-synching

the Spanish version
of Roy Orbison's "Crying,"

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

lip-synching 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 Rebekah 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 theater,

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.

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!

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.

♪♪ [dramatic orchestral]

I'll go home.

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

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've 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 Mulholland Drive,
and always in front of curtains,

♪ And I'll see you ♪

♪ And you'll see me ♪

♪ And I'll see you.., ♪

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 Dorothy in front of curtains
as a torch singer,

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

♪ Somewhere ♪

♪ Over the rainbow.,. ♪

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

that he is so influenced by the film
is the metastory 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 and day by day

in front of your eyes.

I think that is as influential to Lynch
as the film itself.

Good night, baby.

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.

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 fulfillment
on Diane Selwyn's part.

So get out of here before...

Before what?

Before... I kill you.

Then they'd put you in jail.

There's something so inspirational to me

about watching her transformation
in that audition scene

and playing the character so differently,

So get out of here before...

Reinterpreting the scene,

giving us another window
into what that scene could be.

Before what?

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.

Before...

I kill you.

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!

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,

that 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.

We'll pretend to be someone else.

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.

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.

♪♪ [haunting ambient]

[narrator] 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.

♪♪ [dramatic orchestral]

I'm melting! Melting!

[screaming]

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

I wanna meet the Wizard.

I want your dog.

[whines]

Barney?

Give him to me.

That film touches almost
every single genre we can think of.

It has adventure.

Seize them! Seize them!

Musical,

♪♪ [orchestral]

Comedy.

Drama.

Science fiction.

Even horror.

Take The Big Lebowski,

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?

.., 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.

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.

[man] Witch!

Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth
and The Devil's Backbone

also share similarities
with The Wizard of Oz.

[in Spanish] When I was a kid...

I'd stand here...

in the middle of the yard...

and I'd look up at the sky.

I dreamed of getting out of here.

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.

[in Spanish] You have spilled your own
blood rather than that of an innocent.

That was the final task,
and the most important.

Martin Scorsese's After Hours
feels like The Wizard of Oz.

Would you give me a break?
I just wanna go home.

I've gotta get over to that bar,
get my keys so I can get home.

Where do you live? Can you take me...?

Can you take me home?

And Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
is The Wizard of Oz in so many ways,

We open on
her sepia-tone 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 when he starts in--

[Willard] Saigon.

Shit,

I'm still only in Saigon,

[narrator] And he really
doesn't wanna 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 helped 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 talk to the colonel.

Well, you listen to him.

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.

And you were there.

And you.

And you.

Taking Twin Peaks Season 3, 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 made in the 1950s.

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

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

He is the Wizard,

Why didn't you wanna talk about Judy?

Who is Judy?

Does Judy want something from me?

[tinny voice] Why don't you
ask Judy yourself?

Let me write it down for you.

[narrator] 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 Jodorowsky or Buñuel,

[yelling]

♪♪ [classical]

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 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 honors 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.

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...

get some good advice.

There are no Munchkins
in the movie now, huh?

- [woman] I don't think so.
- Yeah, there was a Munchkin.

Um... [chuckles]

There was a Munchkin.

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?

And they use it as the ideal of
their own lives that they can never get.

That kind of money...

will get us a long way down
that Yellow Brick Road.

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

They constantly referenced 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 that rainbow.

It's just shit!

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 these virtues that
Dorothy collects in The Wizard of Oz

are vices
that these characters are collecting.

And 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 gonna 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.

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 Ronnie's
and get a fried banana sandwich.

Okay.

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!

In Twin Peaks,
James literally looks like James Dean,

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

And Michael Cera in Twin Peaks

is dressed exactly like Marlon Brando
in The Wild One.

And Dale Cooper
is like a 1950s noir detective,

and a very idealized version of one.

He is flawless,
almost to the point of satire.

[whistle toots]

There's this 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.

[orchestral renditions of
"Somewhere Over the Rainbow" playing]

So there's a very established connection

between The Wizard of Oz
and the origins of noir.

Robin, I--

Why, who on earth is that beautiful girl?

David Lynch will often
style characters as pinup girls,

like a Marilyn Monroe-type figure,

or a Bettie Page-type figure,
or a Jayne Mansfield.

There's a power to these types of images,

and that they're almost
collective fetishes,

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.

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 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 always ready to come out
and break through the surface,

David Lynch
isn't 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 doppelgängers,

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?

The only things in life for him
that don't have an evil doppelgänger

are probably coffee and meditation.

Coffee.

- Agent Cooper.
- Shelly.

I'll let you in on a secret.
It's called Georgia Coffee.

It comes in a can, tastes as good and rich

- as any coffee I've ever had.
- It's true.

Even cigarettes in Wild at Heart
are these constant thread,

and everybody knows
David Lynch loves cigarettes.

Gordon.

Whoa.

The Wizard of Oz
treats polarization in the same way,

There's a black-and-white Kansas
and a 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 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 empathize with him

and wonder how he used to be good.

And Coop is a force of good,
and, you know,

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 never wonder
if you're supposed to be rooting for Coop.

[thunder crashes]

You know, what's a MAGA hat?

A MAGA hat is basically saying,

"Let's get back to this idea,
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 colored mayor? That'll be the day.

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

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

And I'm gonna clean up this town.

Good. You can start by sweeping the floor.

I think that David Lynch,
who grow up in Boise, Idaho,

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.

♪ Someday, over the rainbow ♪

♪ Way up high ♪

- What is this, Connor?
- Easy, old man.

[narrator] And I don't think
that his realization was,

"Oh, man, I was fooled,
The '50s weren't as great as I thought."

I think his realization is,

the beautiful white picket fence,
and Leave it to Beaver,

and pinup-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 doppelgänger 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.

♪ But in my heart there'll always be... ♪

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 romanticized portion.

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

Stay away from me.

Laura Palmer's dad is a 1950s ideal,

but he's obviously done
awful things to her,

And 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?

.., and witnesses
how she's treated for a very long time.

Don't you fucking look at me!

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.

- [siren wailing]
- Hold me! I'm falling!

I'm falling! Hold me!

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.

[audience cheering]

The relationship between Judy Garland
and the character of Dorothy

is highly analogous to heaven and hell,

the American dream
versus the American myth.

There's references to characters
named Dorothy in Blue Velvet

and in The Straight Story.

There's a Garland Avenue in Lost Highway.

He lives with his parents,
William and Candace Dayton,

at 814 Garland Ave,

Garland,

did Windom Earle do this to you?

Garland?

Oh, no.

Judy Garland?

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?

[tinny voice] You've already met Judy.

What do you mean I've met Judy?

[narrator] And Judy's never to be found.
Judy seems to represent the grand mystery.

- Gotcha. Can I say hello to Judy?
- Where's Judy? Sure.

She's a friend. Hello, Judy.

You see? That's right.
Now, who is Judy? What does she do?

She's just a friend.

Just a friend. Now, you see?

I mean, is it an open-ended friend?

Open-ended, yeah.

[audience cheering]

Where is Judy now?

She lives in America.

She's almost her own doppelgänger

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?

So who is Judy?

It's an unanswerable question.

It takes an entire lifetime
of Judy Garland to answer.

♪♪ [dark ambient]

[wind blowing]

[David] I grew up
with a black-and-white television,

and so the formal idea
that Oz was in color

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?

[David] I feel like I must have handled
the 35 millimeter 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,

I like to remember things my own way.

What do you mean by that?

How I remembered them,
not necessarily the way they happened.

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.

Everything is 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.

They were 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.

Every movie is a transportive event,
a cyclone carrying us to another realm.

[woman] That was... Bobby.

Uncle Lyle had a...

A stroke.

[thunder crashes]

A movie can take us to another world
and then safely return us home,

or it can offer a clearer and more vivid
perspective of the world around us.

Had enough, asshole?

It can dig into the world at hand.

Yes, I have.

And I want to apologize 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.

Lula!

♪♪ [dramatic orchestral]

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.

[in Japanese] Mom!

Dad!

You shouldn't run off like that, honey.

You could get in big trouble.

We see this in Peter Pan with Neverland.

One of the crucial points of that tale
is discovering that Neverland

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...? Ready?

To grow up.
That's why they went back to Neverland.

Neverland?

- Yes, but I am.
- Uh, "am"?

Uh, ready to grow up.

We see it in Where the Wild Things Are,

which has a lot in common
with both 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!

Why?

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.

And there's an inevitable disappointment,
especially for a young viewer

who wants the fantasy to be maintained.

Come.

♪♪ [dramatic orchestral]

Stay.

I remember feeling this very profoundly
as a child with Beauty and the Beast.

It's me.

When the Beast became a human again,

it was innately disappointing
because now he's just a normal human.

When I 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.

[in French] You stroke me

the way one strokes an animal.

But you are an animal.

And so in some respect,

these narratives are doing us,
as children, a favor

in 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.

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,

♪♪ [dramatic orchestral]

[roars]

And 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.

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 are 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 in black and white,

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

The Wizard of Oz I experience
as a teenager is different.

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

[Dorothy gasps]

Dorothy? Who's Dorothy?

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 it's not quite right.

Then later in life, I began
to look at it as a piece of history,

which, 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 of thousands.

And they put them all in one hotel room--

- Not one room, one hotel, in Culver City.
- Yeah?

And they got smashed every night,
and they'd pick them up in butterfly nets.

[audience laughing]

You hear these stories,
and you laugh, and you think it's funny,

but it also starts to color
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 her so completely
that we thank you very sweetly.

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
on 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 Three 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?

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,

rewinding and fast-forwarding,
hitting pause and play, 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 Three 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
at the Culver City Hotel

to Judy Garland's own life story,

And these things color 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 is obsessed with.

Here, Scarecrow. Wanna play ball?

[Wicked Witch cackles]

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

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

Fuck you, neighbor.

Here's to Ben.

- Here's to Ben.
- Be polite!

Here's to Ben.

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 gonna wither and fall away.

They're gonna rot and disappear.

So don't despair.

Great times are coming
for the United States

and for the whole world family.

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.

Well, I tell you... magic.

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

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

"Look up 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

could 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 are 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 gonna keep her out of it.
- Gordon.

I know, Coop.

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

at the movie theater 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-- ♪

The journey of Pinocchio,

the lessons of Pinocchio...

the darkness of Pinocchio...

[Lampwick] Mama!

Mama!

[braying]

.., those are things that
I consistently am coming back to.

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,

♪♪ [ambient guitar]

Lost Highway is a step towards
Mulholland Drive,

which is a step towards Inland Empire,

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

He's working his way towards that

in the same way Terrence Malick
was working his way

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

And once you realize
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
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 will keep revisiting,

reexploring, reinvestigating,
recontextualizing, re-everything,

because they are 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.

♪♪ [ambient guitar]

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 in 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.

[Lynch, on set]
You're a beautiful bunch. Here we go.

On your mark, get set, go!

- [gasps] 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.

Diane. Thursdays at 9/8 Central.

There's no place like home.

[Lynch] Cut it.

[tail sync beeps]

♪♪ [ambient guitar]

[Cooper] There's no place like home.

There's no place like home.

There's no place like home.

♪♪ [ambient guitar]