In Dreams
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5.
No Place Like Home
But maybe there’s something about “The Wizard of Oz” that’s in every film — it’s that kind of a story.
-David Lynch
Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz is one of the most deeply formative film influences on David Lynch; elements of it pervade every film that he has worked on.
To the degree that it exists, any unintuitiveness in the previous sentence arrives mostly from what might be called differences in tone. Oz is one of the most wholesome films ever put to celluloid. David Lynch, in contrast, has gifted such memorable phrases to popular consciousness as “you’ve got me hotter than Georgia asphalt” and “he put his disease inside of me.”
But pieces of Oz do appear throughout Lynch’s work, in unexpected places.
They surface most overtly in Wild at Heart, where direct references abound:
Ebert notes that The Wizard of Oz is a film that looms disproportionately large in the popular consciousness, and offers three possible reasons why this might be the case:
“The Wizard of Oz” fills such a large space in our imagination. It somehow seems real and important in a way most movies don’t. Is that because we see it first when we’re young? Or simply because it is a wonderful movie? Or because it sounds some buried universal note, some archetype or deeply felt myth?
He lights on the the third possibility as being the most probable:
For kids of a certain age, home is everything, the center of the world. But over the rainbow, dimly guessed at, is the wide earth, fascinating and terrifying. There is a deep fundamental fear that events might conspire to transport the child from the safety of home and strand him far away in a strange land. And what would he hope to find there? Why, new friends, to advise and protect him. And Toto, of course, because children have such a strong symbiotic relationship with their pets that they assume they would get lost together.
I mostly agree with this, but it’s a bit rosy. There are other elements of the film that appeal to universal emotions as well, particularly among children.
Like Wild at Heart (and The Straight Story), The Wizard of Oz is also a ‘road movie’ of sorts, one that follows the adventures of Dorothy as she travels down the yellow brick road to the fantastic land of Oz.
But, like many other road movies (particularly since the 1960s), it’s worth noting that Dorothy is also an outsider from society; her travels are an escape from authority as much as they are an adventure. When her “symbiotic” companion, Toto, is sentenced to be euthanized, largely due to the malice and indifference of its adult world, Dorothy finds herself so unable to cope with Kansas life that she runs away from home.
You could argue that the DNA for films like Easy Rider, Cool Hand Luke, or Five Easy Pieces is already right there, in that premise.
Hostility from the adult world and the subsequent desire to escape into alternative universes is also a mainstay of literature for children or young adults. Think of Where the Wild Things Are, Charlotte’s Web, the works of Roald Dahl, much of J.D. Salinger’s fiction, the Narnia books, Disney’s Frozen, Peter Pan, and so on.
That The Wizard of Oz exerts a subtle but inescapable influence on Mulholland Dr. is already a topic of some discussion. But what I think is less-discussed is just how deeply this connection runs.
The Wizard of Oz was, famously, one of the first movies to use Technicolor, and its daring color palette is a big part of its impact. Color is not just an element of the film’s design. Because it is the primary device that distinguishes the drab adult world of Kansas from the fantastic world of Oz, its use can be said to rise to the level of theme.
The dominant colors of Oz are unmistakable: ruby red, emerald green, the pink of the Good Witch Glenda’s costume, the blue of Dorothy’s dress, the gold of the yellow brick road, the silver of the tin man, wicked witch’s black.
As noted the above link, there are visual similarities between the two films. Less observed is the fact that the exact same colors used in Oz also provide the dominant scheme for Mulholland Dr.:
Mulholland Dr. has some exceptionally subtle callbacks to Oz as well:
As has also been observed, the two films share a number of narrative devices. Both films make use of the notion that their internal stories are just a dream; Persona and Vertigo, as discussed, allow for the possibility that portions of their plotlines are dreams, or otherwise altered states, but The Wizard of Oz is the film that is most associated with this trope — perhaps in all of cinema — and also among the most direct in its use.
Mulholland Dr. and Oz also treat the relationship between dreaming and waking life in similar fashion: in both films, characters from a drab and unhappy ‘reality’ are repopulated into the main character’s fantasy in order to recontextualize them in suggestive ways.
This pattern also escapes from the level of story in Lynch’s film, since, as this essay has explored, he also recontextualizes other films into Mulholland Dr. in exactly the same way that the acting population of Kansas reappears in different forms over the rainbow.
Raising this last idea puts me on some dangerous footing for a number of reasons.
One, it may suggest that I am on my way towards a reading that Mulholland Dr. is in some way a complete and literal retelling of Oz rather than a work that borrows liberally and imaginatively from it. I’m not, and I don’t believe that, for instance, Louise Bonner (or any of the other characters dressed in black) is actually supposed to be thought of as a secret witch, so much as a character that can lean gently on that reference as suits Lynch’s needs.
Second, the idea that Lynch is unique in placing allusions to other films in his own would obviously be an absurd one. Most films, including The Wizard of Oz, contain references to other films, and Oz itself may be one of the most-referenced films in all of cinematic history.
What I would argue, instead, is that the way in which The Wizard of Oz is referenced by Lynch is, in fact, both unique and essential to his method of filmmaking.
One of the things that The Wizard of Oz is most famous for is its juxtaposition of drab Kansas “reality” with a world of pure fantasy, as represented by the land of Oz. Its basic narrative, as discussed, involves Dorothy’s discontent with the former, leading her to seek out the latter.
The crux of this yearning provides the primary lyrical thrust for the movie’s most famous musical number:
There’s a land that I heard of once in a lullaby/
Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue/
And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.”
The division between fantasy and reality is subsequently represented cleanly and straightforwardly in the film. As McGowen (who identifies Oz as the core model for many of Lynch’s films) observes, Dorothy’s experience in Oz satisfies all of the needs that are unfulfilled in her Kansas life: over the rainbow, she enjoys agency, the love of others, a sense of heroism, and attention.
The idea of fulfilling desires is also something that occurs in miniature within this fantasy. Just as Dorothy’s various wants are fulfilled by her larger dream of Oz, so too are her companions’ more concrete needs (for courage, for brains, for heart) sated by their visit to the Wizard within that dream.
The Wizard of Oz ends with Dorothy and her friends receiving gifts from the Wizard, before she taps her heels together and departs for the comforts of home. She wakes up to discover that all that she had experienced was only a dream.
As discussed, the relationship between “normalcy” and “fantasy,” or between desire and (attempted) fulfillment, are key elements of Lynch’s films as well. McGowen identifies these as core poles that anchor each of his films, and his book is largely a reading of each of Lynch’s works in these terms.
One way to illustrate this point is to imagine a Lynchian take on the plot to The Wizard of Oz (stay with me here).
For starters, he probably wouldn’t present the worlds of Kansas and Oz as neatly and distinctly as does Fleming’s film; he would complicate matters by presenting each of these domains as different parts of the same world. And he might complicate Dorothy’s desire for escape both by making her wants less obvious and less sympathetic than previously presented, and by making the world of her fantasy offer up a less straightforwardly sunny resolution. He may also play with other elements of the film, for instance by reversing the gender of its protagonist.
That is, in broad stroke, more or less what he achieves in Blue Velvet.
One way to read Velvet, if you’ll pardon the formulation, is as something like “the Hardy Boys and the case of the psychosexual fugue.” In the film, Kansas is the sleepy town of Lumberton. Oz, however, is not a separate entity, but is the hidden, grotesque underbelly of the same locale.
And while the anxiety that informs The Wizard of Oz is largely about Dorothy’s distance from the adult world, the anxiety that motivates Blue Velvet is largely about Jeffrey’s sudden integration into it after the hospitalization of his father compels him to assume patriarchal responsibilities. This second kind of anxiety is a powerful narrative engine, and the coming-of-age genre that it animates has been a mainstay of world literatures since there has been a literature at all.
What Lynch accomplishes in Blue Velvet, however, is to take the want for integration into adult life, and, as previously discussed, to stretch this desire out until it becomes horrific. He does this in a brilliant way: by exposing dark, Freudian subtexts beneath gilded Lumberton norms.
What is amazing, though, is that this is already largely achieved by the film’s two-minute mark.
Note this scene’s famously color-saturated vision of middle-American normalcy, with cherry-red firetrucks, white picket fences, and prototypical familial constellation featuring dad out front doing yard work while mom sits indoors watching television. But the scene is so in-your-face about its off-kilter rendering of this normal slice of Americana that to observe dark psychological subtext in the image that Mrs. Beaumont sees on screen, for instance, or in the buildup of water tension that finally explodes out of the decidedly phallic garden hose that Tom Beaumont is unable to control after his stroke, is to state what is already made extremely obvious by the film. Blue Velvet doesn’t just invite a Freudian reading, it all but expects its audience to bring Freud readers along with them to the theater.
One of the many innovative things that Lynch accomplishes in Blue Velvet is to turn the Oz/Kansas split inside out. As Bill Wyman observes in an essay on Blue Velvet that has many great insights, it is the world of Lumberton by daytime that most possesses an unreal, ultra-cheesy quality to it, while the nightmare world of Frank Booth and his gang is made to feel “more real than normal life.” All of Blue Velvet feels like a bad dream (in the best possible way), but it is also not a film where it is easy to tell whether Kansas or Oz is its main reality.
The word “uncanny” gets thrown around a lot to describe Lynch, although I think that what is generally meant by the term in the context of his films is close to Wallace’s definition of “Lynchian”: worlds of fantasy or nightmare, and their containment within “normal” life. Jeffrey’s journey into the world of the Deep River Apartments, despite the film’s emphases on his frequent entrances and exits, isn’t so much about literal travel to a distant location as much as it is a plunge into the depths of his own psyche.
The violent exchange between Dorothy Vallens and Frank Booth is oftentimes read in these terms, as a variation of the primal scene (since Jeffrey is observing their encounter from the closet) and also as a commentary on voyeurism (since Jeffrey is observing their encounter from the closet, and since the audience to the film is also observing him). This last point, by the by, is one of many similarities between Blue Velvet and Hitchcock’s Rear Window.
As a brief aside, I can’t be alone in thinking that Dorothy’s apartment is incredibly womb-like.
Such a setting might provide additional undertones for the already flagrantly Freudian encounter between Dorothy and Frank, i.e. with Frank commanding that “baby wants to fuck,” and so on.
The key to understanding Blue Velvet, I submit, is to recognize that the episodes at the Deep River apartments, however bizarre, aren’t intended to be understood as external to Lumberton, or as perversions of its wholesome character. Rather, they are part of its essential fabric.
To revive a previous quote from Wallace:
the really disturbing stuff in Blue Velvet isn’t about Frank Booth or anything Jeffrey discovers about Lumberton, but about the fact that a part of Jeffrey gets off on voyeurism and primal violence and degeneracy, and since Lynch carefully sets up his film both so that we feel a/f/w Jeffrey and so that we find some parts of the sadism and degeneracy he witnesses compelling and somehow erotic, it’s little wonder that we (I?) find Blue Velvet “sick”-nothing sickens me like seeing onscreen some of the very parts of myself I’ve gone to the good old movies to try to forget about.
To extend this point, the most genuinely disturbing thing in Blue Velvet isn’t any of the gonzo or outré things that happen on the gang’s joyride. It’s when Frank, during that same sequence, excitedly tells Jeffrey that he (Jeffrey) is like him (Frank). And what is maximally disturbing is the degree to which this statement is clearly true. Jeffrey is not overtly psychopathic in the way that Frank is. But part of Jeffrey’s journey has been to discover how much instinct he and Frank share.
What Frank’s line also does, in its moment, is to collapse any pretense of dissimilarity between the two worlds of the film. To become an adult in the world of Blue Velvet is to enter into the world of Lumberton’s social norms — and to become closer to Frank Booth and his demonic version of paternal authority than one might otherwise be comfortable with. In this context, the answer to Jeffrey’s naive question about why there are people like Frank in the world is a deeply unsettling one.
When the camera begins its zoom into the underbelly of the Beaumont’s front lawn in the film’s opening scene, it is not changing contexts. It is extending them. The nightmare occurring deep within the grassy lawn is also present just beneath the glossy veneer of small town life depicted by the film. Oz, in Blue Velvet, is a permanent nightmare of primal desire that lurks just beyond a starched, conservative Kansas surface.
Along similar lines, the most genuinely disturbing moment in Fire Walk With Me isn’t any of the scenes depicting murder or overt sexual debauchery or surreal world-shifting.
It is the domestic exchange at the dinner table where Leland Palmer insists that his daughter needs to wash her hands.
Note how much Pinteresque menace Lynch wrings out of otherwise anodyne father-daughter topics of discussion such as Laura’s friends, school, how hungry she is for dinner, and so on. In context, Leland’s conventional insistence that Laura clean up before sitting down (which, uncomfortably, he has also just commanded her to do) has an unbelievably disturbing subtext that quickly crowds out the family’s remaining pretense to normal dinnertime conversation. As in Blue Velvet, worlds of darkness and perversity are evergreen in Twin Peaks just beneath the accustomed social order, and familial authority is also depicted as having more in common with Frank Booth than with Ward Cleaver.
Later films by Lynch have different approaches to Oz, though all wear its influence. Lost Highway, which works as a kind of fraternal twin to Mulholland Dr. in several ways, is a film that makes use of a more distinct division between worlds of reality and fantasy than in Blue Velvet. Correspondingly, the scenes that follow Fred Madison through the moment of his prison transformation are (not black-and-white, but) intentionally desaturated to reflect the listlessness of his marriage to Renée.
After Fred’s improbable transformation into Pete Dayton, Lost Highway switches focus to young Pete’s encounters with gangsters and pornographers as well as his affair with mob moll Alice Wakefield. In this section, the film gains vivid color:
As Zizek puts it, the film presents
the opposition of two horrors: the phantasmatic horror of the nightmarish noir universe of perverse sex, betrayal, and murder, and the (perhaps much more unsettling) despair of our drab, alienated daily life of impotence and distrust.
Following The Wizard of Oz, which presents cleaner dividing lines between Dorothy’s alienated, impotent Kansas life and the fantastic world over the rainbow, Lost Highway is split between two worlds as well. One possible reading of the film is that, if not exactly part of a dream, all of the Pete Dayton events nonetheless take place in Fred Madison’s unstable mind (as in Persona and Vertigo, such instability is never made clear by the film). If that is the case, it is possible to read Lost Highway’s focus on pornography and violence as forms of psychogenic reaction born from Fred’s sexual anxiety. Just as Dorothy’s dreams in Kansas are of agency and of relevance, Fred might dream (or hallucinate) instead of forms of masculine power. And just as Blue Velvet takes the underlying fantasy powering the coming-of-age story and explode it, so too does Lost Highway (as in Wild at Heart) take the kind of male-oriented fantasies that typically animate noirs and draw these out beyond comfortable limits.
In the case of Mulholland Dr., it is possible to read the movie as an exploration of those fantasies that undergird conventions found in detective fiction, romance, and the ‘goes-to-Hollywood’ genre (i.e. “All About Eve,” “Sunset Blvd.,” etc.). Following form, Lynch uses his film to draw out the ambitions and desires that power these kinds of stories, and to bend these away from the rational or straightforward and towards the pathological and uncertain instead.
Lynch is generally interested in the fantasies and fears of his characters, even if these are oftentimes presented, and interrogated, in ways that evade easy understanding, because ultimately he is interested in what those fantasies say to, and about, an audience.
Much of Eraserhead is open to interpretation, although it is no big stretch to find anxieties about marital relations and fatherhood informing Henry’s story. As noted, Blue Velvet takes a decidedly (extreme) Freudian approach to the coming-of-age story, but it does so partly in the service of exploring Jeffrey’s strange predilections and fixations. Both John Merrick and Frederic Treeves in The Elephant Man want nothing more than the warm recognition of the upper echelons of Victorian society, and Sailor and Lula in Wild at Heart both want to keep desire itself alive all the way to the end of their yellow brick road in California.
One of the things that Lynch understands better than most filmmakers is that it is not just the case that movies are like dreams; it is also the case that dreams are like movies. Towards this end, he appropriates a wide variety of genres to construct the fantasies of his characters. Think here of the ways that Fred Madison’s “psychogenic fugue” borrows heavily from film noir and video-grade porn, or that Sailor’s vision at the end of Wild at Heart presents Glinda the Good Witch by way of Elvis films (“E,” in the film’s parlance). And there are a wide variety of filmic references that populate Diane’s fever dream in Mulholland Dr., as I hope this essay has demonstrated.
Lynch doesn’t just investigate the fantasies of his characters, however — oftentimes he will tie these back to the implicit desires of his audience. This, I think, is why detectives and voyeurs show up so often in his fictions. Like Jeffrey and Sandy, we also want to know what is going on in the Deep River apartments, and we also observe the action there from a distance, with a mixture of dread and prurient interest. And, like Treeves, we too are caught between our empathy for Merrick and our own unavoidable participation in the exploitative spectacle that he represents.
It is certainly much more gentle than many of the examples raised thus far, but there is also a lightly metatheatrical element to The Wizard of Oz as well. What Dorothy and company discover at the end of their journey, in fact, isn’t so different from what Betty and Rita discover at Club Silencio. The great and powerful Oz, as it turns out, may put on an impressive show, but in the end he is not all that great, or powerful, and all of his effects are merely illusions (telegraphed by the smaller-scale chicanery of Professor Marvel, also played by Frank Morgan, in the film’s Kansas portion).
So it goes with the movies: we are taken in by special effects, by the deceptions of characterization, spectacle, and continuity that film provides. In the end, though, all of the elements of film are fictions, however convincingly they might insist upon their own authority.
Vertigo, Persona, The Wizard of Oz, and Mulholland Dr. are all, in their ways, stories about disillusionment, of characters coming to terms with deceits or dashed promises.
But, as previously noted, all are also partly about the power of illusion.
This is precisely the terrain that the closing moments of Oz explore.
In Jesse Kalin’s discussion of another Bergman film, Fanny and Alexander, he calls attention to several bits of improbability, most notably the opening sequence where Isak Jacobi kidnaps the Ekdahl children from the home of the authoritarian bishop, Edvard Vergérus. Kalin notes that large parts of this sequence are flatly illogical and in obvious contradiction with the “basic realism” that is otherwise suggested by the film. What he concludes, however, is that the film’s daring breach of the illusion of realism works for the film. “What matters for the story,” he suggests, “is not how [the children are rescued], but that it is done.”
I think that this dovetails nicely with the Club Silencio scene: despite the fact that we know an illusion to be broken, it succeeds anyway. What matters most in film may not be strict logical accuracy, but its ability to work directly, emotionally upon its audience.
In this context, it can be easy to overlook the fact that the ending to The Wizard of Oz is deeply improbable: the sentimental idea that there is “no place like home” is in pretty serious conflict with the opening portion of the film, where that place has been depicted as being so unpleasant and unforgiving that Dorothy was compelled to run away from it.
But what matters in the final moments of the film isn’t any of this — it is the inarguable emotional truth of Dorothy’s statement.
As noted before, another thing that all four movies have in common is the motif of drapery.
Of course, the idea of curtains working as an intermediary between two worlds, reality and fantasy, is also of particular significance to filmgoers.
Every film is a small miracle, but I submit that Mulholland Dr. is a greater miracle than most. Given its troubled production history, it is startling that the finished product stands up at all, let alone as one of the best films that Lynch has produced. It’s also just plain eerie that some events in the film, which are partly about a distressed film director trying to rescue a collapsing film production, map so well to actual events in real life (which, you get the sense, were not entirely intentional). Part of Lynch’s genius, however, may have been that he was able to turn his troubles into something approaching a statement of purpose.
Again, the film shouldn’t work at all, given not just its history, but all of the heavy lifting that it sets out to accomplish — it should creak and break under the weight of its references and its ideas. But these are integrated so elegantly and seamlessly that, ultimately, although Mulholland Dr. works on an unusually wide number of levels, it can ultimately best be said to be “about” its own experience. It is an unusually deep and intelligent film, and though Lynch shamanistic and aloof public persona suggests otherwise, it should be taken as evidence that he is among the first rank of directors working today.
Mulholland Dr. does just about everything that I might ask a film to do. One thing that this essay hasn’t really had time to talk about are the more subjective elements, for instance its tone. It is extremely hard, I think, for a movie to be either suspenseful or funny throughout its running time: suspense often breaks, and comedy is notoriously hard to sustain. Lynch’s film achieves both tones, frequently simultaneously, all the way through.
And, god, the acting in this movie. But that’s a topic for another day.
Mulholland Dr. is one of the the best, most powerful dreams that it is possible to experience in the theater, an anti-Hollywood love letter to the movies that works both an expose of the dark side of the dream, and also as a testimonial to the emotional power of film’s illusions. It is also the kind of fantasy, both dream and nightmare, that I find myself not wanting to wake up from. To paraphrase Dorothy Gale, some of it isn’t very nice.
But much of it is beautiful.
The rest, as they say, is silence.
Dedicated to the memory of Edward Roy Azlant
