MEMBRANES

revised 2025

Created in conversation with Alexandre O. Philippe for his film LYNCH/OZ

Right now (2019) 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 character who moves between parallel worlds. So, to my mind, are many of David Lynch's movies. And there's more in common too for what it's worth.

But to be fair, my family and I were just watching Back to the Future and it shared a lot with Oz as well, even if, tonally, it couldn’t have felt less Lynchian if it tried.

But… If we’re testing the proposition than David Lynch’s movies are inspired by (or at least have a lot in common with) the Wizard of Oz, is it notable that this very different one resonates with Oz too?

Consider: Marty, A young man from Anytown, USA travels magically to another world (in this case, his own past) where, like Dorothy, he encounters doppelgängers of people that he knows from home: different versions of his parents, Biff, and even of Doc Brown. He finds allies in this world, faces danger and make it back where he now sees things differently. Does this suggest that Back to the Future shares some DNA with the movies of David Lynch or just that Wizard of Oz has a generic enough structure to line up to countless mainstream movies?

I don’t know, but let’s juxtapose The Wizard of Oz with some of Lynch’s work and see where it takes us.

For starters, there’s an awfully strong pair of Oz/Kansas-style alternate realities in Blue Velvet. Jeffrey leaves the mundane universe of his family’s suburban neighborhood to venture into the Oz of the other side of Lincoln. To make a bad pun, if Dorothy Gale got to Oz through the air, Jeffrey gets there through an ear. Tnis new realm is not as candy-colored as Munchkin Land, but it has a dark magic all it’s own and Jeffrey crosses into a veritable haunted forest when he sneaks into Dorothy Valens’ apartment. By the end of the story, Jeffrey is dragged through Hell, kills the big bad, and returns to his family. Fragmented and dreamlike as it is, this is still a pretty classic hero’s journey, just like Dorothy experienced.

And the epilogue… that scene with Jeffrey, Sandy and Aunt Barbara gathered around the kitchen window looking at the robin? To me, it looks an awful lot like Dorothy home in her bed, surrounded by Aunty Em, Uncle Henry, Hunk, Hickory and Zeke. They’re both back with their families, back but changed - they’ve seen things and learned secrets their loved ones will never understand.

In The Elephant Man, John Merrick is a freak on exhibit in a carnival, just about the lowest place you could imagine finding yourself in Victorian England. In a harrowing journey, he leaves it for London Hospital, which becomes his gateway to the gilded world of the upper class. His Oz was just a tube ride away all along.

In Lost Highway's conclusion, Fred returns home (after travelling to the world of a different identity) but something has been irreevocably changed and there are both dream and nightmare versions of Hollywood in Mullholland Drive.

But maybe "a character moving between totally-different-but-eerily-similiar worlds" is also Beverly Hills Cop. And Star Wars. And Toy Story. Harry Potter and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Are they all Oz narratives? Is almost everything that flickers past us at 24 frames a second? Is that connection enough?

Maybe not, but there’s a really interesting film I watched recently that points to something more. This is Arthur Penn's The Miracle Worker, his 1962 movie about Helen Keller. More than any of those others, it really felt like I was watching a movie David Lynch could have directed if not for the fact that he was only 16 years old back then. Early on, there's a dinner scene where the very formal and proper Keller family are sitting around the table while Helen is racing around it like a wild animal grabbing at food and grunting. The rest of the family tries their best to act like nothing is out of the ordinary. That kind of contrast is at once shocking and comic and horrifying and a little sad. Like a lot of David Lynch films. And , maybe to a lesser extent, the Wizard of Oz.

Let's keep watching.

There's another moment where her teacher (Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan) is watching Helen from out a window, and as she does, Annie flashes back to her own school days. As a child, she was in an institution for the blind, and Penn uses a double-exposure dissolve that lasts an incredibly long time to show both scenes simultaneously. It’s something that David Lynch does too sometimes, and he does it in a way that feels magical. In the last episode of Twin Peaks: The Return there’s an amazing (and amazingly similar) extended dissolve on Cooper’s face where he seems to becoming unmoored in his world. It's a dirt-cheap special effect, but it also has a powerfully dream-like, disorienting effect.

In that moment from the Miracle Worker, it feels as if the ghosts of Annie’s past have returned, and I'd argue that it’s also Oz-like, evocative of Dorothy clicking her heels together and tumbling into the spiralling tornado of dreams; all three of these characters, Dorothy, Annie, and Agent Dale Cooper are becoming untethered and losing track of which layer of reality they’re in. Some of those other movies, Back to the Future included, feature journeys just as long and life-changing, but they're much more linear, less blurry around the edges than what Lynch, Penn, or Victor Fleming did.

There's a question mark left at the end of Oz that also haunts Lynch's movies. "What was real?" Oz leaves it open-ended, if you accept they were both real places in the world of the film, the Emerald City and Kansas are very difficult to travel between. In Lynch's dueling realities, the membranes that separate them are much more pourous and the methods of crossing them more mysterious. The alternate worlds may even be created by the characters themselves. In fact, when he was once asked a question about Inland Empire he quoted the Upanishads, "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."

The very last scene in the very last episode of Twin Peaks: The Return could be the summation of a lot of these ideas about dreams and realities. Dale Cooper and Laura Palmer travel through time and space, alternate pasts and presents to get back to her house, and when they get there, the woman who answers the door, the actor who played her, was the actual woman who lives in that house. Coop and Laura have reached our own world.

And the strangeness, that collision of fact and fiction crossed over into my reality, too. I remember watching Episode Eight, the BIG episode that we’re all still talking about, the one with the atom bomb and the Fireman, the Nine Inch Nails and the lizard-thing that crawled into the little girl's mouth. I've watched that episode twice, but each time, another horror would be waiting for me the morning after.

When my wife and I watched it the first time, Sheena, our cat was acting really strange, rubbing her head against the TV. The next morning we came downstairs to find the living room floor just littered with the blood and feathers of a bird that she had somehow (I have no idea how) managed to pull into the house and kill overnight.

And then, two or three weeks later, I watched it again.

And when I came downstairs that next morning there were 20 messages on my phone waiting for me. My father, back in Florida, had died while I was asleep. He hadn't been doing well for a while so it wasn’t a total shock, but it was awful and it was sudden and it was something I had been dreading.

I know the timing was coincidence and that watching the show didn’t make it happen, but the uncanny mood of Episode Eight was still lingering the morning after when I got the news (in hindsight I see myself coming down the stairs slowly somehow knowing something terrible was waiting for me) so the association will be hard to break.

That show, especially that episode, was brilliant. It's one of my favorite hours of televion, but I don’t think I’m going to watch it again anytime soon; there’s enough horror on this side of the screen.