Return to Oz

(Walter Murch, 1985)

Why does a person watch a film more than once? Why do they watch a film 10, 20, 30 times? Maybe it’s to have a film’s message reasserted at a time when it is most needed. Maybe it’s purely the love for a story or narrative, a particular sequence of events that registers in a certain way. Films don’t change over time. Or do they? Most likely, a film cannot be understood or appreciated fully on first viewing. There are always little intricacies that need to be unraveled. Of course, the viewer changes over time. They are exposed to new thoughts, new attitudes, new opinions and new films. They can revisit a film armed with new perspectives and make something else out of it entirely. Certainly, what a film means to a viewer changes, if not the film itself.

I know that I am not through watching “Return to Oz”. It is a film I have seen far more often than most others. Released in 1985 by Disney, most viewers paid it no attention. For me, it was a building block to my childhood. For many, it was a cause of kid nightmares, the source of which would never be traced until years later. I have read steady streams of comments on the Internet from viewers who see stills or clips from the film and exclaim, “Oh my God, it’s THAT movie!” with equal parts horror and fascination. People remember it but can’t place it. I grew up loving it.


I’ll admit that I still get a thrill from “Return to Oz” for all its unapologetic creepiness and attraction to the downright grotesque. To the souls who have yet to see it, I take a unique pleasure in sitting down and showing them how Walter Murch and the film’s crew took the world’s perception of the over-the-rainbow Oz and twisted it inside out. Gone are the singing munchkins, shimmering landscapes and joyful Emerald City townsfolk that populated the 1939 musical. Dorothy’s journey into Oz is a jump from one disturbing, colourless wasteland to another. Placed into an institution due to her persisting belief in the existence of Oz, Dorothy escapes electroshock therapy and nearly drowns before awaking in the middle of Oz’s deadly desert, inches away from turning to sand. Oz has been decimated by a tyrant known as the Nome King, played by Nicol Williamson, who has divested the land of its emeralds and turned the people of the Emerald City to stone.


That’s L. Frank Baum’s world. Murch and crew paid close attention to “The Marvelous Land of Oz” and “Ozma of Oz” in their formulations of setting and character, crossing over elements of the two books in order to make Dorothy’s trip back to Oz complete in scope. Baum was not afraid to confront his child protagonists with almost hellish forces to overcome, and they are on display here. Of particular unsettling presence is Princess Mombi, played by Jean Marsh, a conflation of characters from both books, who has 31 heads to choose from, on display in cases where she dwells in the usurped Wizard’s palace. In one scene, a headless Mombi feels her way to the case containing her original head in order to have eyes to pursue Dorothy with. It’s the stuff of not wanting to fall asleep at night.


There is a persistent fear of decapitation throughout the entire film that I only noticed on a most recent viewing. Dorothy’s room in the institution is numbered 31, the same number given to the case containing Mombi’s original head. The doctors want to shock the bad “waking dreams” that plague Dorothy from her mind. New friends Jack Pumpkinhead and the Gump are decapitated at different points yet continue to speak freely. Mechanical man Tik-Tok’s neural impulses are wound by dials attached to his body, which wouldn’t operate otherwise. The nomes of Oz appear as visages in the land’s sediment, and the incarceration into the inanimate of Dorothy and her friends prompts the Nome King to grow a body. The pressure on Billina the hen to lay an egg suggests a fate under the axe, and what a pity that would be now that she’s learned to talk. Maybe that one is pushing it, but it’s all meant to show how horrible the world would be without imagination, done on a scale that portrays it as a scary and complete loss of humanity.


A movie set in the land of Oz is tough to make, and maybe another successful one will never see the light of day. “The Wizard of Oz” is, of course, a masterpiece in its own right. It has permeated the consciousness of the culture so thoroughly that it perhaps may never be tampered with without coming off crass and second rate. It meant a lot to me as a kid, who was feverishly addicted to all things Oz and knew exactly where to raid the Peterborough Public Library for every volume it carried. I have memories of sitting at the kitchen table writing a letter to the long-deceased Baum, and of a dream in which I was given a jewel-encrusted pendant by Ozma that I tried to recreate with construction paper and markers the next morning. The first substantial bit of writing I ever completed was a story set in Oz. As fanciful as I found the world, “Return to Oz” revealed a dark side to being young that I also took great delight in. It’s a delight that is currently appealing to viewers in the Harry Potter films and countless imitators. In that respect, “Return to Oz” was 20 years ahead of its time.

Walter Murch hasn’t directed another film since. An award-winning and accomplished editor and sound worker, he would later come to my attention as the man who put Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” back together the way Welles might have wanted it. There’s an admirable character trait there, expressed by a desire to remain true to what originally inspires us. “Return to Oz” continues to inspire me with its originality, its faithfulness, its darkness and imagination.


Six more reviews to go.