Alexandre O. Philippe and Mark Cousins are leading the charge on video essays about film.

Philippe directed two such documentaries released in the last month: The Taking and Lynch/Oz, the latter of which includes a sly corrective aimed at skeptical audiences to assuage their doubts regarding the veracity of the sort of deep interpretations peddled in these movies.

Such Negative Nancys (Nancies?) have a habit of looking askance at wilder close-readings, usually out of some fidelity to believable intentionality. Artistic meaning can reside in the eye of the beholder, but if it doesn’t square with a more practical perspective on filmmaking, then it’s easy to write off wonkier hypotheses as more audience projection than audience deduction.

Which is why Lynch/Oz hands over half its runtime to the voices of famous directors. While they focus most of their attention on the titular connections between David Lynch’s oeuvre and The Wizard of Oz, they also confess to being obsessed with reoccurring fixations that repeatedly appear and reappear in their own work, often steeped in a few old movies of influence that they keep returning to again and again.

If they admit it’s true for themselves, then perhaps the Lynch/Oz-esque theories proffered in these documentaries aren’t entirely up their own asses?

---

John Waters is one of the directors ceded the floor in Lynch/Oz, and he drops a quote that just so happens to double as the organizing thematic principle of Taylor Mac’s read on American history in A 24-Decade History of Popular Music:

“Take what they try to use against you (AKA: what they criticize you about), turn it into a style, and win.”