ANA SALZBERG
In the last scene of Walter Murch’s 1985 film Return to Oz, Dorothy Gale (Fairuza Balk) stands before the mirror in her bedroom in Kansas and traces the word Oz onto the glass as she whispers the name “Ozma.” Immediately, a white light radiates from the mirror, and Ozma (Emma Ridley) herself appears: the young queen of Oz, long banished from her kingdom and only rightfully reinstated by Dorothy in a series of adventures fraught with dark magic and enchantment. Thrilled, Dorothy calls to her aunt to come and see the image of Ozma—who then holds her finger to her lips to caution silence. When Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) finally enters the room, Dorothy hurriedly turns the mirror away and tells her calmly, “It’s nothing. Just a reflection.” As the audience has learned on this journey to Oz and back, however, Dorothy and Ozma are far more than “just reflections” of each other. Giving form to the intertwining of the realist and fantastic that defines the film itself, the young girls share an inter-subjective dialogue—an existential exchange between two discrete but interconnected entities that exalts the merging of corporeality and ethereality, the natural and the supernatural.
Yet upon the movie’s release through Walt Disney Pictures, audiences and critics expressed consternation that Return to Oz was itself not “just a reflection” of its classic predecessor, Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939).1 Eschewing the musical numbers and chromatic splendor of the earlier film, Murch instead wrote and directed a work that pays homage to L. Frank Baum’s original novels, particularly The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) and Ozma of Oz (1907).2 With its diegetic universe bounded by a bleakly realist Kansas (in which Dorothy is prescribed electroconvulsive therapy to treat her “bad waking dreams” of Oz) and a devastated Emerald City, conquered and turned to stone by the evil Nome King (Nicol Williamson), Return to Oz offers a dystopic vision of corrupted fantasies and paradises lost. In The Imaginary Signifier, theorist Christian Metz describes film as “a beautiful closed object ... whose contours remain intact and which cannot therefore be torn open into an inside and an outside”3; yet in his revision-ing of cinematic Oz, Murch reveals the fragmentation of a “beautiful closed” cultural object—or, as he himself termed it, a “cultural artifact”4—through an unsettling fairy tale produced, ironically, by the very studio that ensured the iconicity of such mythologies.
With this in mind, Return to Oz stands as a radical reflection of not only its classic predecessor but the Walt Disney Pictures canon itself, the strictures of traditional family entertainment challenged by the imaginings of an Oz “torn open.” Rejecting the cheerfully-uncanny quality of Alice in Wonderland (1951) or the rousing magic of Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Robert Stevenson, 1971), for example, Murch’s work evokes a supernatural that undermines, rather than ultimately defers to, the dominance of the normative natural realm—and, by extension, the dominance of a normative cultural mythology. Embodying this interplay of reflection and revision are Dorothy and Ozma themselves, doubles in the ever-shifting parameters between the reality of Kansas and the fantasy of Oz, the material and the ephemeral. Through the lens of Dorothy and Ozma’s dialogue of subjectivities, then, the film explores the limits of extra- and intra-diegetic (indivi)duality, redefining the “inside and outside” of a theretofore inviolable ideality both within the land of Oz and Disney’s Hollywood.
Since the beginning of its feature-film production with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Disney has ensured the legacy of its animated and live-action filmmaking through an alliance with narratives ingrained within the Western collective cultural consciousness. In this symbiotic relationship, through which Walt Disney Pictures assumes the prestige of classic works whilst enabling their renaissance, fairy tales like Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959), and beloved children’s books like Johann David Wyss’ The Swiss Family Robinson (Ken Annakin, 1960) and P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964) comprise a contemporary mythology sustained indefinitely by the Disney franchise. As Jack Zipes writes, “Walt Disney established a dynasty that ‘appropriated’ classic narratives and ‘obfuscated’ their original authorship through ‘his technical skills and ideological proclivities.’”5 Appealing to the modern audience’s continued fascination with the moving image, Disney Pictures has since become the collective auteur of the fairy tale genre for generations of children.
Though not directly associated with Wizard, a film emblematic of Metro-Goldwyn Mayer’s legendary artistry in the production of studio-era musicals, Disney nonetheless approached its cinematic retellings with a similar style: the lushness of the images conjuring a realm of thrilling, fantastic possibility; the spirited musical numbers punctuating the progression of the narrative; and the “happy ending” ultimately affirming the supremacy of domestic accord and the triumph over a destabilizing supernatural. Rick Altman has observed that in the fairy tale musical of classic Hollywood, “the love stories ... are never the courtship of a man and a woman alone, they always imply the romance of spectator and image.”6 In the Disney pantheon of fairy tales and its kindred The Wizard of Oz, however, the love affair between the audience and the film as—to recall Murch’s words—“cultural artifact” has become equally important.
In the early 1980s, Disney pursued an alternative mode of production with dark works like The Watcher in the Woods (1982; directed by John Hough and starring Bette Davis) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983; directed by Jack Clayton and written by Ray Bradbury). Appealing to a more adult audience with their uncanny narratives and imagery, these sinister counterparts to Disney’s massive output of wholesome fantasy utilized live-action to recount the often-horrific dramas of human figures placed directly in thrall to destructive supernatural forces. Yet as such unique works, virtually sui generis in the world of Disney, the two films did not engage directly with the over-determined paradigm of family entertainment that preceded Return to Oz. In a series of interviews with novelist Michael Ondaatje, Murch explained, “I loved the daring of trying to make a sequel. A little like saying, Let’s make a sequel to Gone With the Wind.”7 Undaunted by the Technicolor shadow of The Wizard of Oz and the expectations of the Disney franchise, Murch explored an altogether different cinematic territory.
Evoking the feminist sensibilities of the original Oz novels—as Murch pointed out, “All the really creative, interesting people in [Baum’s] books are women”8—Return to Oz crafts a gothic adventure story centered on two heroines bearing a multi-dimensional impact upon and agency within the cinematic universe.9 The film opens with a troubled Dorothy, haunted by memories of Oz and unable to make her family believe her accounts of magic and adventure. Taken to a clinic for electroconvulsive therapy, Dorothy is almost “cured” of her visions—but a felicitous lightning storm allows her to escape, with the help of a mysterious young girl later identified as Ozma. Dorothy makes her way to Oz on a raging river, and once there finds the land conquered by doubles for the clinic’s doctor and nurse, in the form of the evil Nome King and Princess Mombi (Jean Marsh). With the help of various new friends, Dorothy defeats these enemies and frees Ozma from the enchanted mirror in which she has been trapped by Mombi. Ozma then sends Dorothy back to Kansas, with the promise that she may return to Oz any time she wishes.
Indeed, the movie itself establishes a flux between the registers of time and space—and, most strikingly, between the phenomena of the natural and supernatural. Heightening this union is the interplay between live-action individuals and sophisticated mechanical figures designed for the production. In contrast to other cinematic depictions of Oz that either used make-up and costuming to merge the corporeal and the imaginary (including Fleming’s Wizard, as well as Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz [1978]) or straightforward animation (as in 1974’s Journey Back to Oz, featuring the voices of Liza Minnelli and Mickey Rooney), Murch’s film sets in place a complex performance-dialogue between the human and the mechanical that evokes the existential versatility defining Oz itself. Ultimately, rather than ascribe magic to entirely external forces (the witchcraft correspondence courses in Bedknobs and Broomsticks; Mary Poppins’s flight into and out of the family home), Murch’s film offers an a-dichotomous, a-hierarchical universe asserting not the privileging of the real over the fantastic, but the intertwining thereof.
Where the original Dorothy’s closing declaration, “There’s no place like home,” stands as a creed articulating the power of the normative to prevail over the lure of the extraordinary, Return instead captures Dorothy’s resistance to such divisions. Before leaving Oz, Dorothy tells her friends with plaintive gravity, “I wish I could be in both places at the same time.” Through the continuum between magical and actual, corporeal and ethereal established within both the film as a whole and the unique dynamic shared by Dorothy and Ozma, the former’s wish does come true—just as, moreover, the dissolved binary between reflection and revision allows Return to Oz to assert its autonomy from the very cinematic dynasty it inherited.
The title sequence of Return to Oz sets forth the union between natural and supernatural that will come to define the film. After an opening shot of a black sky suffused with stars, the camera pulls back steadily until it reveals the frame of a window through which the sky is seen, followed by the surrounding curtains and walls of Dorothy’s bedroom itself. Tilted at an angle throughout this panning back, the room seems to drift through the cosmos pictured in the window, in this way creating a not-unpleasant sense of disorientation for the spectator. The continual backward motion of the camera, however, soon adds a further dimension to this suspended spatiality: the frame of a slanted mirror that now contains the image of room and sky. Rather than glimpse the diegetic environment in the immediate actuality offered by a window, then, the audience has gazed upon a reflected reality through a looking glass.
Merging the planes of the material and immaterial, this establishing shot presents a variation on the framing devices (in terms of both narrative structure and mise en scène) so often used to place reality and fantasy in opposition. Here, there are no doorways to a Technicolor world as in The Wizard of Oz, or enchanted storybooks in which to plunge as in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Instead, the intrinsically connected succession of frames—those of the window, mirror, and shot itself—convey to the viewer that the actual is ethereal; and the supposedly insubstantial, inverted reality of the mirror is, in fact, a continuation of the physicality it captures. The following sequences affirm this interplay: Looking into the mirror as she lies in bed, Dorothy sees a shooting star soar across the reflected night sky; the next day, she finds a key bearing the word OZ in the fields of the farm. At once, Dorothy knows that her friends have sent it to her on the shooting star—she recognizes, that is, the key as the material trace of an ephemeral dimension ever-present through the mirror-as-channel.
With the looking glass thus depicted as an active mediator of experience rather than a static object, the subsequent introduction of Ozma within a reflection resonates with possibility—the promise of a physical impact wrought by an ethereal energy. Seated in the doctor’s study, Dorothy—with eyes red-rimmed from her sleepless nights remembering Oz—gazes upon the machine that will manage what the doctor calls “excess currents” responsible for her memories. Soon the face of a young girl appears in the glass casing of the machine. Dorothy turns to find her smiling through the study window, a serene figure with blonde hair and pale skin standing in contrast to Dorothy’s own exhausted form. When Dorothy looks back a moment later, the girl has vanished, but reappears in the following sequence as, again, a reflection in the window of Dorothy’s room in the clinic.
Such discussions of reflection and doubling (especially in terms of children) must, of course, address the framework of Lacan’s mirror stage. In this paradigm, an infant approaches the mirror and there encounters his/her double, an ideal being that seems endowed with all of the abilities the actual infant lacks. Alternately identifying with the reflection (in a moment of misrecognition) and jealously coveting its capacities, the individual confronts the fundamental dichotomy between a limited reality and an elusive ideality that will haunt him/her throughout existence.10 Though seductive as a theory, it would nonetheless be simplistic to regard the dynamic between Dorothy and Ozma as a formulaic enactment of the mirror stage. For where Lacan insists upon the reflected other as “a mirage” utterly exterior to the self, within which the individual perceives the cohesion of his discrete corporeal elements,11 Return to Oz depicts Ozma and Dorothy as subjects of commensurate agency moving through and beyond the mirror to influence both the natural and supernatural dimensions. In this film, the mirror is not the exclusive province of the double and her accompanying “psychical realities”12 but—as asserted in the title sequence—a window between the fantastic and the actual.
Murch himself mused upon the ambiguity of Ozma’s identity: “Is she a real person? Or is she an abstract Oz creature, who projected herself into the dimension of the real, in order to influence certain events?”13 Later, implicitly acknowledging the fluidity of the Oz universe, Murch noted, “[T]hat question—Who is Ozma?—is given to the audience to answer. The film doesn’t answer it.”14 What the film does declare, however, is that Ozma belongs wholly to the existential continuum set in place within Return to Oz, functioning as both an abstraction and an embodied figure—as the sequence in which she rescues Dorothy from the clinic definitively expresses. Strapped onto a gurney and wheeled into the operating room, Dorothy only escapes the surge of electricity through a literally last-second bolt of lightning that cuts off the power. The doctor and nurse leave her alone in the darkness, filled with the sounds of winding-down machinery and the screams of tormented patients confined in the depths of the cellar.15 Noiselessly, the blonde girl appears and frees Dorothy, leading her out of the operating room and down the corridors to flee the clinic.
As they race down the labyrinthine hallways with linked hands, their blurred forms outlined only by flashes of streaming hair and Dorothy’s waving arm as she careens in Ozma’s wake, the children are virtually indistinguishable from each other. A brief but striking point-of-view shot, filmed with a hand-held camera to capture the panicked rush of the flight, all but insists upon the merging of the girls’ identities here as they share bodily agency and subjective perception in a desperate attempt to survive. Finally breaking out of the clinic, the children run through the surrounding woods to a riverbank, followed by the wraith-like figure of the head nurse. With the storm crashing and the nurse shouting after them, the girls have no choice but to plunge into the flooding river; and carried away on the raging tide, both Dorothy and Ozma sink in the water. Only Dorothy emerges. Crawling into a floating crate, she drifts away from the clinic and towards Oz. In contrast to Altman’s description of the whimsical “romance of spectator and image” in cinematic fairy tale works, this sequence calls for a more visceral rapport with the viewer (heightened by the resounding minor chords of the musical score): the sensory depth of the branches, rain, and mud through which Ozma and Dorothy struggle, the sheer force of the water that claims Ozma in that moment of wrenching turmoil. The catalyst for Dorothy’s return to Oz is not, then, a single event—a strictly natural disaster like the original tornado—but rather an extended alignment of oneiric terror and sensual gravity.
In her phenomenological study of cinema, theorist Vivian Sobchack relates such on-screen sensory suffusions to the embodied experience as a whole. She defines embodiment as a “condition of human being that necessarily entails both the body and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, in an irreducible ensemble.”16 Embodied existence, then, calls for the cohesion between the registers of experience—an acceptance of, rather than a resistance to, the ever-present interplay between the corporeal and the psychical. With this in mind, Ozma and Dorothy’s fusion in the hyper-sensory escape sequence presents a realization of their dialogical identities, the affirmation of each child’s mutually invested consciousness and physical form. Ozma is not a mere reflection of Dorothy’s desire for an ideal double, just as Dorothy is not simply the bodily counterpart to an ethereal projection. To paraphrase Murch’s remark, Ozma and Dorothy are both “real people” and the inhabitants of an abstract realm. Together, they represent figures of versatile dimensionality, comprising not only body and consciousness but the possibilities of the supernatural within the context of the natural It is such an intertwining between the material and the ephemeral that, as the subsequent discussion will detail, founds Murch’s approach to—his revised reflection of—the land of cinematic Oz itself.
In his analysis of the Lacanian imaginary in the experience of cinema, Metz describes an on-screen image as “not really the object” it attempts to capture but “its shade, its phantom, its double, its replica in a new kind of mirror.”17 If one applies the Metzian paradigm of the vexed relationship between reality and filmic imaginary to the notion of a cinematic sequel, Return to Oz stands as a “new kind of mirror” in its rapport with the original “object” of The Wizard of Oz. For Murch’s film rejects any characterization as a one-dimensional “shade, phantom, double” of the work so embedded in cultural consciousness—it claims, instead, a discrete identity complementary to, but not dependent upon, its antecedent. This approach was, however, fairly controversial; as Murch remarked, the public demanded, “How dare you make a sequel to The Wizard of Oz? And how dare you make it in the way you made it?”18
Perhaps most shocking to audiences were the images of an Oz in ruins: the iconic Yellow Brick Road destroyed; the Ruby Slippers stolen by the Nome King; the Emerald City and its inhabitants turned to stone; and the beloved Scarecrow transformed into an ornament in the evil king’s collection. Following the Nome King’s coup, the only animate entities remaining in Oz are supporters like Princess Mombi, a shape-shifting witch, and the Wheelers, frightening half-men who stalk Dorothy on arms and legs made of wheels. In an article discussing the franchise of the Oz books and their subsequent cinematic representations, Richard Flynn mentions Return to Oz only to disparage the tableau of the desolated Yellow Brick Road as “emblematic of the film’s failure.”19 But contrary to this facile condemnation, the Oz imagery in Murch’s film triumphs in its creation of a landscape of purely suspended animation—an environment in which the beings are not dead, but waiting to be brought back to life.
As Dorothy wanders through the courtyard of the Emerald City, the bleak surroundings seem to vibrate with the sensory echo of once-vital ladies and gentlemen—and, especially poignantly, the Cowardly Lion and Tin Man—who now linger in an extended, collective pause. Ostensibly, the scene depicts a vast lifelessness in an Oz made uncanny; but more than this, it evokes the land’s inherently ambiguous relationship to questions of mortality. Murch reminds us, “There’s an ambivalence about the fact that in Oz nothing ever dies.... It’s a world in which there is dismemberment but no death.”20 As this sequence demonstrates, it is also a world in which there is existential suspension rather than death. In a particularly affecting shot capturing this melding of sentient flesh and frozen stone, a close-up frames the face of one of the women. Mouth open, eyes wide in distress, her expression of alarm seems to reach beyond the confines of her static condition to warn Dorothy of coming danger. To paraphrase Metz’s terms, this woman and her fellow inhabitants are beautiful closed objects on the verge of breaking open—like the cultural artifact of cinematic Oz itself.
Through the character of Princess Mombi, however, Return to Oz explores the dangers of remaining a beautiful closed object, the threat of producing only simulacra of an original being. Residing in a palace paneled entirely in mirrors, Mombi focuses much of her substantial powers on the transformation of her physical form—a pursuit made possible through her possession of a collection of heads, stolen from the young dancing girls of the Emerald City. In a variety of countenances—all lovely, all animate—the heads of the women are kept in cabinets lining the walls of a long corridor; and as Mombi walks down the hall, each watches and waits for the witch to select her chosen incarnation. Mombi also seeks to make Dorothy vulnerable to these machinations, deciding to imprison the girl in a tower until her own “certain kind of prettiness” emerges and the witch may take her head.
Rather than represent an exaltation of what Sobchack describes as the lived-body’s “excessive and ambiguous ... materiality, ... polymorphism, and ... production of existential meaning,”21 Mombi’s shape-shifting stands as a corruption of the embodied experience—the appropriation of another’s physical form in order to realize the infinite variety of her ideal selves. Mombi’s is a decadent dark magic, a supernatural force consumed with the gratification of narcissistic desires; and in reducing these individuals to objects of self-obsessed aestheticism, Mombi renders the heads a collective simulacrum of her own identity. In a troubling inversion of the mirror’s significance in the dialogue of subjectivities between Dorothy and Ozma, Mombi’s own head resides in the only mirrored cabinet on the corridor—languishing on a shelf containing the discarded accoutrements of her magic. In Cabinet 31, the looking glass conceals, rather than adds dimension to, the actual self that lies on the other side of the reflection.
The violation of the medium of the mirror, emblematic of the depth of Mombi’s villainy, bears dire consequences for Ozma herself. Banished by the Nome King and cursed by Mombi to an exile in the mirrors of the palace, Ozma lives as a green flash fluttering desperately from one panel to another. Through this spell, Ozma finds herself suspended within the veneer of a surface reflection, a mockery of the very element that had served as her window to the material realm. Recalling Metz’s terms, Mombi has succeeded in making Ozma a “shade, phantom, double” in a kind of mirror decidedly unnatural within the universe of Return to Oz: one that limits, rather than expands, the existential situation of the characters, severing the fusion between the registers of experience that has guided Dorothy and Ozma. The witch attempts, then, to reduce the “irreducible ensemble” of that cohesive embodied existence described by Sobchack, to restrict the “excessive and ambiguous” possibilities of the lived-body to the confines of a shallow mirror and a narrow cabinet.
Yet the fundamental unity between body and consciousness proves its resilience. As Dorothy tries to flee the palace, she loses her way in the mirrored interior and cannot find a way out. Suddenly, a flickering opalescence appears upon one of the walls, briefly taking shape as the hazy image of a young girl beckoning to Dorothy. Following the direction of the projection, Dorothy exits the hall through a door concealed by the surface of the mirror. Just as in the clinic sequence, Ozma again saves Dorothy’s life. Prevailing against the reductive power of a sinister looking glass, the dynamic engagement between Dorothy and Ozma asserts that the greatest magic lies within the intrinsically connected elements of corporeal form and ethereal subjectivity. Dorothy may have to fight to preserve her bodily identity from Mombi’s covetous narcissism, and Ozma may wander in her immaterial exile, but it is only the witch herself who is truly trapped within the cursed mirror.
If Mombi’s hall of heads and mirrored palace make manifest the dangers of a myopic preoccupation with the reproduction of an ideal image, the adherence to the dictates of a “beautiful closed object,” then Dorothy and Ozma’s transcendent communication within that realm of dark magic affirms Return to Oz’s own identity as a “new kind of mirror” of cinematic Oz. As if in articulation of the film’s radical project, the sight of Ozma projected onto the mirror recalls the Technicolor splendor of MGM’s Wizard as it unreels—only to give way, as Dorothy literally goes through the looking glass, to a world beyond the seemingly-insulated “screen.” Evoking an Oz not explored by the original, canonical film, Return to Oz defines itself as a film-as-mirror reflecting the alternative possibilities of that legendary land rather than its immediate iconic associations.
The last of the Oz sequences does, however, present a land more in keeping with the audience’s traditional conceptions. After Dorothy has reclaimed the Ruby Slippers and reanimated the Emerald City, the people of Oz celebrate in a grand parade that leads to Princess Mombi’s now-cheerful palace. It is an illustrious fete, filled with classic figures from the original film: the Munchkins make an appearance, as do the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion. In a final gesture of victory, guards carry a caged Mombi through the crowds. Her magical powers taken from her, she is now, as she concedes, “a miserable creature indeed.” Though meant to represent the joyful ending to Dorothy’s quest, the triumphant return of the familiar, the scene nonetheless bears a quality incongruous to the greater film itself. In this self-conscious rendering of the iconic Oz, the viewer recognizes the “shade, phantom, double” of Wizard from which Return to Oz consistently differentiates itself; the infusion of a merry fantastic belonging more to the “wonderful world of Disney” than to the unsettled/ing universe of a revision-ed Oz. Rather than detract from the happy ending to Dorothy’s harrowing adventures, however, this juxtaposition serves to emphasize the affective power of the Oz in which the audience heretofore found itself immersed. The brief reconstruction of the cultural artifact, that is, emphasizes how successfully it has been altered.
The final sequence also captures a climactic encounter between Dorothy and Ozma, those dual subjectivities so crucial to the project of the film. After Dorothy refuses the title of Queen of Oz, declaring that she has “to go back” but longs to be in Kansas and Oz “at the same time,” the Ruby Slippers she is wearing glow brightly. Immediately, the green flash that is Ozma appears in the mirrored wall and, finally, takes form as a girl in royal dress. In a medium long-shot, the camera frames a tableau in which Dorothy and her friends face the expanse of the looking glass—only to see Ozma standing in Dorothy’s place in the otherwise faithful reflection of the palace scene. After both children walk up to their respective sides of the mirror with symmetrical precision, Dorothy recognizes Ozma as her savior from the clinic; Ozma only replies, “Help me step through the glass, Dorothy.” Reaching up to touch the looking glass, the girls link hands as the mirror begins to shimmer, and Ozma leaves the realm of the ethereal to join Dorothy in the material.
Crystallizing the issues of actuality and fantasy, corporeality and ethereality that have shaped the relationship between the girls, these images address the fundamental question that Murch himself posed: “Who is Ozma?”22 With this mystery in mind, does the scene, in which Ozma literally takes Dorothy’s place in the world of the mirror, contend that the two are in fact the same entity? That they are, ultimately, interchangeable? In a diegetic world that rejects the polarization of experience, however, the answer to Ozma’s identity cannot be defined in terms of the absolute. Instead, it lies in the mirror itself, that ethereal continuation of a physical dimension providing a channel between natural reality and supernatural potential. As Ozma stands in regal splendor, directly facing Dorothy’s humbler aspect, the mirror fulfills its role as a window framing yet another alternate world—one in which Ozma has been restored to her rightful place as ruler and stands before her loyal subjects. And just as Dorothy needed Ozma’s aid in order to escape the clinic, Ozma now calls upon Dorothy’s kindred presence in order to realize this vision of Oz’s future.
Highlighting this mutuality is composer David Shire’s scoring of the scene. Throughout the film, Dorothy and Ozma’s respective themes—the former’s a sweetly melancholy melody, the latter’s a grave, grand work—suffuse the aural space of the soundtrack in a musical evocation of the narrative’s pathos. Indeed, Shire’s score presents a lyrical complement to the diegetic soundtrack, creating a rich aural dimensionality resonating with moments of mournful strings and footsteps on the stones of the Emerald City; somber brass and the sound of Mombi’s key turning in the locks of her cabinets. Engaging with the actual and the ethereal like Dorothy and Ozma themselves, Murch and Shire’s sound-dialogue further affirms the film’s guiding concern with the continuum between natural and supernatural. In this defining moment before the mirror, with Ozma’s theme representing what Murch calls a “musical inversion” of Dorothy’s,23 the melodies intertwine in an orchestral union that heightens—reflects—the embodied harmony between both sides of the looking glass.
In his discussion of Ozma, Murch went on to suggest, “[M]aybe she’s a projection of some aspect of Dorothy. But maybe it’s the opposite.”24 Or perhaps it is both. Each giving form to elements of the abstract and the actual, Dorothy and Ozma are not interchangeable or, to return to the line of dialogue that opened this essay, “just reflections” of each other. Instead, they co-exist as discrete but reciprocally invested beings, engaging in an existential exchange that asserts the interconnectedness of the body and consciousness, the natural and the supernatural—with the mirror forming a channel between flesh and spirit. Neither Dorothy nor Ozma is an authentic original in contrast to the other as shadowed reflection; nor, indeed, is Wizard placed in sacrosanct opposition to its successor. For in that a-dichotomous, a-hierarchical realm constructed in Return to Oz, each is a beautiful open subject.
Throughout the film, a subtle but substantial threat to Oz provides an unsettling undercurrent in the narrative: the act of forgetting—the land of Oz itself, its inhabitants, and the halcyon days before the Nome King’s revolution. First faced by Dorothy in the electroconvulsive-therapy sequence, the peril of the eradication of memory is entirely associated with the forces of dark magic; and as such, it provides a source of delight for the Nome King and Mombi. After plotting an elaborate game for turning Dorothy and her friends into ornaments for his collection, the King exclaims, “Soon there’ll be no one left who remembers Oz”; and as she watches Ozma flutter desperately from one mirror to another, Mombi taunts the exiled queen, “There’s nobody left who even knows who you are.” In a final challenge to Dorothy’s honor, the Nome King—like the clinic doctor for whom he is a double—attempts to cajole her into abandoning her friends to their frozen fates: “Forget about them.” Even in Oz, a world of immortality ostensibly challenged only by in-animation, the act of forgetting represents the phenomenon closest to death: the withdrawing of one’s subjective awareness from another living entity—the separation of a consciousness and a body.
In relating such notions to the process of making Return to Oz itself, one could argue that the question of memory stands as an especially complex issue. With Wizard and the Disney canon of family-fantasy ubiquitous in the collective consciousness of the audience, Return to Oz from its inception met with the expectations imposed by these paragons. To diverge from such an institutional memory was perceived as a nearly blasphemous act of forgetting—a willful turning away from the history of family entertainment. Truly, in its revision-ing of cinematic Oz, an exploration founded in re-creation rather than reflection, Return to Oz represents a moment of expansion for Walt Disney Pictures. More than merely rebel against its antecedents, the production of the film insisted that audiences actively engage with their established understanding of the cultural artifact of Oz; and in this way, the movie constructed a universe appealing to renewed perceptions rather than gratified preconceptions. In an extra-diegetic variation on the sinister electroconvulsive therapy sequence, the film bespoke a reinvigoration of memory rather than the negation thereof—testing the boundaries of the culturally revered in a stimulating challenge to passive remembrance. In the context of Murch’s work, then, it is far more dangerous to let Oz languish as a beautiful closed object; to allow Ozma to remain in the mirror, or the Scarecrow as an ornament, for fear of shattering the object and revealing an alternative entity.
The unique cinematic being that is Return to Oz concludes with Dorothy’s return to Kansas. Found on a riverbank, Dorothy learns that the clinic from which she escaped burned down in the lightning storm, and that the doctor lost his life trying to save his machines. Yet even in the safety of Aunt Em’s embrace, Dorothy cannot truly evade the traces of the supernatural that still suffuse the natural of Kansas. Stunned, she sees the nurse, who had been reincarnated in the form of Mombi, mysteriously imprisoned in the back of a police wagon trundling down the road in an eerie reprise of the parade in the Emerald City. In another infusion of the fantastic into the actual, this image signals to both Dorothy and the audience that though Oz itself has been liberated, the realm of reality remains under its spell. This enchantment, of course, finds a far more poignant realization in Ozma’s appearance in Dorothy’s mirror. As discussed earlier, Ozma’s presence in the domestic space of Kansas offers a final affirmation of the continuum between the supernatural and natural, as well as the kinship between the two young girls who are so much more than “just reflections” of each other. Though the movie ends with Dorothy playing outside with Toto on a sunny day, what lingers as the film ends is the wistfulness of her expression when she turns back to the mirror—only to realize that Ozma has, for the moment, vanished.
Although her reflection is fleeting, Ozma and the land she rules remain with Dorothy in a more material way. Before Aunt Em and Uncle Henry find Dorothy on the riverbank, she lies on the ground alone. In an expression of what Martine Beugnet has termed a “body-landscape” effect, or a shot that explores the surface and texture of a corporeal figure,25 an extreme close-up frames Dorothy’s eye as she gazes straight ahead. Grounded in the physical, the image indeed creates a landscape of Dorothy’s skin and eye, the elements of her visage filling the screen as completely as the vistas of the Kansas prairies or the expanse of night sky which opened the film. Dorothy’s eye itself, however, is a green as vivid as the verdant flash so associated with Ozma’s presence. It is, in fact, emerald.
In this ultimate fusion of the ethereal and the physical, the shot proclaims Dorothy’s literal incorporation of the fantastic dimension to which she and Ozma equally belong—the embodied conjunction of an otherworldly vision and a mortal form. Like the audience itself, Dorothy bears a gaze that will not forget the return to Oz.
1. As Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The New York Times, “Return to Oz is the work of ingenious technicians who seem either not to know what gave the original film its magic, or not to care. Instead of ... [a] sequel ... [Murch’s film] is more of a grim variation.”
2. A renowned film editor and sound engineer, Murch has contributed to a myriad of important works, including Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) and The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996); and in 1998, he re-edited Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) in accordance with the director’s original vision. To date, Return to Oz is the only film that he has directed.
3. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 94—95.
4. In Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2002), 285.
5. Jack Zipes, “Breaking the Disney Spell,” in From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, eds. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, Laura Sells (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 21.
6. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 153.
7. Ondaatje, 285.
8. Ondaatje, 290.
9. Disney’s engagement with young female protagonists continued in the live-action film The Journey of Natty Gann (directed by Jeremy Kagan), also released in 1985. In this work, a teenage girl crosses Depression-era America to find her father.
10. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.) 77.
11. Lacan, 76.
12. Lacan, 77.
13. Ondaatje, 105.
14. Ondaatje, 107.
15. In a letter to the Journal of Biological Psychiatry, John Hodgkinson (on behalf of The Manic-Depressive Association) decried the film’s depiction of electroconvulsive therapy. Moreover, he called for a campaign to convince Disney to either withdraw the movie from distribution or edit the sequence at the clinic. (Biological Psychiatry 21 [May 1986]: 578.)
16. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 4.
17. Metz, 45.
18. Ondaatje, 285.
19. Richard Flynn, “Imitation Oz: The Sequel as Commodity,” The Lion and the Unicorn 20 no. 1. (June 1996): 127.
20. Ondaatje, 289—290.
21. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 144.
22. Ondaatje, 106.
23. Ondaatje, 107.
24. Ibid.
25. Martine Beugnet, “Close-Up Vision: Re-Mapping the Body in the Work of Contemporary French Women Filmmakers,” Nottingham French Studies 45, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 28.
Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Beugnet, Martine. “Close-Up Vision: Re-Mapping the Body in the Work of Contemporary French Women Filmmakers.” Nottingham French Studies 45, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 24–48.
Flynn, Richard. “Imitation Oz: The Sequel as Commodity.” The Lion and the Unicorn 20, no. 1 (June 1996): 121–131.
Hodgkinson, John. “Correspondence.” Biological Psychiatry 21 (May 1986): 578.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.
Maslin, Janet. “Review of Return to Oz, directed by Walter Murch.” The New York Times 21 June 1985.
Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Translated by Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.
Ondaatje, Michael. The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2002.
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
_____. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Zipes, Jack. “Breaking the Disney Spell.” In From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, edited by Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, Laura Sells. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.