Wizard of Oz Surreal Art Dorothy Tornado Red Shoes

Eighty years ago, in the summer of 1939, sixteen-year-old Judy Garland appeared on movie house screens as the orphan Dorothy Gale, dreaming of escape from bleak, monochrome Kansas.

"Find yourself a place where you won't go into any trouble," her aunt beseeches, too busy for poor old Dorothy, who before long breaks into song: "Somewhere, over the rainbow, skies are blueish / And the dreams that you lot cartel to dream really do come true."

Her wish is before long granted by a tornado that carries her to the gaudy, Technicolor Land of Oz, instilling her equally an icon for misfits, migrants, gay kids, dreamers – anyone who has ever wanted to run away.

My grandparents were homesick. Unlike Dorothy, they couldn't click their heels together and magic themselves dorsum. Home didn't be whatsoever more; information technology was a memory, an thought

More than xl years subsequently The Magician of Oz was one of the beginning films I watched as a toddler in Rio de Janeiro, on my dad's Super 8 projector. My parents were already dreaming of their own escape to London, where nosotros would go a few years subsequently. They hadn't been born when the moving picture was released, a few days earlier the start of the second World War, though by then my female parent's Jewish parents were building a life in Rio, their own Oz, far away from Poland – a country that would plow out to exist far bleaker than Kansas.

My grandparents were homesick, non quite settled, for the rest of their lives. Unlike Dorothy, they couldn't click their heels together and magic themselves dorsum. Home didn't exist any more; information technology was a memory, an thought, a receptacle for feelings of loss.

The Wizard Of Oz: Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Judy Garland and Bert Lahr on the yellow brick road. Photograph: Silver Screen/Getty
The Wizard Of Oz: Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Judy Garland and Bert Lahr on the yellow brick route. Photograph: Silver Screen/Getty

It's incommunicable to guess how many times I've watched The Magician of Oz. L? A hundred? When we came to London I couldn't speak English language and had no friends, just the moving-picture show kept me visitor along with Mary Poppins, An American in Paris, West Side Story, reruns of The Muppet Show, musical dreamworlds I could escape to whenever I wanted.

But The Magician of Oz was The 1. We had it on VHS, recorded from Tv, merely the tape ran out of space presently after Dorothy returns to Kansas, so it was only years later that I heard her final words: "Oh, Auntie Em – there's no identify like domicile!"

The empty lure of escape, the fantasy of an eternal abode and perfect belonging: this is what The Wizard of Oz means to me. Kansas v Oz is the battle we all fight betwixt reality and fantasy

The empty lure of escape, the fantasy of an eternal home and perfect belonging: this is what The Magician of Oz ways to me. Dorothy is an orphan, but who are her parents? In the entire film they are not mentioned once. Perhaps it does not matter who they are. Like many fictional orphans, from Oliver Twist to Harry Potter, Dorothy is a symbol of loss and abandonment, while Kansas 5 Oz is the battle we all fight between reality and fantasy, home and elsewhere.

Everyone has their own Oz, be it fame, money or love, but for immigrants it is unremarkably an actual place. For my Jewish grandparents it was anywhere but Europe; for my parents it was Europe; while my siblings and I begged to go back to Brazil. For Iris Cohen, the protagonist of my second novel, Everything You lot E'er Wanted, Oz is the planet Nyx, a meaningful new life far from Earth from which there is no return. I didn't realise I was writing an immigration novel until I had finished the first typhoon, but I knew early that Iris was my Dorothy.

In all of western movie theatre, is there a more recognisable image than Dorothy in her blueish gingham wearing apparel, arm in arm with the Scarecrow, the Lion and the Can Man, skipping downward the xanthous brick road to the Emerald Urban center, and then that the Wizard can fulfil their dreams?

The Wizard of Oz: the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, Dorothy and the Scarecrow arrive at the Emerald City. Photograph: Silver Screen/Getty
The Wizard of Oz: the Tin Human, the Cowardly King of beasts, Dorothy and the Scarecrow arrive at the Emerald City. Photo: Silver Screen/Getty

It's somehow cheering that this cluttered, surreal musical about a teenage girl, her domestic dog and her three weird friends running abroad from a witch, searching for a wizard, and trying to become their all-time selves is so influential. And surprising, too, considering that it was a troubled product and a box-office flop, with a script that breaks the first rule of storytelling by having an ending that suggests it was all just a dream. (Or was it? More importantly, does it matter?)

The moving picture was based on L Frank Baum's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz but ultimately superseded it. Several directors signed up and quit in quick succession. Victor Fleming is named in the credits, just he decamped subsequently a few months to work on Gone with the Air current, which won 10 Oscars to The Wizard of Oz's 2. Simply who is still watching Gone with the Current of air in 2019?

My novel is the latest in a long history of Oz homages, particularly in the magical, surreal and queer corners of culture. They range from Elton John's album Cheerio Yellowish Brick Route to the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art G?, which owes as much to Oz as it does to Homer'southward Odyssey. Joel Coen once said: "Every movie e'er made is an endeavor to remake The Wizard of Oz."

In his 1992 essay most Fleming's picture, Salman Rushdie describes it as his "very first literary influence". It was 1 of Derek Jarman'due south favourite movies, and amidst the commencement he e'er saw. (This is the key to its influence: the fact that anybody watches it in babyhood. It seeps into your unconscious and stays there.) And there are the spin-offs, sequels and prequels – The Wiz, Return to Oz, Oz the Great and Powerful, Wicked.

Wizard of Oz tribute: David Lynch's best-loved works, including Mulholland Drive (above), follow ordinary people into strange, beguiling other worlds
Wizard of Oz tribute: David Lynch's best-loved works, including Mulholland Drive (higher up), follow ordinary people into foreign, fallacious other worlds

Perhaps no other artist pays tribute to The Sorcerer of Oz as frequently and with as much reverence as David Lynch. His best-loved works, including Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive and Bluish Velvet, all follow ordinary people into strange, beguiling other worlds; they contain an Oz-like mix of innocence, surreality and nightmarish darkness. Wild at Heart is a more obvious homage, with its visions of good and bad witches, and frequent mentions of the moving-picture show. At one point Laura Dern even clicks her crimson shoes together.

Tony Kushner'due south two-part play Angels in America, a hallucinatory epic about Aids, identity and breach in 1980s New York, also alludes several times to the moving-picture show. Similar Dorothy, its protagonist, Prior, is a lonely young person who achieves glory through fantasy; he dreams of being a prophet, simply as Dorothy dreams of being a heroine. During a dream Prior echoes her classic line: "People come and become so quickly hither!"

The Sorcerer of Oz doesn't saccharide-coat the truth: at that place are monsters out at that place, and the but things that matter are fellowship and home, wherever you find them

Or peradventure information technology isn't a dream, and he is a prophet after all. Both Lynch and Kushner empathize that the line between reality and fantasy, betwixt Kansas and Oz, is non every bit impermeable as it seems. The flowers in Munchkinland might look like plastic, just Kansas is just every bit fake, an obvious sound stage with a painted-prairie backdrop.

I recently rewatched The Wizard of Oz for the first time in years, with my baby sleeping on my lap. The film is so familiar to me that I causeless I wouldn't notice anything new, simply of course I was wrong. The Wizard himself is fifty-fifty more clueless and narcissistic than I remembered: he is a corrupt politician, catnip for lost souls. Garland's rendition of Over the Rainbow is so moving and bitter-sweet from the vantage point of adulthood, now that my dreams of escape – from London and from myself – have been laid to rest.

The empty, snickering evil of the Wicked Witch of the West is scarier than anything I've seen in recent children's films. The Wizard of Oz doesn't sugar-coat the truth: in that location are monsters out there, and the only things that matter are fellowship and abode, wherever y'all find them – a bulletin as relevant now as it was in 1939. – Guardian

Everything You E'er Wanted, past Luiza Sauma, is published by Viking

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Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/film/there-s-no-place-like-home-the-wizard-of-oz-80-years-on-1.3930594

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