Way back when, I made a post about Oz and the psychological implications of “fantasy world” narratives. Well, last night, I got together with my buds and we ended up watching Return to Oz with Fairuza Balk. It’s an amazing movie that’s way too complex for its intended audience. The movie is dark in a way that makes recent “adult fairy tale” and those Burtonesque children’s remakes look tame in comparison.
We start the movie with Dorothy, whose sleep has been sporadic and fitful since her return from Oz and the aftermath of the tornado. Auntie Em is seriously questioning Dorothy’s sanity, so much so that she is willing to force Dorothy to undergo experimental electro-shock therapy, which, at the time in which the story is set, is extremely dangerous. Girls were a much easier target for these types of experimental treatments because of their so-called “fragile mental states” and “bouts of hysteria”, so a girl like Dorothy, who claims that talking lions and men made of tin are real, and is supposedly receiving messages from an alternate world that she reached via tornado, is an obvious candidate.
Cut to the hospital, and things start to get really messed up. What really gets me about this movie is the subtlety of it. There’s no way I caught what was really going on in these scenes when I was a kid. The doctor is clearly taking advantage of the desperation of poor people like Auntie Em and Dorothy to provide a quick fix to deeply-rooted psychological problems, all so he can continue his experiments on fresh specimens instead of what they call the “broken patients” that they lock in the cellar. Kids movie? That’s how it’s marketed! And the nightmare fuel has only just started to flow.
Dorothy is rescued from her first shock treatment by a well-timed blackout and a fellow girl inmate at the hospital, who may or may not be a figment of Dorothy’s imagination. They escape together, only to be chased to a nearby river during a rainstorm. Dorothy’s possibly-fake saviour drowns in spite of Dorothy’s attempts to save her, and Dorothy passes out on a floating piece of debris, only to wake up in Oz. There she sees that her childhood dreamland has pretty much been gutted, starting with the yellow brick road and ending with the Emerald City, with all of her old friends either missing or turned to stone. If Oz is indeed a reflection of Dorothy’s psyche, it seems the pathologizing of her fantasy life has turned it into a nightmare realm, and her innocent fantasy that aided her in asserting herself in the first book and movie have been usurped by distorted versions of the hospital’s inhabitants. Many of the dopplegangers that Dorothy’s psyche creates are disturbing, but in retrospect, the worst is how the “broken patients” are reinterpreted. While the people who work at the hospital get appropriately horrifying recreations in her mind, Dorothy only ever heard the screams of the “broken patients”, and thus can only interpret them as thunder, during the Doctor/Gnome King’s last (and unsettling) guessing game near the end of the movie. Pretty fucked up, eh?
The final mindfuck comes at the end of the movie. Once good has triumped and the people of Oz laud Dorothy’s performance and ask her to be queen, she says no, knowing that she has to return to her world at some point, and thus we get the appearance of Ozma, the “rightful ruler of Oz”. Who just happens to be identical to Dorothy’s drowned rescuer. Hrm. Ozma quickly steps in as this infallibe God Mode Sue-type character and sends Dorothy home, and gives her the ability to communicate with Ozma through mirrors so that she has someone to talk to about Oz. So: Dorothy, having briefly met a girl, being saved by her and then failing to save her when the situation was reversed, projects the girl as the ultimate ruler of her fantasy world so that she, Dorothy, can overcome her survivor’s guilt and somehow keep up her fantasy life instead of actually accepting the loss in reality. The final shot of Ozma is her in Dorothy’s mirror, hushing Dorothy and preventing her from getting Auntie Em’s attention so that Dorothy can finally prove that Oz is real. Through Ozma, Dorothy learns to simultaneously hide AND perpetuate her hallucinations.
And hey, guys, this is a live-action DISNEY movie. Fer serious.
This movie is actually pretty awesome, though. It’s incredibly well-shot, the score is awesome, Miss Balk showed some chops as a child actor and the supporting cast of villains is fantastic. Even a lot of the special effects hold up today because they were so well-conceived. My only gripe is the marketing, of course. We think Oz and of course the first reaction is either “kids movie” or “totally gay” (and hey, fair enough), but Return to Oz is so oddly nuanced that it really benefits from a more mature reading. Go rent or buy. It’s worth it.
