Domesticity

Helen Keller - Family Meal Scene - The Miracle Worker

"There's a really interesting movie 

I watched recently, "The Miracle Worker," 

Arthur Penn's 1962 movie about Helen Keller. 

And it really felt like I was watching 

an early lost David Lynch film. 

There's a dinner scene where the very formal 

and proper Keller Family are 

sitting around The Table, and 

Helen is racing around it like a wild animal, 

growling at Food, grunting, and all 

the rest of The Family around her are trying 

to act like nothing is strange. 

That kind of contrast, at once comic and horrifying and a little sad, 

it felt very Lynchian. 

She'll be alright in a minute. 

ASCHER: 

There's another moment where 

Her Teacher is watching 

Helen out The Window, 

and then Annie flashes back 

to her own school days. 

As a kid, she was in an institution 

for the blind, and Penn uses a 

double exposure dissolve that lasts 

just an incredibly long time. 

If it doesn't look like a dream scene straight out of "The Elephant Man" or "Eraserhead," 

I don't know what does. 

It's something that David Lynch does in a way 

that feels effortless and it has 

this powerful, dreamlike effect. 

There's that amazing dissolve on Cooper's face that lasts a minute, minute and a half where he seems to be unmoored in his world. In "The Miracle Worker," it's almost as if the ghosts of Annie's past have returned. And in both cases, it's slightly "Oz"-like. 

All these characters are 

becoming untethered and losing track 

of which layer of reality they're in. 

Why would Lynch be that absorbed with " The Wizard of Oz Wizard of Oz"? Well, it's a very nostalgic American icon of a film. But anyway, Toto, we're home. Home. And this is my room. 

ASCHER: 

In a lot of his movies, there's a sense of a search for a sort of lost, perfect American world. A nostalgia for paradise lost. 

Perhaps for one that never really existed. 

Did he watch " The Wizard of Oz" on 

a perfect day at the perfect time as a child 

and it sort of baked into his subconscious? 

I wonder if on the same day he watched 

"The Brain From Planet Arous" instead,

would his movies be very, very different? 

[ Dramatic music plays] 

Many filmmakers' works are often variations on a theme. To me, Stanley Kubrick's films are often about exposing the abuses, the excesses of people in power. 

"Paths of Glory" being one of the most literal ones. [ Speaks German ] -Guten tag. -[ Laughter] 

Hey, talk in a civilised language! 

But that continues all the way 

up to "Eyes Wide Shut," 

which is about the decadent super rich. 

Ladies, where exactly are we going? -Exactly? -[ Laughter] Where the rainbow ends. Where the rainbow ends. ASCHER: In "The Shining," there's the whole conversation about all the best people who stayed at the Overlook. We had four presidents who stayed here. Lots of movie stars. Royalty? All the best people. ASCHER: Even Lolita is a girl who's preyed upon by different powerful men, Clare Quilty and Humbert Humbert. Gee, I'm really winning here. I'm really winning. I hope I don't get overcome with power. ASCHER: Lolita is a girl who's forced to live in multiple worlds, the normal one of teenagers, but also a darker adult one. You want to stay with this filthy boy? -That's what it is, isn't it? -Yes! -Why don't you leave me alone? -Shut your filthy mouth. ASCHER: There's a lot of "Lolita" the film in "Twin Peaks," and there's a lot of Dolores Haze in Laura Palmer. What is real? How do you define real? ASCHER: Right now, I'm wrapping up a film about simulation theory and " The Wizard of Oz Wizard of Oz" has been coming up a lot because at the end of the day, what kind of movie is it? It's the story of a young girl who moves between parallel worlds. It means buckle your seat belt, Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye. -[ Thunder rumbles] -ASCHER: And there's a question, a sort of question mark left at the end. Which of these worlds is the real one? Are both of them real in some way? But it wasn't a dream. It was a place. And you, and you, and you, and you were there. ASCHER: That's a question that people play with in countless movies that have been influenced by it, everything from "Nightmare on Elm Street" to "The Matrix." Lynch's films are filled with characters who move between different worlds, and they're often very innocent characters like Dorothy. Never seen so many trees in my life. W.C. Fields would say, "I'd rather be here than Philadelphia." ASCHER: In "Mulholland Drive," which might be the most " Wizard of Oz"-y of all of them, Betty is a perfect innocent who finds herself in sort of the twin versions of Hollywood, the dream and the nightmare. I think that in Lynch's duelling realities, the membranes between layers of reality are thinner than they were in " The Wizard of Oz Wizard of Oz." In many of these movies, there are characters who hold all the cards, just like The Wizard of Oz himself. The man behind the curtain. Characters whose influence travels between worlds. We've met before, haven't we? I don't think so. Where was it you think we met? At your house. Don't you remember? When Lynch was talking about "Inland Empire," another story of a woman who moves between different levels of reality, he once answered, "We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along it. We are like the dreamer who dreams, then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe." Like Mulholland Drive and Winkie's Diner, that guy is talking about his dream, and he's afraid that the dream could come true. And then, soon enough, he finds himself in the nightmare of having to relive that dream. He says to a psychiatrist, "In the dream, I was sitting here, and you were up there by the cash register," and then it panned slowly over to the cash register. And you see the absence of the psychiatrist. And it cuts back and then you see the gears turning in the psychiatrist's head who says, "Oh, you want to see if it's real." And then the man can't stop it from happening. The psychiatrist gets up and he walks to the register and we pan over. And now he is exactly in that position. He's filled the negative space, and then the man finds himself in his dream the way Dorothy is transported into her dreams of Oz, only without a tornado or even a dissolve. Just in the space of a line of dialogue or two. That very last scene in "Twin Peaks: The Return" is the summation of a lot of ideas that I think about with "Oz" and with Lynch. The question of dreams versus realities. Because I read that the woman who answered the door in the scene is actually the woman who lives in that house in our world. Is this your house? Do you own this house or do you rent this house? Yes, we own this house. ASCHER: So it's almost as if, well, which of the thousands of possible multiple realities does Cooper land in at the end of the series? He lands in the same one that you and I are living in and that the woman who owns the house that they film "Twin Peaks: The Return" lives in. And it's more than Cooper and Carrie are able to take. What year is this? [ Dramatic music plays] [ Screams ] ASCHER: They end that sequence in a complete mental breakdown, a complete panic, which was an experience that I really went through while watching that whole season. It was shortly after the election and a lot of us were confused and scared about what was going to happen in the world. God bless America. ASCHER: So it's really nice to return to the world of "Twin Peaks," even if within the show, there's one unspeakable nightmare after another, at least it was our unspeakable nightmare. This is the water. And this is the well. Drink full, and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within. ASCHER: But the strangeness crossed over into my reality because I remember episode eight, the big episode, the one with the atom b*mb and the fireman and that lizard. I've watched that episode twice. And each time, another horror would be waiting for me the morning after. The first time my wife and I watched it, our cat was acting really strange, rubbing her head against the TV. The next morning, we came downstairs, and the floor was just littered with blood and feathers of a bird that she had managed to catch while locked in the house all night. Maybe she escaped through a window and maybe she pulled it back inside somehow. I've got no idea. But she m*rder*d it while we were sleeping and scattered its remains all over the floor. And then two or three weeks later, I watched it again alone. And maybe this is in hindsight, but as I imagined myself walking down the steps the next morning, I'm feeling a sort of Lynchian dread, like that guy in "Mulholland Drive" who's walking back behind Winkie's. And I come to my desk and on my phone, there's like 20 new messages that have just popped in the last hour waiting for me. My father back in Florida, he d*ed the night before. He hadn't been doing well for a while, so it wasn't a shock. But I don't know, the timing felt really strange. I don't think I'm going to watch that episode again anytime soon. I don't want to know what's going to happen. There's bad juju baked to the bones of that thing. [ Dramatic music plays] It is happening again. ANNOUNCER: Like wildfire in the wheat field, the fabulous tale of " The Wizard of Oz Wizard of Oz" spread from town to city to nation to the entire world. WATERS: For me, " The Wizard Of OZ" was the ultimate not just American movie, movie period that I saw as a child that made me want to be in show business, that made me want to create characters, that made me want to go on adventures and probably made me take LSD. [ Mid-tempo music plays ] I think it was a good influence on me all the way around. For me, it changed my life when I saw it. My obsession with it started before television. My parents took me to see it at the Rex Theatre in Baltimore, which, oddly enough, later became the sexploitation nudist camp movie theatre like 30 years later. Then the Christmas thing became like the sequel in my mind as a child. Every year, we watched it. I mean, it was a big deal event. And you always watched it because it didn't come on again. There was no other way. Nobody could imagine that you could ever buy a video of something and watch it whenever you wanted or rewind it. That's the thing I always thought was kind of against. You give away the magic trick. But, you know, the saddest thing I ever heard was I talked to this young kind of hipster kid, and we were just talking about movies. And I said, "Do you like 'The Wizard of 02'?" And he said, "No, not really. I mean, it's basically just walking." I thought, "God, what a blurb." If a kid watches " The Wizard of Oz Wizard of Oz" today, the film completely works. I think it's the perfect -- like a drug to kids to get them hooked on movies for the rest of their young lives.