For you youngsters out there, this was a kind of meme at the time—some stoned so-and-so had discovered that in ways that were actually quantifiable (especially if you were, in fact, stoned), the imagery of “Oz” and the sounds of Pink Floyd synched up in an uncanny way. Like, you know, the twister coincided with some gnarly squiggly VCS synthesizer noodling. The thing was, at the time, and at all times since it had never even occurred to me to try this myself. I wasn’t THAT into Floyd, and I’d been around sufficiently to understand that ANYTHING can synch up if your individual will demands it. Still, I was, as I believe you can infer, eager to please, and I nodded my head avidly, and late that night, when I got home I tried the exercise, just so I wouldn’t be a liar, and was, to be honest, mildly impressed.

Why did the synch work? Various reasons, none of them that Pink Floyd had planned.

“The Wizard of Oz” is a work both archetypal and unique, and as the critic Amy Nicholson notes in the first chapter of this multi-essay documentary directed by Alexandre O. Philippe, its place in the firmament of world culture is almost an accident of fate. On its theatrical release in 1939, the movie flopped and was considered an expensive boondoggle. As with “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the film's second life on television made “Oz” ubiquitous and beloved. In his chapter, “Kindred,” the filmmaker and writer John Waters recollects first seeing “Oz” on television in his hometown in Baltimore, Maryland, and reckons that David Lynch had to have first seen it that way as well, either in Boise, Idaho, or Missoula, Montana, two of the very not-very-different-from-Kansas ultra-American locations where Lynch, the great American filmmaker and partial subject of this movie, grew up. (And became, among other things, an Eagle Scout.)

A visual artist by training, Lynch has never identified as a cinephile in the way giants like Scorsese and Spielberg have. In interviews, he’s been known to shrug off vast swaths of film history that journalists try to pin on him, looking for answers to the multitudes of enigmas in his own films. But "The Wizard of Oz" is one influence he will definitely cop to. In one of the best of the six chapters here, filmmaker Karyn Kusama recalls attending a screening of Lynch’s 2001 "Mulholland Drive" at New York’s IFC Center, where Lynch sat for a Q&A afterward. There, he said, “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about ‘The Wizard of Oz.’” And the references are strewn throughout Lynch’s films like stray seeds, from place and proper names (“Garland” is both a street name and the name of a character in “Twin Peaks”) to lots of outright wearing and heel-clicking of red shoes.

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