I was four years old when my mother let me watch Return to Oz. I don’t think she really had any notion of just how disturbing it was going to be. To this day, I can remember with perfect clarity, Princess Mombi, a witch with a detatchable head who beheaded young girls so she could wear their heads as accessories, feeding her obsession with youthful beauty. This scene is forever burned into my brain. I also grew up terrified of mental institutions because of this movie.
And yes, that is Fairuza Balk as a little girl.
This was basically the only part of the whole movie I wasn’t terrified of.
Everything else in this movie: traumatising. The wheelers, the choosing the wrong object and turning into an object, the sinking sand, the fucking pumpkin head, all of it. I also completely forgot that the mental institution was even in it - I wonder if that’s where I get that phobia from (I cannot watch anything involving involuntary restraint without having a panic attack, even though I’ve never been in such a situation, praise be).
But this bit… I mean, obviously it is terrifying, and the image of Mombi choosing the heads and also of the headless girls all dancing in a circle is also burned into my brain, but it also fascinated me. I wanted to be Mombi. I could probably write a whole thesis on this and femme performance and collation of identity.
Oh god, this movie. THIS MOVIE. I had it on VHS and watched it endlessly as a kid. Mombi was horrifying, but I loved the idea that Ozma was trapped in a reflection (and also, sort of, the asylum) - and I loved, too, that Dorothy chooses right in the end because she was clever and observant enough to figure out that her friends were all green objects. Plus, if you count her conversations with Bettina the chicken, pretty much every scene passes the Bechdel test.
The girls in the asylum at the start, though, that always made me more angry than frightened, because it was so UNFAIR. But even though I haven’t thought of this film in years, something in those scenes clearly went deep, because more than anything else, it gave me this hard, clear obsession with the idea that going to other worlds should have consequences. Like, Dorothy gets home from Oz, and her aunt and uncle send her to an asylum for electroshock, because they think she’s crazy. I used to get so irritated that characters would go to other worlds, like Narnia, and then just LEAVE them, go back home again - not just when the fantasy worlds were clearly superior, but without any sign that they realised this, or suffered for having gone. Everything just snapped back into normality like an elastic band, and I hated it. But Return to Oz didn’t do that. The catharsis is that Dorothy proves she’s not crazy, fixes a broken land, and then doesn’t have to go back to the asylum, because her family are just happy she didn’t drown in the storm, and also the asylum proprietor - aka real-world Mombi - gets arrested for doing experiments on the girls, which: YES. Vindication!
I so need to watch this again.
(via moniquill)
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