Return to Oz with Shon Faye

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0:35So we're talking about Return to Oz this week on the podcast. And I think almost everybody is united that this is one of the most terrifying films that was ever made for children on purpose. Like there's plenty of stuff that kids see by mistake that's not for them that scares them. But the fact that Return to Oz was made with children in mind and is still so scary is like a true like feat of modern storytelling you wouldn't get it today and I think about like what what makes Return to Oz so terrifying is is you know we all remember Oz so well like we remember like the glorious technicolor of the 1939 movie with Judy Garland and how like sort of lickable and touchable and bright and vibrant everything is and then you go back to Return to Oz Dorothy goes back she's this different girl she's completely disturbed and you know it sort of has the kind of feeling of a kind of a closed down amusement park it has a ruinous quality to it and I think that's part of the reason it stays with us so much it's kind of like a perversion of this space that we knew so well and I couldn't help but think that like a relevant person to speak about this week is my friend Nada who is living in Gaza and who I've been talking to a lot at the moment and she's been telling me about what her home used to look like before the war and she's been sending me pictures and I'm not the most like visual person but like when I look at these pictures of this home I can see that this person like really loved their home like they really love decorating it like Nada clearly has this eye for color and design she kind of has has two living rooms like kind of like I had when I was growing up you know how you had um you had like your tv room where the family would hang out and then you'd have another room where where guests would come and like the tv room has this kind of caramel chocolatey scheme going throughout like this kind of um dark brown cozy couch and these kind of caramel layered curtains and these sort of brown sprigged cushions and I can tell because she has two young kids that she's chosen this darker colour scheme for this room because kids are messy you know and brown hide stains and then in the other room it's got this like gorgeous kind of blue and silver scheme it's got sort of like hyacinth sprigs and you know sort of a silver kind of tea set that sits on this beautiful coffee table.

3:14And then she showed me what it was like when she returned to her apartment because the apartment was destroyed early in the war. And then she came back to it. She was living in the tents for two years. They were displaced, her two children and her husband. And she said it was one of the worst times of her life living in these tents and how they would stand in line for hours. to use the bathroom, you know, behind 200 people sometimes, and how because of the lack of sanitation, her kids were picking up all these kind of skin infections and things. And then they eventually went back to the apartment, and it was completely, it was just a total ruin.

3:58There's no more hyacinth pattern cushions, no more carefully arranged colour schemes, simply a ruin. and you know they managed to sort of find one room they could kind of occupy and they cooked and ate and slept all in this one room together and things continue to be extremely difficult but she says to me as long as my kids are okay then I'm okay so I'm gonna put Nada's GoFundMe in the episode notes this week and if you can spare a few quid for her to help her stay safe, feed her kids, possibly rebuild her life again, then I'd really appreciate it. Thank you.

4:47Hello and welcome to Magical Garbage, the podcast where we talk about the enchanted trash that made us who we are. My name is Caroline and I'm Farooza Balk's sad, sad eyes. And joining me is Princess Monbi's head collection. It's Sean Faye. Hi. Hi, Sean. How are you? Really, really thoroughly disturbed. I feel like this movie, I don't know if it totally hangs together as a complete narrative sometimes, but it doesn't mean I don't fucking love it. And it doesn't mean that it's not responsible for some of the worst images that exist in my brain.

5:24Shon Faye: Yeah, I think the thing about this film, and I guess it's one of those many experiences that you have as a child and then you grow up and start talking to other adults about it and you realise it was a really collective experience is I just have such vivid memories of certain scenes in this film terrifying me and they are embedded in my brain. And then I realise that that's the case for like every slightly whimsical person over the age of 30 I know with this film. Everyone's terrified about it. Like I posted, you invited me on because I posted about it because there was a BBC article to celebrate the anniversary of it coming out.

6:03Oh, really? Oh, God, I had no idea that we were doing a timely podcast. Yeah.

6:06Shon Faye: This is fabulous. And I posted it on my stories and made a little joke about it. And I had, like, people of, you know, all kind of the full spectrum of my social circle. Men, women, and all in between. Basically, like, replying, being like, oh, the fucking wheelers, they terrified me. Always the wheelers. is the first thing that people come up with and then the head collection i think it's maybe i think the other way around because even this morning i re-watched the film this morning and i was sort of doing some housework whilst it was on in the background and i knew the bit where she had to go and get the um the powder of life from the cabinet with princess mamby's original head and that moment where she like reaches in and the head wakes up and then it's like dorothy gail and tries to bite her that i literally stepped out of the room to clean my kitchen sides what was happening because i was like i don't want to see that because it because it was so um it's so deep in my psyche how frightening that was that i and then all the heads start screaming the name and the body gets up that like still terrifies me so that for me but then the bizarre thing too is also that mumby and the head thing is also sort of deeply glamorous uh in quite like a i feel like as a sort of transsexual older person the idea of a kind of customizable head and um being able to have a new face according to your mood deeply appealing and And indeed, harvest the heads of children.

7:56Shon Faye: Yes, that too. Well, she actually, I have to correct you on that. She said she's going to lock her in the tower for a few years. Until her head is ready. So she actually doesn't want Dorothy's head until it's at least her preteen head. It's everything about that is so perfectly horrifying. I think that like this is the place where this movie is the strongest is when it allows itself to be a horror film for children. The parts that I don't like are when it tries to be a friendly movie. I'm like, no. I don't like the side characters. I don't like any of the sidekick humour. I'm like, get back to being the most frightening film I've ever seen.

8:38Shon Faye: Yeah, like the wisecracking chicken. I could not be fucked with the chicken. But she's just not funny. She's just not funny. But let me step back for a second. because like I, I'm sure everyone who's listening will have heard of you and your work and your very eminent memoirist and nonfiction writer. What is your relationship to sort of magic and whimsy and fantasy full stop? Quite intense, I would say. So actually as a child, my favourite film was The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 film with Judy Garland. Above my bed, I have a print of it by an artist called jason shulman where every frame of that film is layered he does he does um uh art where he layers every frame of a movie over one of each other and it becomes this kind of blurred color beautiful and um above my bed in my flat that his um print of the wizard of oz the frames of the wizard of oz is still there because it was such a huge part of my childhood i was able to recite i think at one point the whole film like along with it like i would be able to mouth along all the words of all the parts for the entire film so like I was so the Wizard of Oz was like a huge part of my childhood and then yeah around that like that probably gave me a taste but like anything to do with fantasy and I watched anything to do because there was like various animated versions of the Wizard of Oz yeah there was a there was a yeah like so so all forms of magic that there was an animated version obviously this film I would have watched quite young because it was kind of connected and it would have interested me um and then yeah like fantasy was and continues to be I mean obviously I am of the Harry Potter generation oh god it's fine I'm not a Harry Potter adult nor am I a Disney adult very into Disney too but I'm not a harry potter or a disney adult grow up oh my god like i'm actually really surprised to hear this about you because i just i i mean um we've met a couple times before this is our first proper hangout today but like i've i've um you know my the way i associate you and your work has always been a very sort of straight talking like i i wouldn't i wouldn't have thought you quartered much disney for some reason i don't know why i assumed that but you're okay you're not disney adult but you kind of disney leaning yes i'm disney lean have you been to the parks as an adult as oh as an adult it's a real test i have by the way twice only only because i do think if i i think if i had managed to get past 18 months with any boyfriend i think i would have made him take me but i think it's too i don't have this is not very feminist of me i can go for meals alone there's plenty of stuff i love solitude but i don't think i can take myself to a Disney park alone.

11:36Shon Faye: You can go with a gal pal. Yeah, I was thinking about, could I go with the gays or the girls? Have I been, I think I might have been to Disneyland Paris when I was 19 as an adult, but I would go now. I just think I would either have to like, yeah, it would have to be someone very close. But the reason I haven't gone with like a gal pal or whatever is I don't, I'm quite Disney. Maybe I am a Disney adult, but I don't have the friends I've made in adulthood aren't. yeah but i like i love it so i i um because i'm also a musical theater i'm an ex right and those worlds do often yeah i'm an ex-musical theater gay um so i also love that i'm going to see a vita tomorrow oh my god and so i think like whimsy and fantastical things like the little mermaid was a film that i was obsessed with as a child um wizard of oz harry potter yes became and um Ursula K.

12:31Shon Faye: Le Guin, like fantasy, classic fantasy novels. And then also I was, um, I'm 37. So I was sort of turning 11 or 12 just at the end of the nineties, early noughties, when it was very fashionable to dabble in witchcraft. Oh, it's never not fashionable. I think it went out fashion for a bit. It's always in with somebody. But I did, I did dabble in witchcraft. I think it was, you know it was kind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer charmed um and of course uh The Craft which stars Feru Zabok who is Dorothy um and um yeah I think it was just very like the idea of having like a pentagram and an altar in your room when you were a sort of queer child in 2002 yeah I was there I mean Wizard of Oz is like a classic you know the phrase Friends of Dorothy exists for a reason you know there's like like like why do you think it is that and you know I couldn't help thinking about it as I was watching Return to Oz today because this is the second time I've seen it like this year like I watched it again when Wicked came out and I did a sort of a double bill with a pal of mine of Wizard of Oz and then Return to Oz and it is fascinating of like you watch Wizard of Oz the original 1939 version and like you know they weren't thinking about subtext really they were thinking about text text they weren't thinking about are the gays gonna love this so whatever but they but it was kind of discovered um by the gay community in a big way i feel and like became a representation of so of so many sort of um sort of queer themes i suppose i mean what what do you why do you think that with wizard of oz has become so rich in queer subtext and how do you think that like followed through into return to oz because i have my own theories but i prefer to hear yours um i think the wizard of oz um i think the idea of um escape from kind of humdrum domesticity into this technicolor fantastical world speaks to and particularly like in the first half of the 20th century a very gay experience which is this idea of you have to leave to do yeah you have to leave and wanting to escape and somewhere over the rainbow this idea of like a like a like a like a safe place that like um that exists and is like you know exists somewhere beyond where you can see it's quite a hopeful and where everyone's a freak yeah exactly and so there's so there's that this like deep idea and it's there in naturally in wicked as well because it's it ironically it's obviously alphabet that becomes the queer heroin in that but it's like defying gravity is a similar kind of like i will be in this place in the sky yeah away from you all because i will transcend the normal and become something yeah this idea of the kind of gay or queer anthem like i think anything where it's like like honestly like let it go in frozen like sometimes like just so the b-side defying gravity really well yeah it is but like that song i mean obviously it's for children but sometimes when i hear that when you see a little girl's dresses also i'll be like that's this is a transsexual anthem i'm never going back the past is in the past i mean i'm like so like this idea of like it's obviously this like overlap between uh i guess a childhood what what is marketed as like oh it's the all children want to escape to a fantasy world i think is probably true that it's for general appeal right but there is a specific way that maybe that lands with a queer person um young or older um where it resonates extremely deeply this idea of um yeah essentially being a freak in your own home and there being some other place where you can find your people yeah so i think the wizard of oz speaks to that i also think that there are like judy garland And obviously she acquired a particular kind of, because I think of the melancholy in her voice, because what's odd is that she's 16 in The Wizard of Oz.

16:42Shon Faye: And that voice is so melancholic that it like, she doesn't seem like a 16 year old. I mean, she's dressed like a little girl. She is 16. She's got the stick tail covering her tits. She kind of sings like this sad 40 year old. And then that is obviously like kind of how her life went. and there is a kind of tragedy to that that is quite captivating. I also do remember my mother telling me when I was watching The Wizard of Oz once that Judy Garland had ultimately, like, my mum basically, I mean, she died of an overdose so she didn't intentionally kill herself, but my mum was like, oh, she basically killed herself.

17:17Shon Faye: And, like, oddly I became more fascinated. Like, there was something about that, knowing that tragedy, but seeing this kind of young girl, to me as, like, an eight or nine-year-old, made her even more fascinating. yeah and what i don't know like that natural kind of mellow you know might not be that gay and queer children are more melancholic but it might just be that there is a there's a sense of um interest in tragedy or things not seeming how they are on the surface so that's the very sophisticated answer the other answer is that i think there are really campy elements to it right like the bright technicolor scheme of Oz.

17:53Shon Faye: The fact that, yeah, there is this, like, female person in these brightly colored sparkly shoes accompanied by three male, non-threatening, kind of gay coded companions. Yeah, like, and they're all skipping it. Maybe they were concerned with subtext because they were not going out of their way that high that these are some gay, gay characters. Skipping down the yellow brick road. And, of course, it's a musical, right, which is which is a huge maybe one of the most stark differences yeah between the two is that um the register of as i understand it returned to oz what was intended anyway was that it was actually closer to the books uh and the books have a slightly darker edges is often the case i think with the subject like when you have um particularly like a big budget film like the wizard of odds but also like for example the early um disney animations is that the fairy tales they were drawn from are much more dark and fucked up and then obviously to turn it like we've always been getting sort of photocopies of photocopies it's like we had this oral tradition that was then codified by hans christian anderson and all that and i i remember reading those stories as a kid like the red shoes used to give me nightmares the idea that like that having to dance until you died and all that kind of stuff.

19:12And yeah, then it becomes Disneyfied and then everything becomes a photocopy of a photocopy. And it does feel like with Return to Oz that they are pulling back to, I guess, the original intentions of the book, which had these kind of Victorian era, right? Frank Baum. And had these quite ghoulish illustrations that are very of that era. And it's that thing of like, oh, you know, lots of almost Jules Verney kind of cogs and characters who are sort of almost assembled from different parts and um like it's definitely you see that being brought to life in return to oz but i also feel like you get this sense of almost a knowingness of like everything we know about judy garland i see and feel in feruza bulk's performance and it almost feels intentional like this thing when you open on the opening scenes of return to oz and it's like dorothy hasn't slept in six months she hasn't slept since the tornado it's almost 1900 and we don't know what to do about her and like she really looks like a kid who hasn't slept in six months and and they kind of are sort of you know trying these experimental therapies electroshock therapy to work with her

20:21Shon Faye: you know because the return to us is also a very radical anti-psychiatry film radically anti-psychiatry um very very like like i was like wow yeah that it it captures well that's it like i think some of the obviously we talked about the wheelers and and princess mamby being fucked up but also the very first half hour is really upsetting and apparently i did read um that when it came out in 1985 in cinemas that there were like reports of lots of parents taking their children out in that first half hour like when basically when dorothy's sort of strapped down to a um yes that is to a table because it is very dark do you know what's so horrifying and very really quite brilliant i think it's one of the more brilliant again i think every all the scenes where this is a scary film it is a brilliant film where it's trying to be fun and light-hearted when they're trying to wrestle the tone back into something lighter it falls apart for me but there's a bit where they're strapping her to this gurney because they're going to take her to be shocked and um she's trying to argue with the nurse but really politely because she's like a well brought up kid and she's like um you know lie down Dorothy I'd like to sit up please and then they go you know you know you have to be sort of bolted in in case you fall off and she's like well I came all the way here in a horse and buggy and I didn't fall off and it's like yes being strapped to a gurney is scary but having this little kid argue really politely about why she doesn't want to do that is both it just takes it to another level to me it's like heartbreaking and scary at the same time yeah absolutely and I think we I think probably it's worth saying at this point that I think for me on the re-watch what struck me the most is Farisa Balk's performance is actually incredible like it's because because it apparently it was her first ever film and unlike Judy Garland who was older and also just a studio kid had been performing her whole life like the tin man scarecrow and cowardly line were men in suits like they were people actors that she was interacting with and they were those guys that played them were quite like um grandays of cinema i think in their day yeah um whereas for isabel because acting with puppets and it's like and guys inside machines yeah there's a guy inside tiktok just like cramped like hunched over with a little remote control but like she's got that like she's got the fucking wisecracking chicken under one arm she's holding a live chicken the whole movie she's 11 I would could you have yeah could you walk around with a live chicken now and remember lives you know Jack Pumpkin head is like his facial expression's fixed he's giving us nothing TikTok is expressionless yeah you know the other one is like a like a gump moose's head on a sofa hate him as well fucking hate him so dry but like they're giving us nothing yeah giving her nothing yeah so so the fact that she is able to convey genuine emotion and i think the thing is is that like i was trying to think because like the kid like like really amazing child actors like i think like when i was i was a child in the 90s mara wilson who was in mrs doubtfire and miracle on 34th street and um matilda she when i was a child she was like the it child actress and there is a specific vibe that like child actors have where it's like this precociousness but like ferrisa bulk is actually very like naturalist like you know it feels like yeah she is a very natural actress if that is her first ever screen role um because you know it isn't even this like oh what she's playing on like Mara Wilson was often playing the fact that she was cute and like able to deliver the lines but like with playing up this cuteness Yeah, had a real winsomeness and a charm She was just adorable, you wanted to eat her Where like, for us to block she's a very pretty kid she is not sweet really No Like you don't want to eat her, you know what I mean?

24:29Like it's not one of those responses that you get where you just, like, you're you don't think, oh my god, I want to mother her you think, oh holy fuck, what happened to this kid?

24:37Shon Faye: Well that's why I love That's why I have to say I love the fact that the other big film role she had then was in The Craft. It's a straight line. Yeah, it does feel like it because it feels like a continuation. But what I love in that is that she is the kind of momby of The Craft and that she is the completely tapped villain. Yeah. But like in that, it's actually amazing acting in that because she's so menacing in that and manages to play this like unhitted, this person that like this teenage witch who was basically losing her mind in real time and becoming like this mega maniac and it not be like hammy that's the thing she's not like a hammy actress it's all very believable so i think she she kind of carries this film i feel like where the where the director and the screenwriters and the producers on this film flopped it on a couple of occasions with as you say maybe the more cheerful parts also the fact that the plot of this film is very uneven because there are like parts of it that like watching it I was a bit like why does this feel like a game show like the like the like the you're gonna show well like like why is there a whole segment of the film that's like touch an ornament I love touch an ornament do you not like touch an ornament I like it but it feels it's so scary to me but the Orion is a game show but I do is my favorite game it's weird I go through to our like showroom and I'm going to get you to touch an ornament for no reason instead of just killing you now yeah yeah and it's like and Mambi's like why didn't you just kill her and he's like it's fun this way we've got another third of the film to fill yeah um that's the other thing too is that I actually think the gnome king I was thinking about that um because one of the resonance I think between wicked and return to us right but return to us doesn't do it as well or is developed is this idea of like um if you look at maybe the those three films is this idea of power and who is who is usurping power from who it's all very dynastic yes like because because in wicked right there is this whole flip of the wizard of oz narrative which is like actually dorothy is the kind of antagonist and she's this little brat who comes and meddles and actually in a world that she doesn't belong in and the wizard is the same like the wizard is this interloper kind of colonial overlord yeah um and in return to oz that sort of played with a bit where the gnome king is like but the emeralds like he's supposed to be this kind of like lord of of of the cavernous rocks beneath the earth and he's like well the fucking emeralds belong to me and yeah they stole my And geologically, you can't argue with them.

27:22Shon Faye: You simply cannot argue. And Dorothy is like, you have so many. And he's like, that's not the point. And I'm like, no, fair play. That is not the point. You know, like, they did belong to him. Yeah, like the Gnome King, I think, I mean, if this was a movie that came out today, it would become a real environmentalist metaphor. And I think it would make it a poorer film, like a more palatable film, but a poorer one. I kind of like how the Gnome King's motivations are fucking all over the shop. It's like, okay, he wanted sort of reparations for the emerald stealing. And as punishment, he turns everybody into a statue, which is another unbelievably haunting scene when she walks back into Oz and it's almost like this shut down theme park.

28:05And like the Disney park you will one day go to. And you have everybody who's in these beautiful Romanesque statues that are frozen in time. And like, okay, so it's kind of like a revenge. but then it's like she sends she begins the game show of touch an ornament and uh sends all of her friends in to touch the ornaments and then they all fail but as they all fail he gradually turns from a face in the rock into like an actor with makeup on and like he's like gradually becoming more human and we also realize that he is the psychotherapist from the hospital from the asylum them and uh and so it's like oh and then he's like oh yes when there's nobody left who remembers ours I'll be a human yeah and then I'll rule ours I was like what is this because I love it but just

28:57Shon Faye: give me one more piece of the puzzle he was also sort of like by by as he humanizes too he sort of starts to give camp gay elder which has this kind of crescendo and when he suddenly is like are you sure you didn't come back for these and then he reveals that he's wearing the ruby slippers and has been wearing them the whole time yeah like it would have been so much simpler if he just like put his hand out and they materialized on the cushion or something but he's like no i've been wearing them this whole time he's menacing gay elder the proper old-fashioned crossdresser experience are these for your wife sir yes but yeah and then and then but i love that that it's so camp when she's like my ruby slippers and then he's like no my ruby slippers um and but that i remember that really strongly as a child this man wearing these like fabulous shoes yeah like like princess mambi with the with the customizable head there's like a kind of queer thing to it and this like realization they fell out of the sky off dorothy's feet and and she's actually brought about this entire destruction of Oz accidentally yeah um yeah I wanted to touch actually on that about what's interesting about Return to Oz again maybe comparing it with The Wizard of Oz is you said this about the crossover right so Princess Monbi is the nurse in the mental hospital yes and um the gnome king is it so that is a continuing theme of um um like the wizard of oz which the original film where characters in oz yes like correlate to characters in kansas and so it gives this sense of like as we do in dreams where i don't know if this happens in your dreams i'm i've just started seeing a jungian psychotherapist and um so i now do dream analysis with him because he and so he'll ask me i keep a dream journal and we talk about my dreams in therapy yeah it is I guess it's because it's um it's very explorative and open-ended but um I think I would have thought it was completely fucking woo-woo a few years ago but I'm like now I'm like let's go I I booked a therapist uh several years ago my one time in therapy I was sort of having some sort of grief stuff and I was like I could do with some grief counseling I think but I didn't know what young Ian meant so I just saw that she was kind of local to me and she did young Ian and then I was like I showed up to her place and I was like listen I I had one of my best mates died.

31:18I'd love to chat about it. And she was like, interesting, any dreams? I was like, what the fuck is this? But I think if I was looking for that, I would actually really appreciate that at this time in my life as my dreams have become much more intense as I've gotten older.

31:31Shon Faye: Yeah. One thing about like, because I guess I haven't really been paying attention to them, but I have been. But one thing I do notice in dreams, and this isn't, I think this is pretty common, is that the dramatis persona change. So like for me in my dream, it can be like, oh, like I might be like oh I I was sat with Caroline O'Donoghue doing a podcast and then I turned around and it was Amy Adams do you know what I mean like because it will be love the comp

31:58Shon Faye: but like people will shift in my dreams so I quite so I think that's very realistic and the Wizard of Oz it's this implicit thing that she's had a head injury from from the house yeah And she therefore is tripping balls and is hallucinating that the mean woman down the road is the Wicked Witch of the West and the farmhands are... Yes. Whereas in Return to Oz, what we're left with is the strong sense that, in fact, Oz is real. Yes. There's a really definitive sense of closure in the movie, if we skip to the end. She's had this big adventure. she saved her friends once again princess osma who i guess we'll get to in a sec although i'm not sure what we'll say um uh it says you know here you can um see us anytime you want and then we sort of end with dorothy looking in the mirror speaking with osma calling her auntie and then also being like no don't tell anybody and then it's like yeah it's it's um the affirmation to the audience that we never got in 1939 version this is really real um it's a sort of a parallel world like characters move across like they're the sort of archetypes are similar but it is a real world it is not an hallucination it really gives us that closure and it's like an interesting if you're like I'm not sure I like that though I think I actually I actually think I prefer that Oz is a dream why because I think it's more it's more potent to me that it's like an extension of Dorothy's subconscious unconscious mind and her longings and her fantasies and the feelings of being constrained by being like a farmhand in Kansas yeah I think I find that much more again maybe it's going back to the old school identification queer identification I find that much more powerful than the idea that she's just a girl that's stumbled into because because in the in the in the books I think it is Oz is real but I think it was actually very clever of um MGM to to to actually turn it into yeah to turn it into a dream because i i i don't know i find that i don't know i find that motif a bit more powerful it's really interesting because like yeah because in a way that the sort of the version you're suggesting where it is a hallucination of hers it kind of suggests like oh this and it kind of really does underline and empower the whole ruby slippers thing of like you have the power within you all along like yes you have this kind of like grim kansas life but there's this inner world to you that is like vast and and contains multitudes which again has a nice parallel for kind of queerness and stuff but like maybe yeah maybe it is a better and more hopeful and more exciting version than like ours is kind of like a version of moving to new york when you're gay you know like yeah i mean i don't know how you feel i suppose like because i imagine for you as a novelist like because because we have to forget that the wizard of oz film in 1939 was kind of set a precedent and now maybe we'd think that and it was all a dream is quite yeah it's quite cliche and lazy yeah and actually no one would do it but i think i think it was quite smart for its yeah as a cinematic conceit to be especially with the whole grayscale um technicolor um contrast yeah what i like about this film which is which does genuinely feel quite sinister at the beginning with the with the psychiatric hospital stuff or the the electroshock treatment is that you do feel like it's a violation that they're trying to get rid of Dorothy's memories of Oz because it's like someone is trying to crush her dreams out of her um and I find that really upsetting yeah um that they're trying to like get rid of it it's it's so that all those conversations with the kind of professionals at the asylum like the him showing her the kind of electro shock machine being like he has a face he has two eyes and a nose and there's his tongue and then her just responding with is it gonna hurt like that thing of when a child knows that they're being sort of condescended to and that their language is being co-opted by someone who doesn't respect it it's almost like appropriation and like and you can always tell as a kid it's a really strong kid memory for me of like when an adult is trying to get down onto your level but like they haven't done the learning they haven't done the reading they're being appropriative of your culture and she's like no you're gonna hurt me with this and I know you're gonna hurt me with this I find so I just find it really riveting and you're so right this thing of like this thing of being crushed or being broken down to your component parts or being made mute is this thing that keeps coming up in this movie again and again of like she has this vast internal alive she doesn't know how to deal with it nobody knows how to deal with her first they try and shock it out of her then mom b wants to take her head away which is cunt and and uh then um the the gnome king wants to turn everyone into a mute like ornament and like it really you know where the film is specifically set on the the dawn of the 20th century yeah and it does feel like this kind of really victorian sensibility of like difficult children sort of seen not heard but i don't know it does feel very just sort of in general difficult people being made to be smaller quieter i think there's like an interesting sort of conversion therapy sort of mirror there if you're willing to see it you know like it really that stuff really got me it really made me very emotional i suppose there's no way when they went for for that i suppose actually the end had to be as it was but it was quite funny that it was like and everyone died as the hospital yeah the hospital burned down everyone lived apart from the doctor who went back to his machine infernal machines which does feel it's so funny um the other thing is i hate the chicken but i do that one thing that's really tickling me was that so for people that maybe haven't seen the film in a while um the The Gnome King is killed because actually eggs, hen's eggs are poisonous to gnomes.

38:17Yes.

38:17Shon Faye: I don't know if you knew that, but now you do. And so Belina, Dorothy's chicken, who starts speaking when she arrives in Oz, eventually lays an egg and it poisons the Gnome King. But as a result of that, that's not explained until it happens. We do see you got a chicken in there from the wheelers. The chicken is controversial from me off. Well, that's what was really tickling me today was that they start talking about the chicken and you don't really know where that's going, but every time someone's like, she has a chicken with her. And there is something kind of absurd and silly about the fact that the chicken is being spoken about.

38:55Shon Faye: It's like she's smuggled gear into the horse.

39:02Shon Faye: She's got a chicken with her. Those wheelers are so junky coded as well. Yeah, they are. She's got a chicken in there. Well, that's the thing about the Wheelers, right, is that they are, because the film came out in 1985, the Wheelers and Mombie original head, OG Mombie, her makeup and the Wheelers are the only signs of the 80s. Yeah. But they are really 80s. Well, TikTok's a bit steampunk. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. But, like, the Wheelers, there's something about them. It's the makeup and the... The Starlight Express. Yeah, and the sort of pale faces and then the sort of brightly coloured blush and then the sort of horrible orange hair.

39:42Shon Faye: And then Mambi has got this like, like unblended highlighter beneath her brow that's kind of just, so they're like the only times that we see that we're in the 1980s really. It's interesting that, isn't it? Like everything else does feel sort of so gloomy and timeless. And Mambi's got a perm as well. And Mambi's got a perm. Mambi's got a few perms. There's a few permed heads in there. But it is weird, yeah, because some of her younger heads have a kind of more of a Victorian style but then yeah like otherwise the film you wouldn't know I wouldn't have been able to tell it was made in the 80s yeah you wouldn't have was made in the 60s for a lot of money or in the 90s for no money at all you know it kind of has that sort of look about it like it feels like a tv movie even though it isn't yeah you know it's yeah it has that placelessness to it i feel like the the wheelers they they sort of there's because everyone talks about it right like oh my god you bring up this movie people immediately talk about how terrified they were by the wheelers and i feel like the second that you get their faces and they're giving actual human performances they fall apart for me i'm like when they have the masks when they have the masks over their faces yeah that's really scary um no they're they are properly terrifying and i think that's that's what's so unusual about this film is it has a few distinct images that have managed to stay with like a generation of people forever and haunt them yeah and like actually how many children's films achieve that where it's like vividly that's burned into my mind today i was genuinely like the you know unnerved because it's like it record it's like record it's like traumatic recall my body's keeping the score it's like really remarkable about how a movie that like is technically speaking in many ways not good like like and but and was sort of really not liked at the time it comes out and isn't like a joy to watch now like even if you were having like a kind of um like a showgirlsy type let's all come around and then like watch this movie together because it's a bit of crack and it's a bit of fun and and it's sort of bad and weird it doesn't even kind of succeed on that level because there are so many quite long drawn out sort of dull parts but like and I know I'm sounding like being negative about it I love it because it has created the succession of truly iconic fucked up images that have defined people in chase nightmares for decades like it's such an achievement to do that yeah and I think like it does point to things that I think are still worth you know it's like wicked i look i went to see wicked when it first like i said the whole oz franchise it's not even a franchise but the whole oz were universe canonical and non-canonical and i would argue that they sort of treat return to oz as non-canon these days because it's a bit like everyone like commercially everyone's a bit embarrassed and it was released by disney like the original film was mgm i don't know who does wicked but like like it was weird that disney own the rights to the books they they apparently pumped this film out because they were about to lose the rights because they were out of time out and you know like it's odd because in the like this like all like they don't look like the scarecrow doesn't look anything like the original scarecrow so it's like oh he looks bad yeah he looks he looks like a kind of an animatronic sort of theme park ride sort of of the wizard of ours kind of thing he looks like something that's going to come alive yeah as your boat goes past it you know but it doesn't look anything like the original but then weirdly they paid for the license to use the ruby slippers so it's like that's weird it would have been better off if they had just been like we've got nothing to do yeah with the uh og film with wicked you know wicked is very i like i loved it i went to see it in like 2005 i went over 2006 when it first came to london so i was an early adopter of wicked but i but i and i loved the film i went to see it um and i will be seeing the second part but it is very saccharine and like you know like oz is i i did read the books i think um like if i think about the fantasy novels i read um as a child like i think i think the most fully realized were and intellectually expanding were Earthsea by Ursula K.

44:15Shon Faye: Le Guin. I think the most kind of gripping and page turnery ones were Harry Potter. I don't know why I'm saying sorry. I'm the one being oppressed. Yeah, exactly. I'm the one that literally bought those books to invest into a big fund that's now being used to attack my human rights. anyway then then um i yeah and but then i think the oz books i think what they what i remember about them is they were genuinely fucking weird yeah and because in the original books right like they have to wear spectacles because the emerald city is so bright right it does yeah like you have to wear special glasses because the emeralds when you're too close to them they're too there's like all these weird little details and you mentioned about uh princess osma who in this film this is one of the many threads that this film it's like because it's based on two of the books one of them being osma of oz yeah and so they obviously felt like they needed to introduce osma and she does become queen of oz at the end but it's a bit weird because she's not a fully realized character but one thing that they sort of lift that is quite interesting is this idea of a girl trapped in a mirror that to me is very scary yeah really scary yeah and it's another one of the images that really like I obviously the the mom beat the wheelers stuck in the head on a repeat they're coming up in all the dreams but like when when I saw the asthma in the mirror again I had I wasn't expecting to see it and I had that strange chill of like oh somewhere in my lizard brain asthma's always been in the mirror you know something so haunting about it yeah and in the in the books I think at one point Mumbi turns her into a boy.

46:05Shon Faye: Called Tip, I read today on Wikipedia. Yeah, so that no one will recognize her. So we've got a little trans vibe there. But like this idea of, it's almost kind of ancient Greek, like Ovid or something to turn this girl into a, conceal her as a boy. And is Asma in the books, is she always like a child princess? I think so, yeah. Okay, sure. I think in the film she's more of a composite of figures. But the whole sort of government of Oz, it's a deeply unstable region. I don't know what their economy is like. Their GDP must be so bad because it changes power structure. But for a long time it's a sort of benevolent dictatorship with the wizard.

46:49Shon Faye: But at least things worked, you know. Yeah, before he came, it's not unlike Franco in Spain because before he came there was kings and then they sort of returned to a monarchy. So I presume that politically Oz is left to Spain. It's not like Franco in Spain. So funny. But yeah, Oz is government... Who else is making these comparisons? Nobody. Oz is governmentally quite unusual. I mean, there's something, you know, I'm not sure that I would want to live there, just economically. But so by the end, I think it's to tie things up. Although it's odd because Dorothy has left the scarecrow as kind of king.

47:29Shon Faye: Yes, that was the end of the original art. And then he gets turned into a statue. He gets usurped by the gnome king, turned into an ornament, and then he's unturned back into the scarecrow and it's like, why get to be king now, right? So, oh, no, Osma's here. So we're actually going to go back to that line of succession, which pre-existed. So he was always kind of a prince regent to begin with. Yeah, well, he's kind of just some sort of like, yeah, I guess it's like, I mean, it's kind of like Trotsky in that way. He's just like never quite real. He's gone to Mexico and get murdered by an ice pick in 20 years.

48:03Shon Faye: Well, yeah, just like, you know, like in the end, Trotsky never really saw any real power. It's like the scarecrow is. Trotsky. Yeah. Like he's probably the one with all the real radical ideas. Well, if anything, he was because, well, yeah, or Osmerachi would be, I guess, closer to like reinstalling the czars. That's why it's more like Spain. I'm thinking this live, Caroline. but I think yeah so so Ozma just in the film I do think the image of this girl trapped in the mirror this is what I think about Return to Oz I guess if I was going to do a sort of overline thing is that I think it's full of images that I think wow this should be in more kids stuff because I think there is a general I guess the commercial expectations of cinema I'm sure that there would be people in the industry that would say you know this film flopped and there's a reason for it people don't particularly parents probably don't like the idea of films that scare their children but i do think um this idea of a slightly dark fucked up side to children's stories yeah um that exposes the sort of darker side of human nature like it is captivating and i just think some of the it has been mined out i think of of children's films like i think i mean if we if we call wicked a kids film which i guess we could like i mean in the way that the these other two movies are kids films there is like jump scare moments like you've got those um monkeys coming through attacking poré in a grand day in a striplash um and that's like a very jarring scene but like i feel like a real a real problem or whether it's a bug or a feature i don't know but we're getting a lot of um movies that need to be you know financed a lot making movies is more expensive than ever and so scripts really need to be ironed out of any implausibility down the line we don't want to lose anyone at any point everything must be explained signposted you know everything like the the chickens being the eggs being poisonous we would have known that by minute five if return to us was made now and i think we might have jump scares in kids films now but what we're losing is genuine strangeness implausibility and creepiness because I think in order to create those moments on screen and in film you need to leave doubt and wonder and kind of black spaces where your imagination has to fill in the rest yeah I'm trying to think of the last time I think there was that element of chilling or you know because I don't see loads of children's films at this point in my life because I don't have kids and there aren't like yeah kids that I'm taking to the cinema so i'm out of the loop that either parents or children themselves are in but i suppose like um tilda swinton is the white witch in the narnia films because it's tilda swinton so there's a kind of icy yeah she's bringing a weirdness and also the kind of i mean she's she's got the kind of like they make her gigantically tall and she's got the kind of couture looks yeah also a white women with dreadlocks look which is quite wild but whatever it was like 2003 but like maybe that like I can remember because I'm trying to think about when I was a child return to apart from return to Oz what the sort of films that were targeted because I watched a lot of I unfortunately my mum was quite not super on it because I was her eldest child so I saw a lot of like but we really grew up during the age of um which is now totally over of the serialized horror tv show for children you know like goosebumps and are you afraid of the dark were they ever the demon headmaster the demon headmaster yeah the demon headmaster to this day the prefects are the voice of the headmaster they must be obeyed and it was actually really scary like these like yeah these like hypnotized prefects um so yeah this idea of peril or threat but it being more intensely psychological than just like all jump scare um yeah and i and i and i'm i'm sure that maybe there are equivalents of it now but i do think i think 80s and 90s because i was also thinking as well as tilda swinton there was like a 1980s tbc adaptation of the lion the witch in the wardrobe and again the white witch and that was very scary and um yeah i guess like yeah i just think there was something maybe going on in the 80s and early 90s where there was like a slightly darker mood and there's definitely because like this and also i think that the existence of Jim Henson's Creature Shop was really helping sort of push it as well I mean like that to have a kind of um I don't know a dedicated studio that was just pumping out weird shit for for big Hollywood bugs that doesn't really exist in the same way now we don't have the kind of the guy we go to to get our fucked up puppets and I certainly wish that we did but I also think that like there are always kids who love this like everyone you know there's always 12 year olds watching Twin Peaks do you know I mean ever since Twin Peaks came out there's a 12 year old watching it somewhere and I do think people are getting that fix now young people are getting that fix from like sort of brain rot TikTok accounts kind of thing you know sort of like odd cursed memes that they don't understand but they're tickling a kind of another region of their brain that Return to Oz possibly would have tickled before the other the other standout I think is and I mentioned the little mermaid earlier was ursula the sea witch the poor unfortunate souls yeah but now i obviously growing up and again it's like she was based on divine yeah pat carol who voiced her was picked because she had a low voice that sounds very androgynous like she could be a drag queen and there is like a scene yeah in the poor unfortunate souls where she's like donut you know about talking about how she's going to take a voice and she's explaining to ariel that she'll still be able to bag a man without a voice because men don't like women talking anyway yeah yeah and and there's like a whole bit she's like don't forget the importance of body language and she's like throwing her hips around it's very sexy yeah and i it's like yeah unreal but like it really embedded itself on my conscious and it's like anything that's like you know sort of a bit like it like it almost like how did that end up in a kids film and it isn't it how did this like sort of like sexual drag queen i mean think about like the moral panic about drag queens now yeah and then like in like 1989 disney basically like someone at disney managed to get away with putting divine in as the as the villain and like you know getting as close to a drag queen as you could get like a really low voice broadway star yeah i mean you see a lot of that and like i'm sure you get sent the same sort of disney adult algorithm stuff as i do because we are both closeted Disney adults of like the kind of queer coding of villains in that kind of classic Disney's animated thing like Scar is like talk about another queer he's got ruby red slippers on when I was about like 12 or 13 and obviously I'd seen the Lion King many times you know when you have those like odd moments like sexual awakening isn't one of those things that happens in at least for me it didn't happen in like obviously there were things like you see a muscly man and you're like oh and then yeah yeah in my case like oh fuck i've directed boys but i remember thinking oh scar's voice is very sexy yeah of course like when i was like 12 or 30 but specifically like oh that's hot do you know what i mean but i remember having a huge sexual awakening moment to um the end of aladdin when jafar has jasmine in the red outfit yes and she's got the gold handcuffs and just like pretend that like she's was turned on by him and then he like sees through because he sees Aladdin's reflection in her crown as you can tell it's really imprinted on me and then he puts her in an hourglass and she slowly drowns in sand yeah oh my god that was a sexual moment for you huge the thing I remember about gosh we're really going to die but the thing I remember most about that was a huge thing for me and I thought it was fab and I still think it's fab is the Aladdin where she is posing as a peasant and then they try and arrest Aladdin And she's like, unhand him by order of the princess.

56:11Shon Faye: And I'm just like, such a good reveal of Drag Race. Such a good reveal. I can't believe no one's ever referenced that. I love that. Because it's like, you know. Order of the princess. But like, this is. I am not a prize to be won. I can't believe I've never had an opportunity to say that. It's so annoying. There are also that, I think on that sort of AI slop, TikTok, Disney adult stuff that you're talking about. There's a lot of like, I saw one recently that was meowing myself. There was one about how disappointed Belle is at the end of Beauty and the Beast when he turns into like, he turns into like a sort of pansexual guy from Field that's, you know, practicing ethical non-monogamy.

56:53Shon Faye: Yes, very little McNalbo. Yeah. And she's like, I wanted to fuck the Beast. The Beast. Didn't sign up for this. Come on. awful awful hair awful yeah but yeah i think that there is a sort of like darkness in that can be unexplored in kind of children's and i think they continue to be in children's fiction right like books allow um you know like i remember genuinely being quite i think you know children do terror um does need to be sort of a part of the development of an imagination as a child um and sort of yeah particular images being really scary like you know what what is it it's like something like freudian uncanny vibes about what why are we all so scared by the idea of the all children were also scared by the idea of this woman that keeps multiple beautiful heads that all sort of move around in these cabinets it's like there's something there about it like like this yeah the uncanny like you know what why is that so scary like it's not you know nothing violent there's nothing it's not bloody at all like it's not like we're she's we're seeing her chop off heads and i think i was i was studying those scenes very closely today because i had that same thought and i think it's so much of it is in the fact that throughout the entire scene as um dorothy and mambi are having a conversation in the sort of head closet um the the faces are all animate and they're all kind of watching and for me and then later on when they all start screaming after she breaks into the cupboard it sort of flips and it's like it's just something about the book ending of those scenes together is very internally horrifying and satisfying but it's also I think it's the it's the thought of consciousness I think that is really scary as well the idea of like okay so when she swaps a head out she instantly becomes mambi but does that mean when the heads are dormant they are all fractions of mambi as well are they their original characters?

58:53Like at what point does the transition begin? Like that, that fucks me up.

58:57Shon Faye: Yeah. And I think... Hey everybody, it's Farnoosh Tarabi, host of the So Money podcast. This episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. You know that one friend who always finds the best travel deals, picks the right cards and somehow ends up in first class for the price of coach? Smart Travel is like that friend, but in podcast form. They cover things like which travel cards earn their keep in which are just heavy, shiny metal. And the smartest ways to book flights without playing Guess the Cheapest Day. Travel smarter and spend less with help from NerdWallet. Follow Smart Travel wherever you get your podcasts.

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1:00:10Shon Faye: maybe like a child-like thing to do which is like the idea of um heads on dolls and customisable that little girls in particular would do but it turns it into this really sinister thing which is i will imagine if someone did that to you you know there's a kind of terror there about like um it being a familiar idea but then being made real which is the hallucinogenic quality of i guess which is it's like a lot of um maybe childlike uh yeah like i guess like childlike um idealism or wonder being turned into something quite literal and therefore scary also there's something very like the terrible beauty i think is scary i mean obviously there's like the wicked stepmother but like it's always very telegraphed from the beginning but i think the way like mambi is introduced where she's in this huge grand hall she's so beautiful and she's playing a tiny guitar yeah and then it's like we're just i don't know we're just made to trust beautiful women on screen when we're that age and you know dorothy goes quite willingly to her and then the heads yeah i wonder if the wheelers as well are kind of some sort of like because they're quite like teenagers as well there's like a teenage gang vibe about them It's so like the boys who are hanging out outside the corner shop and I'm afraid to go in because they're all smoking and what if they say something to me?

1:01:40Shon Faye: Which is quite 1980s, the teenage boys are all smoking glue, let's make a video campaign for schools vibe. There's a kind of fear of youth culture there. And the fact that when you're a small child, groups of teenage boys are quite scary. Yeah. On bikes. And I do think that the wheelers are, because the wheelers would never be in the 1930s film. No, they are like a bicycle culture thing. And that's why they're kind of punky vibes. It sort of feels like they're a riff on punks. But that thing when she's being chased by them down this kind of stone labyrinth, it does sort of feel like your worst exact fear as a kid, which is you've seen a bunch of boys on bicycles.

1:02:21They've yelled something at you. What if they chase you? It feels just so, yeah, like dreamlike and odd, but also a reflection of a truly real fear and a truly real experience. Yeah. so that might be

1:02:33Shon Faye: maybe it's an amazing movie maybe I was too rude about it earlier I think there are just like some very inspired things about it apparently the guy that directed it he'd never directed before he was a cutter for I read this earlier Francis Ford Coppola I believe so he was like inside Hollywood or whatever but not a director yeah this was his first directing job it fell behind schedule because things kept getting delayed and also didn't he get ill yeah and then for rosa bulk because she was carrying the whole film as we've discussed she had child law you know child labor laws um damn child labor laws and so it fell behind schedule and there was a point where he was almost fired during it but then he um got he was mates with george lucas and george lucas flew in and managed to convince them not to fire him and they reverse their decision.

1:03:29Shon Faye: But basically, the film flopped so hard, he was blacklisted, and he was never directed since. So this is his one film. Wow. But that's what, what do you think? Because I always think this about, like, I think it more about pop songs, like being a one-hit wonder. Yeah. Because sometimes I think, it must be fucking great to be a one-hit wonder. Oh, yeah. Like, honestly, because you're relieved of all the tensions of a big career, but you've got this one thing, that like maybe it's cringe for the first five years after it happened but like you know like um i was thinking about jennifer page's song crush from the 90s that it's just a crush so good yeah it's so good but imagine being jennifer page it's like you probably get like one or two invites a year globally to go to a pride and sing that you know it comes on the radio all the time yeah but you've you've been forced to get on and she probably day to day leads a normal life but you get to whip out I've been thinking this a lot about it a lot lately I think because um you know with like Mighty Hoopla, Sankt the Pink and everything all the lineups are just like essentially the one hit wonders of the early noughties kind of thing and it's like you're just so delighted like wow I'm so glad that Amy Stutt gets to play I loved Amy Stutt I love Amy Stutt and like I feel also I feel like I'm never in a club now I mean like I'm I'm so rarely in a club but when I am there's always some banging remix of Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield and I realize she isn't a one hit wonder she was quite successful but like there's something about maybe it's something to do with like we're of a generation that's partying more and later into life like generally every previous generation far more of us would be far more settled by now there's quite a lot of us who are still partying and going to hoopla and uh we're just kind of we have the resources to keep these one hit wonders kind of going it's sort of beautiful and everyone's interested in seeing them for at least an afternoon like there's a real business to be made out of one hit wonders that I'm not sure really worked before maybe that's true and I but I just wonder it might with a pop song it's a bit different because it's only a commitment of three minutes but I just I've always wondered if like I would be I mean I I don't know because with books like I literally wrote my second book partly because I had a successful first book and I was like I don't want to be the person that just wrote that book about trans issues and like like the second project for me was very much about please just don't let me be a one hit wonder like a one a one bestseller type yeah um so clearly i do have a fear of it but i guess where i'm thinking at like bigger media i'm like maybe once you get over the grief and i'm thinking about this guy is like return to oz it's kind of okay he never worked again but it's now like what 40 years well yeah 40 years ago yeah like now maybe when you just like kick back and be like actually i'm kind of proud of this like so many people watch this film like it has got this cult it's the whole thing about the cult classic thing right it's like elizabeth berkeley you mentioned showgirls where she basically said that like it kind of fucked her over at the time but she's grown to like love that character i wonder if there is something quite almost quite chic about being a one hit wonder more so than being like a two or three hit wonder you know like i'd rather be jennifer page who did crush than katie perry oh for sure do you know what i mean like so locked in a particular time and so successful in that time and probably still getting soundtrack money and syncs and stuff and like probably still getting a nice bit of cash through and we did an episode about a year ago on one hit wonders and uh a friend of mine who came on as a musician said you know what i think what people miss about the one hit wonder is the wonder like how how difficult it is for to for to capture that much attention for any amount of time at all and like how um i think that return to us kind of falls under that remit of being like you know yeah you didn't ever make another movie and yeah this was a failure when it came out but like it is so difficult to for any movie to leave any kind of impression on anyone like how many like cohen brothers movies have i seen that like were nominated for oscars and i don't remember a frame of you know there are some companies i love this is not a dig on them i'm just saying worthy films are forgotten constantly and this is a piece of trash that is beloved and is full of wonder you know oh yeah 100 i i'm trying to think of like other children's films that left an impression on me to the degree that this one where i'd be able to remember vivid scenes that left a very strong emotional impact on me in terms of fear um or similar and i'm like there aren't many no um do you think in in some ways like like the method is the message in that like i think like the ways in which i remember this movie are not like i was in uh at a birthday party and we all sat down to watch it kind of thing it the ways in which i remember this movie are like it's a weird rainy saturday in somebody else's house and we turn it on and it's already half done and we we just see the scene of of mambi or we just see the we just see something else and it's kind of because it was on tv a lot it it exists in people's brains as repeated fragments rather than a whole narrative well even i remember how i consumed it as a child so like what my dad would do for me uh was when films were on television he would record them onto vhs and then he would print special labels and stick them on so that instead of having the like bought vhs version i would have like the wizard of oz to watch endlessly because he'd recorded it yeah on bbc2 with all the ads yeah yeah and like i remember so i had wizard of oz and then i also had return to oz with those specially printed labels on the like wow that's nice yeah and um and return to Oz the recording of it started about five minutes and he hadn't caught the beginning of it okay so I always started when she was just like the she was already had arrived at the hospital and was I think it's the gurney right it's where it starts but you do you know that well there's like very yeah you might have that kind of static wipe that goes on the screen as well because the tape is old like that adds to the kind of freakishness of it I've just remembered one of the other ones that left a strong impression me I don't know if you remember this because were you have because i you asked me about your my relationship to fantasy and but i'm seeing that you probably had yeah i would say that you and i were on a similar i wasn't like a huge wizard of oz person but like definitely um you know yeah definitely everything witchcraft huge fairies girl like i was really based on the cottingly fairies obsessed and like did you hear Okay, here's a ghoulish thing that I really hope you've heard of.

1:10:18Lady Cottingly's like pressed fairy book. Yes. You're aware. As I know it, that she said that they were like smushed fairies. So it was basically, it was Terry Jones from Monty Python. Fucking weird. So he was obsessed with the real Cottingly fairies story, which is like the Victorian girls who fake the photographs, which I was already obsessed with. and then he came out with this kind of art book which was with the illustrator who i think did the dark crystal so it's all of a family here um i think they met doing labyrinth together because i think terry jones was on labyrinth and then they made this art book essentially that was like uh the story of a little girl snapping fairies in her book in her like what's supposed to be a pressed flowers book and there are these ghoulish dying fairies with their sort of bodies pressed against the paper like can you see the images and what was so extraordinary and and very haunted about this book is that it the book goes over the course of her life so she starts about she's five she can barely rise she's like I caught a fairy ha ha ha and she's like kind of a sadist and never stops being one she's killing them her whole life and then as she gets older the cursive becomes harder to read so if you're a child you kind of had to stop reading but as it goes on she um the fairies become like complicit in these erotic episodes she has some of them are kind of are basically rape like they're like holding her down while the rector shags her oh my god it's so unclear who this book is for but it was given to me because i liked fairies but like i was obsessed with it and it was like that thing that sort of private thing i went to look at by myself when I was done thinking about sand.

1:12:01Shon Faye: I thought I knew what you were talking about. I did not know about the deeply fucked up psychosexual Cottingly Fairies book. Yeah. I'll be Googling that. But actually you just mentioned Labyrinth. Yeah. Like again, another 80s film. Yeah, but that is another film of like this where I think it had such a striking, like some images from, I can't actually, I haven't seen Labyrinth probably since I was a child. Yeah. So I couldn't tell you the plot. um in depth but like i can still remember the baby going missing yeah um and david bowie and the the waltz around the room yeah he's basically telling her to be his bride yeah yeah exactly and there was another film um called legend i think oh with um no that's willow yeah there's willow but there's legend warwick davis and both of them yeah and then and then at the end and this was so scared me was tim curry plays like the devil and he's like he's got like he appears and he's like fully bright red with horns but with tim curry's voice and that really i can still remember that to this day like finding this like genuinely scary kind of satanic figure again in a children's film but i do think like whether you say the one hit wonder i guess in cinema it's the um cult classic yeah yeah because i do think um i mean some cult classics are um like practical magic big cult classic um but flopped at the box office yeah but totally beloved now so much so they're making a sequel with lee pace yes but i but i do sometimes think would i i suppose i would always rather commercial success and to have a lovely home in the hollywood hills or whatever but like it there is also something quite chic about cult classic and then you just wrap it up there and no more scene it's like how you know Kate Bush only did one tour in the you know yeah in the 70s like and then where's like no I don't like touring I'm never gonna do it again there's something quite glamorous about yeah doing one thing I think what has to be inherent to the cult classic I think it is quite different to the one-hit wonder because like a one-hit wonder is like here's a shimmering pop gem that like summarizes the moment and also subverts the moment and here you go enjoy your summer kind of thing whereas the cult classic I think what keeps people coming back to them whether it's showgirls or this or the room or or even practical magic to a point of view is that there's it's so difficult to tell with these movies that are imperfect what is intentional and what is an accident do you know what I mean because it doesn't feel overworked to death or it just feels like there's still kind of odd layers left in or bits they forgot to delete and it's kind of the humanness of it that sort of because you can sort of see the strings you can see the joins you can see the intentionality where it came together and where it fell apart I'm so well historically gay myself but obviously these days a fag hag Like I am, but I'm so embedded in kind of a gay sensibility in adulthood that sometimes I'm a bit confused about what's a cult classic, what's not, because something just feels to me like it must have been, it's like a mainstream hit that everyone knows.

1:15:20Shon Faye: And then I realise it's always just because I only know gay people and gay people are obsessed with this film. I'll give you an example. It's like First Wives Club. I actually don't know. Yes. In my head, that's a monster classic. Yes. And I don't, but then like, I'm assuming that probably a lot of the people we know. Yeah. are like it's for empowered girlies and gays and i don't know whether or not it was big at the time but maybe it was but to me it's massive like yeah yeah yeah massive like film but i think it has an afterlife that was bigger than its initial because it's so beloved and i would always re-watch that film an interesting kind of way to figure out the aggregate of like whether or not something is a classic is when the sort of the metacritic or the rotten tomatoes is really low because it's taking contemporaneous reviews and then the imdb score is like nine out of ten you know that's good to know actually so it's like you find the cult in between yeah if it's like it's like 13 rotten tomatoes nine out of ten mdb that's the tell yeah oh my god yeah because yeah i'm trying to think of like oh death becomes her oh for sure yeah death becomes her is a strange one because that is a classic one where it is very another one that we're doing the quick and every trans woman i know it's like one of their favorite films like yeah like munro burgdorff it's one of her favorite films it's one of my favorite films like um uh bimini not trans woman but like under the trans umbrella um i remember her telling me like drag queens and trans women and it's obviously it's again it's that like relationship to femininity like high camp high bitchy but kind of also like this idea the fear of like femininity and um yeah and again like full of these kind of like stock images like goldie one having a hole in her stomach and yes isabella rossellini and her big necklace guess how old i am that was a really good isabella rossellini wasn't she's like 78 i'm 87 years old um but um yeah like i think um yeah like the cult classic i i just think i would be quite happy if i was a director of like a cult classic and then we just oh another film that like i think got critically panned that i think now like now is like considered better with hindsight was um marie antoinette the sophia coppola yeah because i think at the time everyone was like what the fuck is this because they just didn't like it but now i think it's like very beloved and yeah oh i could never get enough of just like behind the scenes pictures of like kirsten dunst having a fag or having one headphone in listening to a song on a macbook or something you know but again like i think it was because people didn't get that kind of like playful oh she's a bratty teenager who happens to be the queen of france and like we're gonna have aaron carter do the soundtrack like it's genius it's such a weird it's such a yeah genius um but like such a weird one for sofia coppola who like famously it was like she worked for years on marie antoinette and she like then wrote lost in translation in 30 days and then lost in translation instantly beloved indie classic and marie antoinette it takes 20 years for people to understand what was going on but you know i'm not gonna feel bad for something no and she's not a one-hit wonder for sure no the other thing here's one thing i actually noticed today when i re-watched it we can maybe end on this yeah is i did love that like dorothy's it starts off with like oh dorothy's got mental problems yes but there's actually quite a lot about mental problems in it so like um bellina is like oh i don't want to go back where i can't talk tick tock's thinking winds down and he says something about like well how are you still able to talk when you couldn't think and dorothy goes it happens to people all the time sassy and then and then and then jack pumpkin head is like always check my head for signs of spoiling that because i don't really upset me those lines he keep because he kept saying spoiling yeah he was like don't yeah he was like he was like because i've seen so little of the world yet i don't want to spoil before i can and i was like this film is like it's very like same there's something maybe with like same No, I think genuinely there was something that really spoke to me this morning where I was like, maybe genuinely, because like right now in the world, I feel like about half of the conversations I'm having with everyone I know is we're only getting more mentally ill.

1:19:52Shon Faye: Like fascism, tech, we're only like getting more and more like we're all just managing an unsolvable growing mental health dip. Sorry to end on this bleakness. And we just been like for the last sort of like, I'm going to say six years, the feeling like the levees are about to break and surely we can't take any more. And then yet another day passes and another thing happens. Yeah, literally. And I feel like that's what Return to Oz was giving me was that everyone had like literal head trouble. Like whether your brain is winding down and slowing, TikTok, I mean, his name alone, right? How could they?

1:20:24Shon Faye: TikTok. TikTok and his brain is constantly winding down. Oh my God. How press he is with that. Jack Pumpkinhead, his head is spoiling. And Bellina is like, I'm not going back where I'm just going to be clucking the whole time. Like a hen. Gump has got his own situation. Well, Gump's like, I wasn't made to turn around. I can't perform a U-turn. I have to just keep going. And he keeps joking about the last, like, you know, he says, I think I understood my previous life better than this one. There's something about. Yes, he hates having a body. He hates movement. So there's something about head trouble.

1:20:59Shon Faye: Literally everyone's heads are. You're so. Oh my God. everyone's heads are fucked and then it starts with an asylum yeah because Dorothy's had a head injury so there's this repeated motif of like oh everyone's heads fucked and I'm like this is like me and all my mates me and all my mates that's the meme I'm glad that we have the meme ready to go for the podcast going out me and all my mates yeah because you're like it's so the original Wizard of Oz like everyone has a complex series of emotional and mental problems courage whatever this is all just like my head's fucked I mean heads literally my head my literal head is fucked

1:21:38I'm so glad that we got to this conclusion in the end delighted with this this has been returned to Oz our heads are fucked thank you Sean thank you Carol

1:22:06Hey, everybody. It's Farnoosh Tarabi, host of the So Money podcast. This episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. You know that one friend who always finds the best travel deals, picks the right cards, and somehow ends up in first class for the price of coach? Smart Travel is like that friend, but in podcast form. They cover things like which travel cards earn their keep in which are just heavy, shiny metal. And the smartest ways to book flights without playing guess the cheapest day. Travel smarter and spend less with help from NerdWallet. Follow smart travel wherever you get your podcasts.