Something shifted on that warm summer’s night in 1996, when the film ended and I found myself waking as if from a dream. Staggered, bleary-eyed. Torn between the waking moment and that impulse to go back. Not unlike Dorothy upon waking from her own Technicolor slumber, I was convinced that I had been somewhere else, some faraway place where magic happens, and I was desperate to go back.
This must’ve been what it was like back in the day when images were first projected on to a screen and whole audiences gave themselves over to the illusion of cinema. The difference was that I had experienced this alone, in my bedroom, on a small analogue TV. We weren’t rich. My mother’s boyfriend just happened to work as a satellite engineer. His job was to install Sky. That’s how he courted her. He stuck a satellite dish on the chimney and suddenly we had dozens of channels. Cartoon channels. Sports channels. Film. Not all of them, obviously. Just the ones that came with the basic package he insisted on paying for. I couldn’t have asked for more, but then, after a few months, this generous man decided to wire Sky into my bedroom.
This was something else altogether. A whole other level. Nobody had this back then. Not one person from about the estate or in my school. The way it worked was that he ran an aerial lead from the Sky box through the ceiling and up through my bedroom floor, into the back of the TV, allowing me to watch whatever they were watching downstairs. That first night I sat on my bed and marvelled. Channels changed in front of me as if by a ghost. Images replaced images, the full spectrum of every kind of programme flashed before my six-year-old eyes, then it stopped, and the film that was showing at that exact moment was The Wizard of Oz.
It was still bright, and I could’ve been outside with my mates, digging for worms in the big flowerpots that had been built in every other square to introduce a bit of greenery on to the estate. That’s what we’d do, we’d pull big long squirmy worms out of the muck and drop them into plastic bottles filled with dirt so we could watch them burrow down into it. And it wasn’t just worms. We did it with bees too. We’d go around with plastic bottles stuffed with flowers and catch them as they hopped from one plant to another. If you caught enough, they would buzz so loud the bottle would vibrate in your hand. One day I lay down on the grass in the middle of the estate and fell asleep. A wee lad from round the corner had a plastic bottle filled right up to the lid, and he held it to my ear while I slept. I jumped, terrified, thinking I was being attacked by a swarm. The buzzing was so loud, so violent, and there were so many bees squeezed into that clear bottle, hundreds of them crawling over each other. A single black mass. That’s my memory, and it haunts me to this day.
If I think back and try to remember what drew me to The Wizard of Oz that night, my mind immediately goes to the wind in the opening credits. It’s not the actual wind we hear, but voices wooing like the wind, a whole choir of them, and it’s a strange, uncanny sound. Like ghosts. Curiosity walks hand in hand with fear, and there was nothing I feared more as a child than the wind at night. Our estate had been built on a hill, and in the winter the wind howled so loud my mother had to make up a story about Santa calling to his reindeer to get me to sleep. That’s him getting ready to deliver your presents, she told me. Urging his reindeer on. Whistling. That’s how you know it’s Christmas soon, she said, and I bought into it hook, line, and sinker. Still, that residual fear was there. I must’ve felt it when the chorus of voices wailed through the TV that night. But I was brave, I stuck it out, and within the first five minutes, Judy Garland started to sing. The world dissolved. I slipped into what felt like a waking dream, and it was so unobstructed and pure that nothing else existed. Not even myself.
*
When asked about where his ideas come from, David Lynch, the artist and film-maker whose entire oeuvre is permeated with references to The Wizard of Oz, said, rather ruefully, that his ideas come “like on a TV in your mind”. Apart from being a very David Lynch thing to say, it is, at least for me, fairly accurate. There is a kind of screen there. Any ideas that come to me play through that screen. Sometimes they take the form of images, sometimes words or sentences. Regardless, it’s less the process than the medium I’m interested in, the medium being the screen and whether being exposed and subsequently falling under the spell of the television at such an early age can in some way influence how a person’s imaginative machinations work.
Lynch would’ve been 10 when The Wizard of Oz was shown on TV for the first time. Like most people from his generation, that’s (probably) how he would’ve watched it. Not in the cinema – it was a box office failure – but during the holiday season, when it was shown almost every year between 1956 and 1974, and drew some of the largest audiences at the time. As Lynch said himself, on numerous occasions, not a day went by when he didn’t think about The Wizard of Oz. And he kept going back to it, kept calling forth those images that have seeped so deeply into the Western psyche that the associations are almost archetypical in the collective consciousness: the red shoes, the Yellow Brick Road, the floating bubble, the Emerald City, the wind. Lynch was obsessed with the wind, you hear it all through his work, and it often carries something of those sinister, otherworldly wails we hear in the opening credits of The Wizard of Oz. I wonder then if that’s what Lynch meant by “a TV in your mind”, if he was consciously or unconsciously talking about the TV he sat in front of when he was a boy and watched The Wizard of Oz for the first time. If so, is that where he was trying to return to? Was that his home?
*
My earliest attempts at writing were done on a typewriter owned by a woman called Mary McAree, who lived across the street from us. I was only four or five, but there was something magical about pressing the keys and watching black letters appear on the page in front of me. It didn’t matter what they said, if indeed they said anything at all. A connection was established. Stories emerged, and for however many hours I sat at the typewriter in the corner of Mary’s livingroom, dreaming up fantastical worlds nobody else had access to, only me, only my imagination, I was somewhere else. That’s something that has remained consistent throughout my life. This impulse to go inward. To make images. And I’m in no doubt that being exposed to The Wizard of Oz around that time, when the impulse began to take root, has something to do with why I’m still doing it now.
That’s not to say that there weren’t deeper, more complicated internal mechanisms at work. There most certainly were. That impulse to withdraw into myself, to escape my own sepia-toned life, as it were, and embark upon my own imaginative adventures, was the ultimate form of escape. And there were things I desperately wanted to escape from, even at that age.
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That might be part of the reason why Dorothy’s journey cut through to me the way it did. Her boldness, her fearlessness, and her willingness to take control of her own destiny, to pry it out of the hands of the weaker, more exploitable adults in her life, and doing this with the aim of improving the collective lot of the characters around her, of raising them up, empowering them, and in her own way, saving them from their deepest fears and inadequacies, must’ve struck me as profoundly heroic, and something to aspire to in my own creative life. That hasn’t changed. I still have a deep affinity for the message, as idealistic as it is, and although writing for me is now less about escape than it is a form of excavation, there’s still something in the act of composition itself, of embarking on a trade that can only be practised alone, separate from the external world, that speaks to that urge to disappear. All that matters then are the words on the page, the images and the effects that can be drawn out of them. Everything else, at least during the act of writing, must be left behind.
*
A few years ago, I sat up late one night drinking with a poet who insisted on listening to Judy Garland singing three different versions of Somewhere Over the Rainbow on YouTube. The first was the original from the film. The second was a performance she gave in 1955, when she was thirty-three, and the third was recorded at a concert in Denmark on March 25th, 1969, less than three months before she passed away. There were no words. We were, to be fair, too drunk for words. All we could do was cry. Well, she cried. I sat there in great turmoil, struggling against the waves of emotion rising through me. Because I dare not cry, not in front of other people. And there was a whole squad of people – Belfast-based poets, mostly – squeezed into the space around us, drinking determinedly. Listening to Judy Garland sing a song that speaks to a deep longing we’ve all had and will continue to have, in one form or another, for the rest of our lives. That’s what made it so moving, listening to her perform at each stage of her life, from girlhood to middle age, and hearing how the song changes as she changes, her voice deepening with age and experience, becoming more sombre, more alive to life’s cruelties.
A sense of tragedy permeates the recording from Denmark in particular. You know she’s at the end now, her life has been what it has been and much of it terrible, and still she manages to go to that place, that bottomless well of intention that only the greatest artists are able to draw from, and give it to us straight and true.
This essay is taken from In The Good Seats: Essays on Film (VA Books, Feb 2025) by Belfast author Michael Magee. His debut novel, Close to Home, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature 2023, the Nero Award for Debut Fiction, the John McGahern Prize, and was named Waterstones Irish Book of the Year
