Oz – A Rock'n'Roll Road Movie

(Chris Löfvén, Australia, 1976)

The fantasy genre, as defined by Tzvetan Todorov, offers no clear explanation of the strange events it depicts. Films that opt for a rational explanation are part of the uncanny genre. Chris Löfvén’s Oz – A Rock’n’Roll Road Movie is the only Australian production of the 1970s that fits this category.

Since the main character is named Dorothy (Joy Dunstan), wears red magic shoes and is off to see the final performance of Wizard (Graham Matters) – he is a rock star – one may infer that this is a remake/reworking/modernisation/parody (take your pick) of The Wizard of Oz (1939). As in the original story by Frank L. Baum (of which there are several film versions), Dorothy is, after all, only dreaming.

Interpreting Löfvén’s film as a dream makes sense of the various fantasy elements encountered throughout. The same actors appear in numerous roles, with a particular idée fixe on the Wizard, who is everything from a tram conductor and record dealer to an usher at a theatre. Dorothy’s shoes guide her through the unfamiliar labyrinth of the city to the Wizard’s concert and, eventually, save her from the advances of a rapist trucker (i.e., she kicks him in the balls).

Dorothy’s dream exists to teach a moral lesson. It does not open the world of the marvellous to the dreamer, but rather serves to return her into waking reality, wiser than before. In the Judy Garland version of the story, the moral delivered by Dorothy at the end was befitting the idealism of sentimental, small-town America: “There’s no place like home”.

In Oz, 37 years later, the modern Dorothy leaves home and her romantic aspiration relates to rock music, life out on the road, and a search for self-discovery and fulfilment. Here, the moral point speaks out against the excesses of egomania and greed: “Fame and fortune fuck you up.”

Oz is an intriguing oddity in Australian cinema history – one of relatively few feature-length musicals, it previews a music-video aesthetic of the 1980s (and beyond) of which Löfven (born 1948) was, already in the ‘60s, a precocious pioneer. But, in any other terms, it is pretty off-putting. If Oz takes its own moralising seriously, then its presentation of sexuality is quite offensive.

Dorothy, the innocent, is the prize to be won by whoever gets to her first. One of the Ross Wilson songs is “Who’s Gonna Love You Tonight?” – indeed, all the songs are of men speaking or men desiring, never about Dorothy’s point-of-view. Agency, please!

Even worse is what the film does with Glenn (Robin Ramsey), who sets Dorothy on her mission to find the Wizard. He is the stereotyped queer, down to the sparkling white suit and predictably effeminate gestures. As well, Glenn is revealed to be the evil purveyor of all that fame and fortune – the corrupting entrepreneur. The moral lesson might as well read: homosexuals are ruining the world.

If, alternatively, one takes the film as parody – of Hollywood, rock music culture, the pretentious philosophy of finding your real self – then the stereotypes are (perhaps) jokes at the expense of those very stereotypes and the mentality from which they emerge. That would be a generous reading.

But the vagueness of such an interpretation places Oz a long way behind Shirley Thompson vs. the Aliens (1972), the parodic-critical intentions of which are far clearer.

This is a rewritten excerpt from the survey chapter on “Fantasy” commissioned by editor Scott Murray for the long out-of-print The New Australian Cinema (Nelson, 1980) – my first-ever appearance in a book, at the age of 20!

© Adrian Martin December 1979