The DVD Fairy

So the machine is used on people by placing these metal headphones on their heads and running the currents through them. This shot is taken when they are “testing” the machine, so what you can’t experience here are the ominous crackling and whirring noises it’s making as a steady current of high voltage fuckery is shooting between the two metal pieces. So Dorothy gets to stare death in the face for a good solid ten seconds before they flip the machine off and then slap those bastards over her ears.

This woman is knowingly helping to destroy this little girl’s life.

Lights flash as the machine gets cranked up (there’s even a wind-up clockwork mechanism in it; I have no idea why), but just as the doctor reaches to turn it on:

Nice timing, God. Where the fuck have you been?

Oh, and then the screaming starts up again. Lots of voices. The doctor rushes off to check the generator while the nurse goes away to “take care of that.”

Of course we weren’t expecting to see a little girl’s brains fried before our very eyes in a Disney movie, but color me impressed that the director still staged it as though it were a real possibility.

Two odd moments in this scene that I want to focus on. The first is that while Dorothy watches Aunt Em drive away (and utters her name on the verge of tears), the girl in the reflection comes back, this time to offer some comfort.

She tries to make small talk about Halloween being soon, but she gets to the point quickly.

This girl knows Dorothy should not be here, and she is directly concerned, for no as yet disclosed reason, with her safety.

The trust involved here is interesting. This is a total stranger and Dorothy’s been kind of cautioned to remind herself that it’s just her imagination by her folks. Does she sense that this person is possibly offering her an out?

Oh, and then this happens:

When I was little I didn’t understand what this meant, even though it’s explicitly explained later (over a matter of two seconds or so), but I was too young to understand. I just know scary screaming and moaning happened whenever there was thunder in this movie.

The girl promises to come back later.

Dorothy interacts with the present the girl left her.

The personification of inanimate objects in this world will bear relevance in the next.

As it gets darker, Dorothy decides to turn on the light. The reason why this gets mentioning here is because I thought it was kind of an odd, lingering moment that I don’t know had any true relevance to the story, save that we know Dorothy herself has never been in a place with electricity before.

I want to think there is some significance to this moment because it goes on for a few seconds longer than it should. Maybe if it had been the first thing she did I’d feel a little less unsettled about it. There is a juxtaposition of forces going on in this scene, with the thunder and lightning outside and the harnessed power of electricity in the wires, perhaps suggesting Dorothy senses a level of danger even in the light, especially considering what’s about to happen to her.

To a toddler that didn’t like naps, this was pretty much the most obvious indication of this woman’s evil nature.

Do you see this asshole trying to Mr. Rogers this shit for her? This is how aware Dorothy is of what’s going on. While he’s going on about how this is going to make all her bad dreams go away, and how it’s got eyes and a nose and a mouth, she takes one look at the thing, then back at Dr. Worley, and asks

“Will it hurt?”

God does she ever not trust this guy. Give it to me straight, Doctor. Stop trying to make this fanciful and happy for me. Just tell me: Are you going to hurt me? 

While he’s going on and on about how they’re entering the electrical age and the human brain is nothing but an electrical machine, so filling it with unchecked voltage will set it right, we have this eerie moment where a girl appears in the machine’s reflection.

It’s never really explained who this girl is in the context of this world, and most of this is setup for the parallels you’re going to see in Oz, a la the original movie.

Reflections play an important part in this movie, and in this particular scene, I liked that Dorothy saw this as significant rather than the horrifying pretend-face that Dr. Worley wants her to focus on.

The scene ends with Worley declaring that he’s going to keep her overnight and that Aunt Em should come back for her tomorrow.

So Dorothy is being left in this scary place, with a man Aunt Em doesn’t know, who has shown them no credentials, who intends to hook Dorothy up to this machine with the dead eyes. And I’m beginning to think Uncle Henry was right to feel skeptical.

The fact that Em tells her to “be a good girl” and do everything the doctor and nurses tell her to do unsettles me something terrible. I know that we would probably say the same of medical professionals today, but they’ve already heaped so much on us that says this is bad news, and Dorothy already senses it, but she’s trapped in this powerful need to be an obedient child and GAH.

“I’ve never let her out of my sight among strangers.”

GOOD INSTINCT, AUNT EM. LISTEN TO IT.

What gives me chills now is Dorothy asking, on the edge of tears, that Aunt Em brings Toto when she comes to get her. I think she suddenly has the feeling that she’s going to need her best friend. Maybe it was a bad idea to leave him after all.

Icing on the cake is this bit when the head nurse takes Dorothy to her room and makes a show out of taking away the lunch pail her aunt gave her.

This said a lot to me when I was small because I didn’t like having things that were mine taken away from me. Or touched by people I didn’t know. And this is pretty much the only thing from home, other than the clothes on her back, that Dorothy has. Even if they were going to feed her themselves they might have let her hold onto it for comfort reasons.

Also, impossible to communicate in pictures are the horrible hellish squealing noises the wheels of these gurneys make. That, with the dead-eyed orderlies that push them, will be significant when it translates over later.

I have never seen so many reasons to not trust adults in my life.

So this Doctor wants to look at Dorothy’s stuff and asks her questions about Oz.

He keeps asking her questions to try and poke holes in her logic. When she mentions getting home with the ruby slippers, he wants to know where they are. She insists they fell off. Worley announces he knows “just what to cheer Dorothy up,” which is apparently electro shock therapy.

The thing that gets me about this scene now is that Dorothy looks like she’s about to cry through the whole thing. Her voice doesn’t crack or anything like that, but look at her.

She knows these people don’t believe her, and while her guardians seem to have been careful not to refer to her as anything beyond “a little unwell,” I think she started to figure out what was happening pretty quickly. Add that she seems certain her friends in Oz are in trouble, and she’s now surrounded by people who are not only intent on not believing her but making sure she puts Oz aside altogether?

Girl’s under a lot of pressure right now.

We haven’t even gotten to the nightmare fuel yet, and this movie is already really damn dark compared to the Wizard of Oz most people grew up with.

In a nod to the old movie, Toto is placed somewhere he doesn’t wish to be and escapes to follow Dorothy. Now, the wee!DVDfairy took note of this and recognized the pattern. This is something Toto does. People put him in things. Toto goes “YOLO” and lets himself out.

This instance frustrated the Hell out of me, though, because it doesn’t pay off.

This time, Toto isn’t escaping an evil old woman’s picnic basket or getting away from the Wicked Witch of the West. Dorothy doesn’t sense that there should be any reason he needs to follow, so she yells at him to go home.

And she therefore makes him the saddest dog ever.

He’ll wait for you, Dorothy.

Hope you don’t get shot through time or sent to another world or anything.

Belina finds a key in the yard.

Oh hi, Toto. Are you still in this movie?

Anyway, Dorothy cleans it off and thinks it came from Oz, because the shape possibly spells it out.

Even when I was small – I kind of understood how this worked because I wanted Oz to happen. I saw the first movie and right now this one is hitting all the continuity buttons a two year old can have when they’ve only just gotten object permanence down and their concept of time is still a little too shoddy to respect such radical notions as “bed time,” so I was like “YEAH OZ STUFF LET’S GET TO THAT” only more in a two year-old fashion.

But I could also see why when Dorothy shows it to her Aunt, her Aunt can call bullshit.

The best that her aunt and uncle can understand is that she’s been sick since the tornado. She talks about a place that she had to have dreamed up, and she can’t sleep. There’s something wrong. So when she shows Aunt Em a dingy old key that could have come from anything? It’s flimsy evidence.

She also knows Dorothy doesn’t want to go see this doctor. So it could just be a ploy to get out of going.

And in this scene Aunt Em lays a lot of shit on this little girl’s shoulders. Winter is “coming on.” Dorothy can’t sleep and she’s therefore no help around the farm. They apparently have had to take out a mortgage to stay afloat, and Uncle Henry hasn’t finished the new house.

He apparently just ISN’T working of late, and not much is said on this. Given his remarks the previous scene about not wanting charity, having Dorothy sick and being unable to do anything to help her – and now having to send her to someone else hoping a stranger can help her? At some point he broke his leg, but it’s well past the point of mending. It’s all in his head now.

My point, though, is that Aunt Em is putting a lot of pressure on Dorothy to just “be normal” at whatever cost because otherwise she’s a burden.

I’m sure she doesn’t mean it to be that way, but that’s what it is.

In this way, I kind of think that Dorothy bonds with Belina the chicken because they’re both being expected to do something they can’t, and being told they have to do it isn’t going to make it easier.

Even when I was little i was impressed that Dorothy could get up and work, or even wander around listlessly, after a night of no sleep.

Beside the point of this post, which is to introduce this chicken, who will be a key character later in the film. It sets up that this chicken won’t lay eggs. That’s her conflict for the film. But then it’s a kids movie and in two minutes has already hinted at being pretty damn dark. I won’t fault them for keeping this shit simple.

More on this in the next post.