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Film

CHILDHOOD TRAUMA THEATER - THE WHEELERS

"The indisputably most harrowing movie experience of my youth was watching Return to OZ on TV when I was 5 or 6 (hopefully 5). I've noticed from the comments for the previous columns that this movie evidently messed up a hefty chunk of my generation—which is something of a relief—but whereas these comments generally document a multitude of terrors in the film my encounter is confined solely to the first appearance of the Wheelers in the ruins of the Emerald City. Not the queen taking off her head, not the rock monster, not the desert that kills you. I never made it to any of these other moments, because by the time they started happening I was already curled up in my bed upstairs, terrified to look at the door, obviously cause that's where the Wheelers would be coming in. Those guys terrified me for months. I couldn't even really describe them now, except that they're some sort of mechanical guys with wheels on their feet and a bunch of tubes running out of their head. The rest of the details are locked in a kind of mental fog."

Annoncering

[note: the second this scene began, Aaron, who'd previously been in high-spirits and working on an extended riff based on Fairuza Balk's character from The Craft very quietly sucked in his breath and gripped the couch cushion like he was in a plane whose engines just cut out. His knuckles actually turned white.]

"Now that it's all the way through I feel fucking stupid, but during those first few seconds I had to force my face to keep watching the screen. It was seriously heavy, like reliving a car crash. Can you imagine how bad that would be? [presumably meaning while stoned] Part of it I think may have been that I'd forgotten about the entire first half of the  movie where Dorothy's in the mental hospital, so I kept thinking the Wheelers were going to just pop out of some door at some random time. If they really wanted to scare some kids that's what they should have done—just suddenly Wheelers every ten minutes, like the dumpster guy in Mulholland Drive.

"Anyways, so the Wheelers are way less robotic than I remembered. They're basically just weird carnival guys with metal helmets. Still, for some reason the proportions of their bodies are really unsettling. Maybe it's because the arms and legs are the same size? [other viewers concur] I feel like there's got to be some sort of psychological explanation for why that sticks out in all our minds, some deep-seated primal fear, maybe relating to spiders?

"By the way, what was going on with the intro to movie? It's Fairuza Baulk probably circa the Craft or American History X and she's explaining that you're about to watch Return to OZ. Um, that's kind of what we were counting on when he hit play, Nancy."

AARON HELM