Straight to the point

Something Wicked Your Way Comes
by Ann Bauer at Brownstone Institute

The biggest surprise of my November 2024—and remember, that’s a pretty high bar—was that I didn’t totally hate Wicked: Part One.

Are the songs inane and forgettable? God yes, other than “Defying Gravity,” which is solidly OK. Is the iridescent gumdrop color palette irritating and a little like being showered in My Little Pony vomit? Again, yes. Do the scenes at Shiz University look like CGI knockoffs of Hogwarts from the Harry Potters 1-76? Indeed.

But beyond all this franchise-driven drek lies a good story, truly great performances, and brisk pacing that makes the film’s two-hour and 20-minute run time sail by. 

Ariana Grande plays the narcissistic “good witch” Glinda with an impeccable comic soft shoe. Jeff Goldblum is dapper and smarmy as the charlatan Wizard. Michelle Yeoh is predictably marvelous as the gorgeous, sleek, silver-tufted professor of sorcery. 

But the lead truly is the star of this show. It’s impossible not to be moved by the voice and carriage of Cynthia Erivo, as Elphaba, the younger and literally greener version of the Wicked Witch of the West. I was utterly bored by the musical numbers until perhaps 40 minutes in (I didn’t want to be rude and look at my phone), when Erivo began to sing in a strong, soulful, serious way.

There are moments of dark tension in the film, largely concerning the fate of Animals, that echo civil rights movements of the past—and today. Peter Dinklage, voicing the biology professor and goat, Dr. Dillamond, makes his martyred character as vivid and dear as Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird. Prejudice based on skin color (Elphaba’s) and disability (her sister, Nessarose’s) is deftly handled, which is nearly impossible to do.

Wicked, the movie, is a simple examination of good and evil that makes clever allusions to other such works. “Are people born wicked or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?” Glinda asks in a wide-eyed riff on Malvolio—one of literature’s best villains—from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night. Later, there is a more sinister reference to Orwell when Dr. Dillamond flips his chalkboard to begin a lesson and someone has written, “Animals should be seen and not heard.” 

When the crew from Shiz goes to the OzDust Ballroom, against school rules, the mob of happy, angry, bewildered students breaks into a coordinated dance with whiffs of “Thriller.” Time collapses and the kids of the ‘80s, of today, and of Industrial era Oz all share this sensuous hope that they, finally, will conquer evil—when in truth, many will become it. I could almost hear the ghostly laughter of Vincent Price.

And yet…as much as I enjoyed the movie, I was sad about what was missing. Religion, politics, nuance, mysticism, science, class warfare, and God.

I grew up on the Oz books—all 12. And dramatic as it sounds, they kind of saved my life.

I was a shy, odd, mostly solitary kid and those books provided an entire world that explained mine. My favorite was “The Marvelous Land of Oz, sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which a boy named Tip who lived with a gnarly witch in the Gillikin forest awoke to the fact that he was in fact a princess, Ozma, who had been imprisoned inside a male body.

It took a century for the transgender to adopt Tip as their symbol. And I certainly didn’t have a name for it back when I was 8. My issue wasn’t gender, but a host of other character traits that Tip—and later Billina, the Gump, and the Patchwork Girl—helped me understand.

The series began with a map showing the land quadrants of Oz: Gillikan, Winkie, Quadling, and Munchkin. It was a story about feudalism and territorial battles, about caste and bias and exploitation. It was also about magic, the real kind that we all possess and the false fixes that politicians promise. In 1900, as railroad barons were laying track to monetize the American West and farmers were being duped into stripping arid fields and creating the Dust Bowl, L Frank Baum imagined an alternate reality—futuristic, full of robots, unprecedented species, and wild sorcery. Oz was a little like our world but preferable, crazy with danger and opportunity. A place where one earthly colonizer could plummet in and set everything right.

In 1995, Gregory Maguire published “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.” I read it shortly after it came out, because I followed everything Oz. It was well-reviewed, including by John Updike, who called it an “amazing novel.” But it was a sleepy, niche book until Winnie Holzman rewrote it for the stage in the early aughts.

Today, I’m hearing Maguire’s work referred to as ‘fan fiction,’ which I think diminishes it. Wicked the novel was more adaptation, a standalone prequel to The Wizard of Oz—the way Jean Rhys’s award-winning Wide Sargasso Sea was to Jane Eyre. 

And here, we get to my complaint about the film (as well as the insipid Broadway musical it was based on): So much of what made Wicked the novel great was its utter darkness and complexity, its reflection of our culture and confusion, the barbarity of this era in history just like every other one. It is as predictive as “1984 and as metaphorical as Frankenstein. In the stage and movie version, 95% of that was stripped out.

Maguire turned Baum’s four territories into four religions: Unionism, Lurlinism, Tiktokism (from the character Tiktok in the original series), and the Pleasure Faith. But instead of straightforward theology, he infused politics and land rights into the faith-based wars (sound familiar?). Unionism preached a mashup of communism and an Unnamed God; Lurlinism was fundamental deference to a fairy queen deity; Tiktokism involved worship of technology and The Clock of the Time Dragon; where the Pleasure Faith was exactly that—hedonism and sorcery inspired by a Kumbric witch.

In Wicked the novel, the central tension is around the rights of Animals (capital ‘A’), meaning creatures with a soul; and animals (small ‘a’) who have no higher-order spirit and can be used as workers, caged, or eaten. When the dumb and despotic Wizard seeks to increase his hold over the proletariat (Munchkin farmers, Quadling laborers, Winkie tradesmen), he puts the Animals in chains and offers them as a lower-class target for the people to exploit.

Strains of racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and LGBT discrimination run through the book. Its stock religious characters are very concerned with moral purity, as each sect defines it. Wicked opens with the Tin Man—a working-class hero in Baum’s original—saying about the Witch of the West, “She was castrated at birth. She was born hermaphroditic, or maybe entirely male.” The scarecrow chimes in, “She’s a woman who prefers the company of other women.” Their ‘othering’ supports a moral view of Elphaba as evil. In fact, she’ll prove to be a flawed but ethical heroine.

This is another complaint, a small one: In the novel, Elphaba is far from perfect. She’s prickly and occasionally unkind, especially to the Munchkin Boq who is her stalwart friend. Born to a stone-souled minister and a drunken, straying lady of good lineage, she grows up on the outside. Her skin is green; no one knows who her real father is. Her magical gifts are great but unruly, and she is reviled by the man who raises her. She is not the resilient, dancing, beautiful good girl you see on screen.

Maybe the biggest loss in the translation of novel to musical and then screen is the examination of science and its role in the way societal power is accrued. When Dr. Dillamond’s research shows that there are cellular differences between Animals and animals, he is killed by a furtive agent of the state and replaced by a professor who delivers government-approved messages, quashing magic.

“Science is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn’t rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds something anew rather than revealing the old.”

The sloppy overlap of government control in what is considered acceptable science, the denial of facts that do not fit the sacred text of the elite, the condemnation of anyone who brings countervailing evidence to light? It’s all in the book.

Wicked the film—by necessity, I’m sure—reduces so many of these intricate elements into modern tropes. 

The father is a garden-variety ‘toxic, narcissistic’ father who rejects Elphaba because of her skin color and favors her sister, the beautiful wheelchair-bound girl (who, in the book, was armless and puritanical). Prince Fiyero is a brash, handsome bad boy, rather than a dethroned and terrified Winkie. The class differences between Animals and animals; the research into genetic superiority; the dangers of government deciding issues related to faith and science; and the bawdy, transhuman trashiness of the Time Dragon Clock—all missing. At least for me.

What’s left is a pleasant and cohesive story that follows a direct and unsurprising plot, reminiscent of the 1971 film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory but without the dryness or wacky turns of Gene Wilder. Instead, Wicked is pure kitsch and sparkle. Stunningly beautiful people—even the ones who are held up as supposedly monstrous—who all get along and try try try to do the right thing.

In other words, it’s a musical for an audience that, I’m aghast to discover, wants to sing along. It’s a sweet film with a good message that will satisfy both carefree adults and children. So much so that even I could let go of my tenacious loyalty to the books for two-plus hours, lie back in my theater seat, and enjoy.

Something Wicked Your Way Comes
by Ann Bauer at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society

Source: Brownstone Institute Read the original article here: https://brownstone.org/