Who Mourns the "Wicked"? A Sort Of Movie Review
(Oh, hello, there. This post is very long-if the dismount is a little truncated, it’s because I ran out of room! If you liked this, please buy my book!)
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I am 12, and have bad bangs, big ideas, and two and a half friends—my far cooler little sister, L, the dour, blonde neighbor-girl, Margo, and Jen, a nerd from sleep-away camp whom I speak with on the phone once every four months. Jen hails from New York City and also hates the lake, so we spend these sweltering cabin-bound summers away from our families avoiding nature and listening to musical theater cast albums on her fancy silver CD player.
She carefully explains how RENT is about AIDS, a kind of stomach bug you get when you do too much heroin, and how Cabaret is about how Nazis hate gay people a lot and hate Jewish people even more and hate gay Jewish people the most. I listen attentively to her lore as the roil of pubescent obsession rumbles in my chest. Top 40 doesn’t do much for me, so I gravitate towards big band and jazz, a terrible move for a fat girl who is already getting hounded by bullies on the bus. Musical theater, on the other hand, feels immediate, narcotic, an explosive answer to my stake-less suburban existence.
I need it. More.
When the first few chords of the The Wizard and I begin to waft from Jennifer’s space-age Sony speaker, my body glows with a urgency I’ll only be able to replicate in adulthood with the help of love or liquor. The Britneys and Christinas of radio fame moan simplistically about impulses I don’t understand yet—lust, wearing tiny jeans at the club—but Elphaba’s soaring raison d’être, launched into the stratosphere on limber soprano wings, feels ecstatically familiar to my preteen ears.
The Wicked Witch of the West, ugly, illegible, failing at femininity in ways I know too well, hopes out loud that extraordinariness will make her lovable. No father is not proud of you, no sister acts ashamed, and all of Oz has to love you, when by the Wizard you’re acclaimed, she reasons. If she does well, the Wizard will “degreenify” her. She doesn’t yet know that color stains.
I cling to Elphaba’s logic, too. I may be fat and bad at math, but there has to be something I can do to make myself viable, or tolerated, at least. I can’t be slim for Mom or athletic for Dad or popular for L, but if I put my talents to work, surely, I can find my Wizard, too.
Therein lies the lesson of Wicked, the Broadway juggernaut that has at last received a Hollywood treatment more than twenty years after its inception, and, sadly, the lesson of adulthood, too.The Wizard and I operates as a bittersweet lyrical foreshadowing of complexity to come. “I’d be so happy I could melt!” Elphaba trills, inviting the audience into a guilty omniscience—her fate has always been sealed. The Wizard isn’t real, and he can’t save her from the deluge.
I am 13, and hotly covet the lime-green tutu my sister has worn to tonight’s performance—it doesn’t come in my size. She and I are leaving the Gershwin Theater with my exhausted parents, whom I have bugged into a pricey New York City vacation so that I can see Wicked on Broadway. Idina Menzel’s breathy bray and knife-sharp jawline have twisted my brain into a frenzy. I can’t shut up. My father walks ahead of us, solemnly hailing a cab.
“Dad? Dad?” I squeak at his back.
“Yeah?” he snarls, without turning around.
“Dad, is Wicked about George Bush?”
After a beat, he replies. I can hear him half-smile as he speaks, although he won’t turn his head to meet my gaze. “That’s perceptive, sweetie. Yes, it is, it’s about politics— it’s a metaphor”.
“Oh God, I don’t want to talk about that. Nasty stuff”, my mother interrupts. “Get in the car—let’s talk about something else”.
As our cab bounces through the Theatre District, adrenaline alchemizes with a small flame of pride in my stomach. Dad said I was smart, which means he might love me. I finally have proof that I understand Wicked in a way no one else does. If I must be alone, at least I can be right, just like that brash, green girl-god who escaped the truth on a crooked broom.
I am 35 and have grey hair, no parents, and about six friends, maybe even fewer since Mom and Dad died—three are seated next to me in the first row of the big room at the Albee Square Alamo Drafthouse, twenty four hours before Wicked, part one, is slated to hit major distribution in middle America. It’s been fifteen days since Donald Trump declared a presidential victory over Kamala Harris, a foregone conclusion that highlighted both the ontological failure of contemporary liberalism and the precarity of US minority existence in single, bloody blow.
Morale is low, in other words.
I natter on and on about this bloated Substack entry I’m writing around the movie, promising my usual blend of messy theory and inexact historical analysis. Maybe, if it’s clever enough, the essay I’ve written will make my friends love me, or, if that doesn’t work, maybe the tickets I bought will do the trick, or the bar reservation I booked to debrief after this three hour distraction from the brass tacks of reality. My nostalgic pining for Wicked doesn’t really square with the brand of hard-left bookish cynicism I’ve cultivated as an adult, at least for those who don’t know me well. I’m deeply sentimental and embarrassed by it, which makes me compulsively dissect my darlings instead of discarding them. My friends listen patiently as I discuss the combatant terrorism parable lurking in the rafters of this IP engineered to distract children during Thanksgiving weekend.
I feel green, yet again.
The lights go down, so, thankfully, no one can tell.
The “Wizard of Oz” extended universe encompasses, as of this writing, 43 books, 8 comics, 24 movies, 17 theater productions, 7 museums, at least one official theme park, and 124 years of American desire. As such, a comprehensive analysis of L. Frank Baum’s legacy is impossible to broach in essay format, much less cohere into some tidy central thesis. A flying-broom’s-eye-view grants us two, inalienable truths, however—the history of “Wicked”, and, by extension, “The Wizard of Oz”, revs the engine of American story-telling technology. It follows, then, that the Wicked movie, no matter how stupid it may seem, is a kaleidoscopic ode to identity politics, delivering on a vision minted by its author at the dawn of the 20th century.
Far less sexy, but equally important to mention, is the impact of copyright law on Oz’s persistence in the American psyche. Authorial ownership, or lack thereof, has come to define the tentacular nature of the Ozzian intellectual property, allowing for endless reinterpretation. Even pop sensation Ariana Grande refers to her Wicked role as a single data point in Glinda’s lineage, as if she is merely keeping the character’s mantle warm until another pink witch plucks it primly from her shoulders.
Of course, the legal scaffolding of cultural production is part and parcel of American myth-making, and Oz is the quintessential American epic, a Campbellian Hero’s Journey painted in shades of screaming color. In a 2021 piece for PBS.org, Why is the Wizard of Oz So Wonderful?, American Studies PhD Rebecca Onion ventures an answer to her titular question. “Perhaps the potency of the Oz story lies not in a specific interpretation of its meaning, but in its ability to serve as a blank canvas for so many kinds of American fantasies”, she writes.
Salman Rushdie’s renowned 1992 essay on the film, which he calls his “first literary influence”, describes the 1939 movie as “breezily godless”, a bright, brimming non-Narnia in which “nothing is deemed more important than the loves, cares and needs of human beings (and, of course, tin beings, straw beings, lions and dogs).” In the pastoral abundance of Oz, “the power of men is illusory…The power of women is real”, Rushdie writes, but Dorothy’s humanist hallucination also highlights the power of whiteness, or, more specifically, the sacrosanct purity of “normal” domestic existence. While the 1939 film broke box office records with its use of lush Technicolor, it is a black-and-white reality, a reality free from dwarfism, colored skin, and indigenous incursion, that propels our protagonist to freedom. We understand Kansas as a shorthand not just for “home”, but for church weddings, thin lips, and plain English.
Lyman Frank Baum, a middle-aged upstate New Yorker with two failed careers in theater and newspapers under his belt, published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, hot on the heels of his first best-seller, Father Goose, The Book, a collection of nonsense poetry illustrated by political caricaturist W.W. Denslow. Father Goose’s success may have allowed Baum to quit his thankless job as a traveling salesman, but Oz changed his life - not always for the better, but certainly for good. While Oz was a runaway success, it couldn’t save Baum from the cycles of debt he accrued attempting to transform the book into movies, years before film technology could reliably capture the magic he crafted on the page. He filed for bankruptcy in 1911, only to license his own risky production entity, The Oz Film Manufacturing Company, just three years later. The company was a critical coup, but it never made good on its commercial promises, consigning Baum to a life of iterative Oz schlock until 1918, a year before his death at 62 years old.
According to the archives, Baum believed in two primary causes—women’s suffrage, and the calculated genocide of Native Americans. While running a news outlet in 1890s South Dakota, Baum penned a now infamous editorial in response to the Massacre at Wounded Knee, a state-sponsored tragedy in which three hundred Lakota people were murdered and piled into an open grave by the US military. “The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians”, Baum wrote. “Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are”.
A few critics have argued that this screed was sarcastic, given the casual vitriol of his phrasing, but Baum’s opinion wasn’t unusual in his cultural milieu. President Benjamin Harrison, a man now almost entirely forgotten by anyone who isn’t a Reconstruction historian, did very little to distinguish himself in the canon apart from the authorization of genocide—following Grover Cleveland’s Dawes Act of 1887, which allowed the sitting President to divide Indigenous land into individual allotments, Harrison signed the Indian Appropriations Act into law in 1889, officially opening “surplus” or “unassigned” lands to white settlers. (US textbooks sanitize this event by naming it the “Oklahoma Land Run”).
During Harrison’s tenure in office, the Sioux nation was forced to surrender 11 million acres of land to “boomers” staking their claim to the newly formed Dakota states; the Crow were forced to forfeit 1.9 million acres to aid in the formation of modern-day Montana. In his first ever message to Congress, Harrison declared all Native tribes and societies a single “ignorant and helpless people”, fit for nothing but meager attempts at assimilation.
Baum’s simmering contempt for Indigenous sovereignty was also reflected in the white suffragist logic he revered; despite the fact that the movement's roots were modeled on Iroquois gender parity, League of Women Voters founder Carrie Chapman Catt believed that Indigenous women should wait their turn for voting rights, and Anna Howard Shaw, Catt’s longtime ally and president of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, actively campaigned against the Native right to vote, declaring the Indigenous population “unfit” to participate in electoral politics.
I mention all this not in some weird move to “cancel” L. Frank Baum, who is dead, but to underscore the Ozzian racialization as a feature, not a bug, of its audience allure. While centering political allusion as the origin of Oz feels like a critical dead-end, it’s important to discuss the ways in which political coding buoyed the franchise to the crest of cultural esteem. The Wizard of Oz isn’t an American morality tale like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, nor a paragon of “literary nonsense” like Alice in Wonderland ; instead, it’s a fantasy landscape populated by symbols that don’t always cohere into a reliable narrative framework. Depending on the critic, The Wizard of Oz could be and has been considered an allegory for the rise of Populist Party, the demonetization of silver as a standard backing for paper cash, 19th century theosophy, the Spanish-American War, or the myriad ethical failures of the American steel industry. None of these tidy translations account for the beating heart of Oz, however—the notion that home can be a form of heaven, the ultimate American promise.
And isn’t home, like heaven, always worth the collateral damage required to build it?
"Once we were a free people, living happily in the great forest, flying from tree to tree, eating nuts and fruit and doing just as we pleased without calling anybody master”, the King of the Flying Monkeys informs Dorothy in the original text. “This was many years ago, long before Oz came out of the clouds to rule over this land."
The 1939 Wizard of Oz movie was not the highest grossing film of its release year—that distinction belongs to Gone with The Wind, another sprawling American fantasia that glorified the white comforts of pre-industrial racialized capitalism. The two films dominated the box office together, poppy-colored opiates for an anxious nation exhausted from economic devastation at the outset of a second World War. Inspired by the success of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, MGM dusted off the Ozzian rights it had purchased from Baum for about $40,000 prior to his death. Production was something of a nightmare, plagued by contractual malfeasance, asbestos, and three separate directorial changes of the guard. While the film didn’t flop, it wasn’t until it’s telecast in 1956 (the same year the book lapsed into the public domain) and subsequent entry into the TV holiday special tradition that the Wizard of Oz became a household classic, enjoying annual screen time on commercial network television between 1959 and 1991.
The role of Dorothy was originally promised to child star Shirley Temple, but hard-working warbler Judy Garland, just sixteen at the time, fetched a far lower fee. Her turn as a cherubic American Everykid elevated Garland from a stalwart genre regular into the quintessential girl-next-door archetype, inviting viewers into the interior architecture of her world-weary mezzo soprano. Garland, doe-eyed, guileless, and pumped to the gills with amphetamines to keep her slim, projected a corn-fed whimsy that chafed against her witchy counterpart’s wizened, spiky gleam. Oz, after all, is a liminal Jacobean forest rife with not-quite-human hybrids—bestial, animal, endemic to the scenery. Dorothy, despite her status as a cypher-cum-stranger in a new world, is normal, just like Kansas.
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, Garland’s plaintive reverie about elsewhere-happiness, was most memorably covered by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, a Native Hawaiian musician who reimagined the American standard as a speculative anti-colonial prayer. Known for promoting the fight for Hawaiian independence in his songs, Kamakawiwo’ole used the popularity of his 1993 “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World” medley as a Trojan Horse for more explicit commentary on the ravages of the tourism industry on his island.
Kamakawiwo’ole sang not for homicidal pale-skinned visitors, but from the perspective of plucked trees and bodies crushed by carelessly placed real estate. His Technicolor world was no synthetic dream, but a blooming paradise of ancestral heritage, a poignant vow against settler desecration.
Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby
If happy little bluebirds fly
Beyond the rainbow
Why, oh why can't I?
This wasn’t the first time Oz had been reclaimed against white supremacy. In 1974, The Wiz, a “super soul” retelling Dorothy’s story in the context of Black American culture, debuted in Baltimore, going on to sweep the Tony Awards after its transition to Broadway the next year. The Wiz constituted a major breakthrough for all-Black casts in theater, paving the way for projects like Dreamgirls and Bubbling Brown Sugar. It’s groovy soundtrack and dynamic staging transformed Oz into a vital urban adventure, and while the star-studded 1978 film adaptation was wildly panned upon release, it is now lauded as an early example of cinematic Afrofuturism, a cultural aesthetic that centers Black diasporic atemporality as a venue for liberation.
In The Wiz film, Judy Garland is replaced by the winsome Diana Ross, who plays a somewhat jittery 24-year old version of Dorothy Gale, a public school teacher in Harlem who has failed to launch from her uncle’s small apartment. The cast of characters she meets in the trash-filled, electric Oz are funhouse mirror images of her own Kansas “normal”, including a number-running variation of the book’s Locasta, Witch of the North, and the fabulous Poppy Girls, a funky band of big-haired sex workers who stall Dorothy’s troupe in their tracks. The movie glitters and grinds with irreverent fun, and that old Ozzian notion of “home” is transmogrified by a Black woman’s voice into a warm, deep yearning beyond contingency. For this Dorothy, home represents a momentary respite from racist violence, anti-Black housing policy, and the bitter realities of a bankrupt New York City waffling towards calibration. Dorothy might not belong in Oz, but she doesn’t belong on the Upper East Side, either—she’ll always be the Other, the first, the odd one out, if she dares to ask for more.
When Dorothy sings The Wiz’s greatest contribution to musical theater, “Home”, now a cross-over staple interpreted by greats like Whitney Houston, she draws that longing in three dimensions, letting faith linger on air—
And just maybe I can convince time to slow up
Givin me enough time in my life to grow up
Time be my friend
And let me start again…
III. THE WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST
In 1991, a year after the Iraqi President sent 140,000 troops to invade neighboring Kuwait over $8 billion in unforgiven loans, New England children’s book author Gregory Maguire couldn’t help but notice an uptick in headlines comparing Saddam Hussein to another famous mustachioed politician—Adolf Hitler. As the US embroiled itself in another far-flung foreign war over fossil fuels (even George H. W. Bush’s under secretary for defense policy admitted that “the fundamental U.S. interest in the security of the Persian Gulf [was] oil” in correspondence with Dick Cheney) Maguire bristled at the seamless proliferation of propaganda spun stateside by his country’s well-oiled military machine.
As a once-orphaned gay father of two with a PhD in children’s fantasy literature, Maguire’s driving intellectual force had always steered in the direction of narrative morality—the fungible, sticky limits of human groupthink. He’d never been able to shake his fascination with gruesome 1993 murder of a 2 year old British boy, James Bulger, at the hands of 10-year old schoolkids; the crime had shaken the UK to its core, prompting heated dialogue about the carceral limits of childhood transgression and the role of the state in cultivating antisocial behavior. “It propelled me back to the question of evil that bedevils anybody raised Catholic”, he quipped in a 2021 Guardian interview. That bedevilment resulted inWicked, his 1995 opus, an acerbic almost-satire that addresses Maguire’s two main gripes with the Oz-iverse—the demonization of a woman who just wanted what she was owed (shoes, respect), and the ontological flattening of race in a story that relied on phenotypical hierarchy to function.
“If everyone was always calling you a bad name, how much of that would you internalize?” Macguire asked CNN in 2008. “By whose standards should I live?”
Wicked is neither a comfortable nor satisfying story (Adult breastfeeding! Tiger rape! Transphobia! Oh, my!). While Maguire paints Elphaba in a sympathetic light, he applies a Clintonian lens to both hers and her pink-frocked foil’s political activities—Glinda, depicted as vapid and self-serving, prefers to absorb the lessons of old-guard Ozzian power brokers in a bid at personal safety. Elphaba, on the other hand, becomes a terrorist combatant in the Emerald City, joining an underground sectarian cell before eventually fleeing to her affair partner’s castle. The book ends in a throng of turmoil, uncertainty, and death; neither Glinda nor Elphaba is vindicated by their positions a respective fascist handmaiden or insurgent.
Dorothy murders Elphaba, in step with the canon—all told, Elphaba’s individual protest proves no match for fascism. Resistance may be noble, according to Maguire, but it will always be futile, a gory pastime for unloveable drop-outs from the cult of girlhood. In Maguire’s telling, radicalization is the result of interpersonal rupture, not widespread social decay. While he correctly identified race as a central element of Oz’s imprint on American consciousness (Fiyero is reimagined as an Indigenous prince, for instance), Elphaba’s color has less to do with structural bias than Biblical stain—she is a product of adulterous rape, and must bear her wounds externally like a not-so-scarlet letter. Maguire characterized his style as a form of “19th century moral urgency”, drawing on Dickensian aesthetics to tell Elphaba’s story, which renders discrimination against her more of an analogy for disability than race. (Race and disability are necessarily intertwined, both from a demographic perspective and in the context of critical philosophies like social contract theory and post-colonial studies, but…I’m not convinced Maguire was thinking about that).
In her 1994 book, The Female Grotesque, scholar Mary Russo argues that the precarity of social revulsion as constructed by misognyist patriarchy renders the witch an “archaic trope” of the “primal” woman’s body, placing corporeal abjection staunchly “on the side of the feminine”. Baum’s Wicked Witch had white skin in the original text; Hollywood designed her green-ness to project a queasy moral inaccessibility to the naked eye. Margaret Hamilton’s prosthetic nose and arching claws owe their malevolence to anti-semitic physical motifs oft-deployed on screen to communicate fiendishness to the audience. In film, her sins live through her physicality. Her whinnying snarl dubbing Dorothy “my pretty” further delineates the difference between them—no need to litigate transgression when the evidence is phrenological, baked into the guilty party’s DNA.
Sarah Good, one of the first three women to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials of 1691, wrote in her prison diary; “As for being a witch, I looked the part - bent, haggard, leathery-skinned - though in prison I would bear my last child and watch it die”. She was a victim of her body, indicted by her failure to perform Puritanical womanhood with the relish God demanded.
In her PhD thesis, “Tracing Cultural Un/Belonging: The Witch in Western Feminist Theory and Literature”, academic Justyna Szachowicz-Sempruch uses the analysis of queer theorist Judith Butler to cohere the “witch” as a social construct.
““Always already a cultural sign”, the witch’s body “sets limits to the imaginary meanings that it occasions, but is never free of an imaginary construct.” she writes. ““The fantasized body can never be understood in relation to the body as real, it can only be understood in relation to another culturally instituted fantasy””.
While the Wicked book made an inarguable splash, it was the adapted Broadway musical that changed the course of entertainment history. Soon after the novel hit the bestseller list, Universal started the process of adapting a screenplay, but executives found the scripts wanting and balked at a live-action price tag for a girl-helmed movie. Eventually, higher-ups settled on a Broadway musical interpretation, a cheaper option that leveraged Oz’s position in the collective consciousness. The late ‘90s bore witness to the Disneyfication of theater, and major film studios wanted to cash in on ticket sales with lower production overhead than a standard animation roll-out. Inspired by the financial boon of 1997 Lion King stage show, Universal tapped Stephen Schwartz, the brain behind Pippin, Pocahantas, and The Prince of Egypt, to write the Wicked soundtrack, and Winnie Holzman, creator of My So-Called Life, to craft the musical’s book.
The results strayed significantly from the musical’s antecedent. In an interview with Playbill, Holzman noted, “It was [Maguire's] brilliant idea to take this hated figure and tell things from her point of view, and to have the two witches be roommates in college, but the way in which their friendship develops—and really the whole plot—is different onstage”. Schwartz added, “Primarily we were interested in the relationship between Galinda—who becomes Glinda—and Elphaba... the friendship of these two women and how their characters lead them to completely different destinies”. Maguire reported that he was “aghast” upon first seeing his ideas unfold on stage, but was so moved by the audience’s reaction to Defying Gravity , the anthemic clincher to Act I’s frenetic Oz-building, that his opinion on the adaptation softened almost instantly. Sure, his story had been neutered, but Holzman did keep a clumsy B-plot about fascist surveillance in tact as commentary on then-President Bush’s 2001 Patriot Act, an invasive, racially iniquitous legal approach to privacy abnegation passed in the immediate wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks.
While we’re on the subject, it’s difficult to discuss the cultural influence of Wicked without mentioning 9/11.
In his New York Times pan of the show, critic Ben Brantley described the narrative as a “politically indignant deconstruction of L. Frank Baum's Oz tales” that “wears its political heart as if it were a slogan button”—petulant phrasing for a decidedly centrist conceit. Elphaba doesn’t die at the end of the musical—in fact, she reaches a detente with Glinda after surrendering to her old friend’s new regime. The Hitlerian Wizard is conveniently ousted, and Elphaba’s reputation transitions into a state of repair after years of violent scapegoating. The homoeroticism at Wicked’s thematic center, actualized in the book with a kiss between Glinda and Elphaba, is reduced to more generalized passion on stage, an optimal site of obsession for queer teens and plausible deniability for beleaguered parents.
In her recent op-ed for Teen Vogue, “The Politics of Wicked: The Musical’s George W Bush Era Vibes Hit Hard in the Trump Years”, Leah Marilla Thomas makes pains to mention a lyrical reference to Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 speculative fiction novel It Can’t Happen Here in the song “Something Bad”, but the allusion plays modestly in real time—everything has turned out fine by the time the curtain falls, or at least a polite, neoliberal version of fine The dream of Oz, and by extension, America, can be salvaged after all, emergent Animal genocide be damned.
Wicked underwent San Francisco previews in 2002, a year after al-Qaeda militants hijacked four commercial aircrafts in US airspace, leading to the deaths of almost 3,000 people and catalyzing America’s international War on Terror. The Producers, a Tony-stacking satire of Nazi incompetence, swept the theater box office that year, trailed closely by a Thoroughly Modern Millie revival that showcased newcomer Sutton Foster’s tap-dancing chops. In a commercial atmosphere that valued jingoistic posturing above all else, boom-time nostalgia that side-stepped any critique of America's imperialist complicity in its own demise played well with traumatized audiences for whom presence at a New York City theater constituted its own form of fat-wallet patriotism.
President Bush exploited American angst as a ploy towards murderous intersubjectivity, fabricating “weapons of mass destruction” in an effort to justify a staggeringly unpopular war in Iraq. In his quest to finish what his father started, Bush condoned the deaths of over 200,000 Iraqi civilians and destabilized multiple sovereign nations. While liberal distaste for Bush’s fourth amendment-flouting policies had reached the mainstream by 2002, entertainment plot lines valorizing the efforts of rebel extremists seemed all but verboten on stage or screen. Wicked had metamorphosed from a grim condemnation of American hard power to a self-satisfied liberal exhale—”the system works, actually, especially if white women are in charge! No need for vigilantism, especially not from…witches of color”.
This narrative re-brand absolves the contemporary Broadway buyer, who is, statistically, an upper middle class Democrat, by selling them on the aesthetics of dissent free from the pesky risk of punishment. A subtle twist of Augusto Boal’s 1970s Theater of the Oppressed (TO) process, which builds on the leftist pedagogy of Paulo Freire, re-orients radical inclusivity according to a capitalist schema, resulting in a parade of bombastic properties that traffick in revolutionary images without actually advocating for the “common man”—Les Miserables, Ragtime, Hamilton, etc. It’s possible to be subversive on Broadway, of course—A Strange Loop comes to mind—but Wicked minted a particular trademark of false pop-sedition that young women adored, a prototype Disney then perfected in Frozen, a financial windfall so massive that it forever changed the course of the corporation’s life cycle.
One of the dumbest parts of engaging with popular properties is wading through the online commentary, usually contributed by kids who are still learning how to interpret the media they consume. Children, as we know, love identifying plot holes and “Easter eggs” as a substitute for literacy, which isn’t their fault, but does tend to muddy the waters of discussion across social channels. Questions like “Is Elphaba Jewish or Black?” betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what subtext achieves in a narrative arc—Wicked’s Oz isn’t an interchangeable apologue for Nazi Germany, but the heavy-handed references to Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism extend the emotional scale of the story. Elphaba’s ostracized condition is heightened by its comparisons to historically persecuted people, but her character isn’t Jewish or Black or Fat or Queer or Autistic—her character is green. That’s why her relatability remains so reliably commodious.
She’s “not that girl” because you’re “not that girl”; she’s “defying gravity” because you’re “defying gravity”. Elphaba is the ultimate cypher, a canopic jar for viewer desperation.
Remember:“The fantasized body can never be understood in relation to the body as real, it can only be understood in relation to another culturally instituted fantasy”.
You’ve probably noticed that I’ve spent more time parsing through the various historical milieus of Wicked’s legacy than detailing the contents of the books, movies, and plays. This is purposeful. The measure of a myth isn’t weighted line by line, but in its affectual impact on the culture it reflects. Campbell called myth a form of “poetry”, the “penultimate truth”—to understand why Wicked resonates across generations, we must consider how Wicked makes people feel, and what relationship feeling has to the messages audiences are primed to absorb. Most folks don’t remember Act II of this musical at all, save for the image of Glinda and Elphaba holding hands at the end. They aren’t supposed to.
In their 1947 critique, Dialectic of Enlightenment, critical theorist Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote that “the culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims. The automatic self-reproduction of the status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination.” When I consider Wicked’s dim color grading or toothless lampoon of white feminism or bizarre insistence on Bowen Yang or the decision to break up a two hour stage play into a pair of three hour movies, I can’t help but wonder if these purposeful swats at mediocrity were constructed order to attenuate Cynthia Erivo’s political salvo on screen.
So, why am I so obsessive about situating a stupid witch musical? Why am I throwing every adverb I know at a fucking movie? Here’s the thing— I believe it’s increasingly essential that we critically interrogate enormous American entertainment properties because our government has become an enormous American entertainment property, albeit a grievously militarized one. Our incumbent dictator president was a television personality, for fuck’s sake, Linda Mcmahon of the WWE has been nominated to lead our education department, and our largest export, outside of, you know, bombs, is aspirational depictions of pleasure, or perhaps diversion, if we’re being conspiratorial.
The death of journalism and tandem rise of the opinion economy has thrust us into a crisis of criticism—just ask Russ or Charli XCX or literally anyone working in art editorial—but criticism could well become relevant again if we pivoted away from value ascription and re-routed to concatenation, explicating cultural production as a chain of events that impacts regular citizens. It matters that the biggest movie in the world outlines an individual schism with a fictitious fascist government! It matters that a Black woman stars as a Green woman at the helm of an international blockbuster! It matters that Wicked is fighting for first place at the box office with an explicitly white nationalist Gladiator reboot!
I mean, it had better matter, right? Because if it doesn’t matter, what exactly does that mean for the politics of representation on a geopolitical plane?
Surely the politics of representation in popular culture weren’t…a trap, were they?
The 2024 movie version of Wicked is great. That’s the least important aspect of its aftermath.
Internet estimates conjecture that the marketing budget for 2023’s faux-feminist, Pepto Bismol-pink spectacle Barbie rang in at about $130 million dollars, $100 million above the industry average. Wicked cost $150 million to make, and I can’t imagine the publicity was any cheaper. After the endless barrage of Wicked-emblazoned Stanley cup tie-ins, themed Starbucks drinks, Galinda-fied makeup sets, and weepy podcasts featuring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, I’m positive I wasn’t the only fan with a stultifying post-Barbie hangover. Internet denizens have been waterboarded with teasers and exclusives and un-illuminating behind-the-scenes content for months prior to the Wicked’s release. The thrill was almost gone for me by the time I hit the Alamo Drafthouse front row. Fortunately, the film itself deflated my well-earned cynicism.
Critics and executives alike credited Barbie and its serendipitous proximity to the Oppenheimer goliath with reviving a pandemic-addled public’s taste for in-theater movie experiences, but the push was hardly random—it required a herculean amount of effort to get asses in seats. Whatever the price tag, the campaign worked for Wicked; it has officially nabbed the distinction of the highest-grossing American Broadway movie musical in existence, raking in a staggering $385 million by December 1st. Wicked, despite laboring in development hell for years, owes much of its success to the Barbie model—turns out, girls buy tickets if you market directly to girls. The twee meta-styling of the diminutive Wicked stars and the tearful focus on their friendship also mimic Barbie’s color-coordinated cast camaraderie, veritable catnip for press junkets and TikTok soundbites. There’s the choice-feminist element, too—both Barbie and Wicked take place in universes where women aren’t necessarily part of the underclass, but visual difference is still noticed, if not always punished. During a period of concerted pushback to DEI initiatives in both the corporate and academic spheres, apolitical “girl-power” narratives help de-fang the threat of female autonomy for a mass audience. By that measure, Wicked should bore in the same hollow fashion that Barbie did, butWicked has something Barbie didn’t—Cynthia Erivo.
Cynthia Onyedinmanasu Chinasaokwu Erivo, a queer British-Nigerian theater maven in her late thirties, seems like an unlikely international star at first glance. A preternaturally gifted singer and songwriter, Erivo was best known prior to her Wicked booking for her Tony Award-winning role as Celie in the 2016 Broadway revival of The Color Purple, followed by an Oscar-nominated turn as Harriet Tubman in an eponymous 2019 film that no one liked. Her embodiment of traditionally African-American stories (she also played Aretha Franklin, bizarrely) has attracted ire from the Black community online in light of some less-than-savory Tweets she made in 2013, but these days, she struggles more with a reputation for self-seriousness. She uses the word “journey” with aplomb, she might be a philanderer, she’s not particularly funny, she really hates the fan edit that twink made of the Wicked movie poster—nothing criminal, certainly, but evidence of a stern spirit. As we know, misogynoir requires Black women, especially unambiguously Black women, to perform a manic combination of apologia and decorous extroversion in order to appease public appetite, and while Grande’s studied PR touch has started rubbing off on Erivo, Ms. Cynthia remains a little stiff. I feel for her—her entire career has consisted of closeted musical soliloquies detailing how plain she is, (she isn’t, she’s dark-skinned, which racists often mistake for plain). Suffice it to say, I’d be tiresome in interviews, too.
Incredibly, this dryness works in the context of Erivo’s spiky, subdued portrayal of Elphaba, a thankless assignment she delivered on tenfold. In classic musical theater fashion, Elphaba may have cornered the market on ballads, but the character herself is forgettable by design—in order for chubby, defensive middle schoolers to see themselves in Elphaba, the witch must be a little bit insufferable. Holzman’s book makes good on her So-Called Life ability to access adolescent interiority, but there isn’t much to work with for the average park-and-barker. Still, while Ariana Grande has distinguished herself as a comic genius in her limber portrait of Glinda, Erivo’s watchful, pining micro-expressions are truly revelatory, nuancing a somewhat compact role into a brazen tangle of complexity.
I’ve seen Wicked twice now, and while I do have some gripes (washed out exterior sequences, iffy casting on Madame Morrible, needlessly long-winded action sequences breaking up “Defying Gravity”), my major impression was one of un-ironic tween wonder, punctuated by more grown-up pangs of dread.
Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins coined the term “outsider-within” in the late ‘80s to describe the unique perspicacity of Black women, whose ontological “Otherness” has been structurally arranged to raise the stock value of white in-group status by contrast. “…They are simultaneously essential for [society’s] survival because those individuals who stand at the margins of society clarify its boundaries. African-American women, by not belonging, emphasize the significance of belonging”, said Collins.
I thought about Collins a lot while watching Erivo at work—Elphaba’s “Otherness” is compounded by the Blackness of the actress inhabiting her body, grounding the interpersonal cruelties she suffers in hundreds of years of white supremacist conditioning. Her despicable white father who prefers his light-skinned child over Elphaba, the jeers and judgmental stares of her wealthy, normative classmates, her knee-jerk presumption that a frat boy Winkie prince wouldn’t give her a second look, the single-shot bullying scene where Elphaba dances with a tear streaming down her face amid a sea of cackling teens—these moments bow and bend like the fun-house mirrors Black women are so often forced to find themselves inside. In the film, Elphaba wears stylized Victorian mourning garb created by designer Paul Tazewell, a reference both to the character’s deceased mother and, perhaps, to the Pattersonian “social death” she endures in the gaze of her peers. Even her maternal figure, Dulcibear, is voiced by Black British theater doyenne Sharon D. Clarke, an advertence to the “fictive kinship” Black domestics have been forced to build with the children of landed whites for centuries.
All of my most long-lasting friendships have been with Black women, and because I have loved Black women, I have also, necessarily, disappointed them. As a little girl, I saw myself in Elphaba, the glory-struck outcast, but as an adult, I wince at my familiarity not just with Glinda, but with her distinctly white weakness, her taste for bombast over justice, that bone-deep instinct to remove her hand from Elphaba’s broom. The look in Elphaba’s eyes when she realizes that the Wizard is not just a liar, but a war criminal, resonates so gravely on screen not because Erivo registers shock, but because her face conveys the resignation of betrayal, a nimble acting choice that fortifies her character’s imminent, or perhaps inevitable, radicalization.
In a 2021 interview about her book, White Feminism, Koa Beck told NBC News. “My takeaway is that white feminism is enduring because it’s so palatable and because it doesn’t really challenge much about our structure, our life, the way we make money or the way we relate to other women. There’s something so easy about it, and it fits within the rhythm of the shows and media we consume”.
Easy. Mindless and careless, even.
As we huddle at the revolving doors outside the movie theater, calling Ubers home after our first Wicked viewing, my friend T grimaces at an alert on her phone. The US House has just passed legislation granting the Treasury department unilateral authority to strip tax-exempt status of any nonprofit claiming to “support terrorism”, a clear authoritarian censorship attempt against pro-Palestinian 401©3s. Wicked’s schmaltzy prophecy has come true. American Oz was never exempt from the values it pretended to eschew; something bad is happening.
To be an American is to be inculcated in the sadism of story-telling. You’ve probably seen that viral video of volunteer doctor Tanya Haj Hassan tearfully addressing the UN, narrating in choking bursts of breath the pleas of her besieged Palestinian colleagues. Her voice quavers as she reads a quote from her murdered coworker, Dr. Mohammed Ghanim. “I stayed away from sharing the tragic stories for two reasons”, she cries. “The first reason is that I know it’s of no use…the second reason is that I can’t find words to describe the stories”.
My America cloaks itself in a crazy-quilt of words woven at the expense of human rights, a loud, layered loom-work of lies. In Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis’ 2016 book Liquid Evil, the philosophers theorize a new kind of contemporary devilry in an era defined by its post-solid state. “In its present form, evil is hard to spot, unmask and resist. It seduces us by its ordinariness and then jumps out without warning, striking seemingly at random”, Bauman explains. As a writer and journalist, I am predisposed to fetishize the single voice, the lone canary song, as a harbinger of hard-won egalitarianism. As an American, I have been acclimatized to regard Elphaban modes of protest—spectacular, non-fatal—as the ultimate form of citizen-faith. As a white woman, I want so badly to believe that the future is not foreclosed, that there’s universality in the specific after all, that the Emerald City doesn’t have in order to evict bad Wizards. My America is a graveyard of wicked figures, of chartreuse death-masks, of Brat-colored beats drowning out the Weimar’s fall.
Don’t look up to catch a glimpse of Elphaba. Keep your eyes on your phone when she sits next to you on a Greyhound bus leaving Port Authority.
Good new. He’s dead.
I didn't cry. I promise I didn't cry.
Lol AIDS as a heroin-induced stomach flu? What a dumb kid! Everyone knows AIDS starts as a form a chickenpox.