Wicked, the musical film based on the popular Broadway show of the same name, is one of the year’s biggest hits, debuting at No. 1 in North America over the weekend and already generating early Oscar buzz . Audiences came prepared to love Wicked’s famous power ballads and girl-power core, but one aspect of the story seemed to surprise them. It’s a somewhat clunky but surprisingly durable political allegory.
“I just noticed that Elphaba looks like Kamala Harris and Wizard looks like Donald Trump,” one fan posted on Reddit. “How can it be[political]when a charismatic leader gaslights a community that this woman is evil just because she stands up for marginalized people in society? ” joked director Jon M. Chu.
Despite being a silly, epic show about friendship and talking animals, Wicked actually invites political interpretation. The allegory is both eye-opening and still feels eerily prescient more than 20 years after its stage debut.
The musical Wicked is based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel of the same name, an anti-fascist thesis about a wizard who becomes a Hitler-like tyrant. Although the musical wasn’t a huge hit when it premiered on Broadway in 2003, it became a hit during the administration of George W. Bush, who had ordered the invasion of Iraq just months earlier. .
In Wicked, it is revealed that the Wizard disenfranchises the talking animals of Oz because he needs to give them a common enemy in order to unify the rest of the land. . But the Wizard’s persecution of animals, and later of Elphaba, is rooted in lies, just as Bush’s false claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before the invasion.
Some of the references are clearly obvious. When Dorothy’s house falls on the Wicked Witch of the East, Glinda repeats the Bush administration’s favorite euphemism for the Iraq War, describing it as “regime change.” “Is he a crusader or a ruthless invader?” sings the wizard, referencing Bush’s infamous depiction of the invasion of Iraq as a crusader. “That’s why labels can survive!”
Critics’ reactions were mixed. “As a parable of fascism and freedom, ‘Wicked’ over-hypes it and significantly weakens its disturbing power,” Ben Brantley declared in the New York Times in 2003, adding that the show “is It has a political heart, as if it were a slogan,” he added. button. “
Author Daniel Handler, on the other hand, was taken aback by the dark interpretation of the sunny, magical Oz, but found himself drawn to the idea. “I can’t help but wonder if the witch, a difficult figure transformed by difficult times, might not be exactly what our stage needs,” Handler wrote in the New York Times that same year. “And perhaps, as the show suggests, the ‘W’ in George W. Bush stands for ‘evil.'”
Singing the same lyrics today, the magician suggests Trump rather than Bush. They are leaders who consolidate their power by scapegoating marginalized groups and slowly but surely denying them their rights. Meanwhile, the difference in strategy between Elphaba, a mob-mongering progressive, and Glinda, a conciliatory liberal, could be particularly damaging to Democrats amid post-election criticism.
Both Elphaba and Glinda worship the wizard and dream of serving as his right-hand man. When Elphaba learns of the plight of the animals in Oz, she is convinced that if she knew that the animals were being targeted, she would immediately come to their aid, and heads straight to Emerald City to seek help. The wizard suggests that Elphaba might do so if she uses her magic as part of her rule, but upon learning that the wizard is behind the attack, Elphaba disowns her and becomes a realist. Glinda is greatly disappointed.
Wicked began life as an allegory for American politics. It cannot be otherwise.
“I hope you’re happy that you’ve hurt your cause forever,” Glinda sings. After all, Elphaba is alienating a potential powerful ally. “I want you to be proud of me for giving in to feed my ambitions,” Elphaba replies. Elphaba is determined not to cooperate with anyone who would use her powers to harm the speaking animals of Oz. Can we read this moment as an allegory for how Democrats should deal with transgender issues going forward? Sure, it sounds far-fetched, but it’s not as far-fetched as you might think.
Most Wicked fans would agree that the political subplot is the weakest part of the musical, so it’s hard to believe that Wicked’s political message is so prescient. It’s strange in a way. Wicked lives and breathes not so much by dueling visions of activism as by the rugged friendship between its two protagonists.
Yet in another sense, Wicked began life as an allegory for American politics. It cannot be otherwise. That’s what the story of Oz is about.
Most children’s fantasy classics in the English-speaking world are in English. Think Peter Pan, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Sword in the Stone, and Harry Potter. They tend to think about what it means to be a good king, about the wild magical beasts that lurk in the forest, about being an island nation.
But The Wizard of Oz is an American fantasy. The Oz map, rectangular with its long sides horizontal, is a simplified, child-like map of the Americas, an unimaginably vast habitable continent from east to west. (Oz is surrounded by a toxic desert rather than an ocean.) It is a country where farmers cultivate fields of corn and wheat and apple orchards. There, businessmen build a vast and glittering city. The west side is full of wild, undeveloped land. And it is a country ruled by fraudsters who lie to the people they govern.
When L. Frank Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz in 1900, he imagined the Wizard of Oz as a powerless but well-intentioned man who was a little dishonest. In the 1939 film, the wizard explains to Dorothy, “I’m a very good person, just a bad wizard.” Still, The Wizard can serve as a surprisingly ironic metaphor for all the broken promises of the American Dream. The Wizard is a man who promises everything but gives nothing, and who tells you that the answer was inside you all along.
It’s this metaphor that gives The Wiz, an all-black reinterpretation of 1970’s The Wizard of Oz, a surprisingly poignant feel. In The Wiz, Dorothy and her friends are black people who are promised certain basic rights by a government that never plans to repay them. (In response to similar criticisms, he cast black actress Cynthia Erivo as the racially distinct green-skinned Elphaba.)
In The Wiz, the Scarecrow learns that the Wizard is a politician who washed up from Atlantic City, and sneers that “government is the last refuge of the incompetent.” “Incompetent!” Wiz Crow. “It’s me!”
Wicked, on the other hand, is not a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, but rather a historical revisionist. As such, it is fundamentally skeptical of authority figures, much more so than Baum, who ultimately replaced the wizard with the virtuous and almost infallible fairy queen Ozma.
The premise of a story about your childhood villain being misunderstood is that the narrator was lying to you. In Wicked, the Wizard isn’t just a very bad wizard, he’s also a very bad guy. He lies maliciously and with strategic purpose.
The Wizard serves as a wonderfully ironic metaphor for all the broken promises of the American Dream.
Here, Elphaba and Glinda, like Dorothy and her friends, become just two dreamers traveling to the Emerald City. Because they want the wizard to grant them their heart’s desire. The idea is to protect the animals that speak Oz’s language, as they are increasingly being persecuted.
However, the wizard they encounter is not only unable to grant such a request of theirs, but actually plans to take advantage of their innocent wishes and defeat it by carrying out further violence. I’m doing it. He plans to take Elphaba under his wing and have her perform magic on his behalf. Doing so would allow them to more thoroughly persecute the sentient animals they are recruiting and spy on the rest of the population more effectively.
Eventually the wizard names Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch of the North, as he can trust Glinda to maintain friendly relations with the regime, but Elphaba refuses. He’s not a con artist, he’s an America ruled by the strong, an authoritarian dictator.
This is the kind of metaphor historical revisionists can offer, and it’s part of why Wicked feels oddly urgent at the moment. In a story that subverts childhood classics, no one in authority can be trusted. That’s what makes these stories so fascinating, when untrustworthy people rise to power.
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