Wicked?

Ok, I know what you’re thinking. Me writing a Film review? Preposterous! Being as there is however a first time for everything, I hope you will humor the following pages in the spirit of discovery…

Yesterday I attended the viewing of a new live action film production of the well known stage musical, “Wicked.” I was intrigued by the premise, having never had a chance to see the live version, I was new to all but the main lines of the story that might be deduced from the musical numbers. For some time after the film, I found myself unable to understand what I had just seen. As a production, it mostly went off without a hitch. I learned first of all that Ariana Grande can act, which was most unexpected. The various media kerfuffles notwithstanding, Cynthia Erivo manages a sympathetic and even compelling performance in places, and Jeff Goldblum has managed to play himself in films for decades, so no surprise that he pulls it off this time around.

I am not a film critic, so I will go no further with a critique of the production itself. Rather what perplexed me about “Wicked” was the premise of the story itself, and how the writers of this genuine if challenging work of art seem to my mind to have entirely misunderstood their own characters.

The first example of this came to me in the first minutes of runtime, when we are posed the question suggested by the title, namely, “Why are some people Wicked?” The answers we are given to choose from, “Are people born Wicked, or are they made so,” are nonsense on their face. Evil is always and forever a matter of individual choice. Mankind alone is possessed of malevolence because he alone is possessed of free will, which includes within it the potential for wickedness. A Wicked Witch is Wicked because she uses her powers to do evil, it is the doing of evil that makes one Wicked. The real question to do with Wickedness is not why some people are, but why everyone is not! If we reduce wickedness to a matter of birth or social moulding, would not Wickedness be universal? Who has entirely escaped the ‘Wicked’ gene, and who has not in some degree experienced personal catastrophe? And if wickedness is only found in the oppression of the oppressed by the oppressors, theoretically through the social landscape, have we not reduced wickedness simply to the situation of being a social oppressor? A matter in which one has, by this logic, almost no say? If we contend that the Wicked Witch is only wicked because of the antagonism of the ‘Good’ Witch, to where shall we turn to explain the antagonism of the ‘Good’ Witch? The problem becomes an infinite regress. The true question is actually given to us in the original film from whence ‘Wicked’ derives its premise. When Dorothy awakes in the land of Oz, very nearly her first question is posed to the Good Witch of the North, when Dorothy remarks, “I didn’t know there were Good Witches?” Indeed the question that ought to be asked, is “Why are some people Good?” What is a Good Witch?

There is a further detail in the meaning of ‘witch’ within this ‘Cinematic Universe’ (a phrase I so wish could be used less often…) that must be unpacked. C. S. Lewis remarked of modern portrayals of Witch burnings as foolish and tragically superstitious affairs by the unlearned and stupid masses of a Medieval past, that the opprobrium is on belief in Witches, not in the burning of them. If modern people believed, as medievals did, that there really are among us certain people, who are in league with a real live Devil, and who seek to curse against their will the souls of innocents, certainly the outrage, if in substance and not practice, would be sympathetically understood. The Wizard of Oz is a quintessentially positivist work of Art. In it, the benevolent man of science supersedes the magical landscape of the fantastical Oz with his own technological brilliance, and is revealed in the end to simply be a kind if buffoonish man behind a curtain. There is no belief in true magic in the 'Wizard' of Oz, the character of Oz is portrayed beforehand as a pretending man of illusions, in short, a Quack. He constructs elaborate ritual, and plays out the well known character in the 1900’s of the spiritualist fraudster. His real power lies in performing this role for the gullible Dorothy, to encourage the wayward youth to return to her parents. There is nothing preternatural about his magic, it is clearly and obviously illusory. We can garner from this that the magic of the land of Oz is psychological. The Wizard is able to coax and persuade Dorothy with her own emotions, to reach a conclusion she ought to have on her own, but was blinded from by her love for the Dog Toto. A classic ‘coming of age’ motif, the child who runs away from her parents for a childish attachment, caught up in a fantasy of being misunderstood and cast out by society, finds solace in the mysterious worldly-wise stranger, who sets her right on her feet again, and shuffles her home. One could imagine a far more malevolent end to a gullible youth lured in by false magic… This malevolence is embodied by the Wicked Witch of the West, who seeks to kill the innocent Dorothy simply to get at her shoes, a classical marker of identity, and source of power for the Wicked Witch. Like the Witch Queen in Snow White, it is a case of jealously gone to seed, The Elder, grown up world, seeking to leech the young girl of her beauty, wonder, individuality, and identity for its own, ‘Wicked’ purposes.

My fascination with the Wizard of Oz is the manner in which the magical man of technology is helpless to bestow upon the characters of the main ‘quest’ their wishes. Rather, he subjects them to the classical mythological landscape, of journey to and return from the underworld, to find what they lack. The young girl coming of age encounters the archetypes of underdeveloped masculinity, the man of looks with no brain, the working man with no heart, and the strong man with no courage. Though they believe that the Wizard will give them what they lack, it is truly their quest alongside the budding Dorothy that does the giving. Even Dorothy’s own wish, to be home, is fulfilled by her own acceptance of the place she has run away from as home. Dorothy is what is missing from the film ‘Wicked,’ that is, simple goodness. Misguided, underdeveloped, immature, but goodness nonetheless. There is a powerful insistence in The Wizard of Oz that even in a positivist utopia, the real power remains in the realm of classical myth. If our problems are solved by the Wizard, then the Wizard has used our own journey to bring it about. The Scarecrow makes up his mind to follow Toto to the Witch’s castle after being unable to make up his mind which way was the right way at the beginning of his journey. The Lion does not run from the pouncing guards, but tears them to shreds, as a Lion should. The Tin Man loves Dorothy, and his love, an emotion of the heart, overcomes his newfound fear of spooks, an emotion of the body. It is the descent into, and return from the realm of evil, the turning towards and passing through the shadow, that grant our characters their wishes.

Now that we have set up the framework of the classic film, it will be easier to illustrate my confusion with the sequel. Perhaps the greatest of all is this. Elfaba is not Wicked. She never becomes wicked, nor uses her powers for Evil. She is not even an anti-heroine; she is simply a classical hero. Her encounter with the wisdom of the ancestors in the Grimmery (an ancient book of forgotten magical wisdom) is the ultimate climax in her personal journey from powerless to powerful. There is no fundamental difference between this and the underworld encounters with those who have gone before by Odysseus or Aeneas. The encounter is more abstract, but it is the central transformation of her character, it gives her the power to ‘Defy Gravity.” Furthermore her antagonist, the oppressor of animals, is the Wizard of Oz himself. This is confusing on many grounds, as it suggests that Wickedness is to be found in the man of Technology, who is unable to grant her wish to free the animals from persecution. Leaving aside the obvious fact that technology will always be powerless to solve the problem of inequality and oppression, it would seem that we are asked to accept an entirely different character for Old Oz, without any explanation, except that he supposedly knows that ‘the best way to unify a people is to give them a really good enemy.’ Despite the fact that this is obvious nonsense, coming from a character who has united the people of Oz by a magical cultus that worships himself, and there seems to be no reason why people and animals cannot share this cultus, it is a rejection of the core premise of Oz’s character, which is given to us in his encounter with Dorothy before the twister. He could have done any number of things with a vulnerable girl come looking for answers, but he chose to show her, in his fantastical way, that she loved her mother more than she wanted to run away. As I have previously labored to make clear, the ‘Good’ magic of Oz is no magic at all, but the art of suggestion, by a clever man behind the curtain of suspended disbelief. This is the real magic of stories, they suggest to our subconscious what our conscious minds will not accept, and they do this best through an array of fantastical made up characters that we, the reader of all people, know to be falsehoods. We know there is an author ‘behind the curtain’ and yet we turn the page. There is a deeper religious commentary to the Wizard of Oz, and before we proceed to a reconciliation of the apparent aberrations in Wicked, it would be apropos to uncover it.

The Wizard of Oz, in addition to being the modern fairy tale of most significance, is a profoundly Christian story. In the main lines, we have a character who has lost their way, guided on the right path by a benevolent virginal character of almost pure love in the “White Witch of the North,” the fairyland stand-in for the Blessed Virgin, Tolkien’s Galadriel, or George Macdonald’s ‘marble lady’ in Phantastes. They are pursued by almost pure evil, a character who is best summed up by the word ‘Mine,’ from who they are powerless to escape without help, which she renders invisibly, thanklessly, for no reason other than love for Dorothy and her friends. Dorothy greets the Wizard with a line straight out of the Psalms, ‘I am Dorothy, the meek and humble.’ The god-man of Oz replies not by granting their wishes directly, but by allowing them to face the demons that haunt them, decision, difficulty, and despair, and choose the good in the face of fear. This act by itself grants them what they lack, and the wizard is revealed in the end not to be a scary facade, but a kindly man, a person. Despite it’s dripping positivism and thinly veiled critique of industrial capitalism, the Wizard of Oz turns in a sermon of the first order in knowing God, encountering him, and learning rightly to pray, expecting not fire from heaven, but another trial to joyfully overcome, remembering that behind the fear and trembling and consuming fire of God, there is a person, the man Jesus, knock after all, and the door will be opened, (bell out of order…). There is even a sense in which the person of God is waiting to be discovered behind the curtain, and our ideas of God, the maniac face veiled in flames, is a simple distraction from his true personhood. Of course Oz is not God, he is simply a man pretending to be one. But even in pretense, there is a form of the Thing itself, and no amount of redressing and social commentary can obscure that. The plot of Dorothy is simply Christian, learning to love those we have been given, and to be thankful for what we have, is the beginning of Christian Joy, a Joy that Dorothy finds upon re-awakening in Kansas, a state picked explicitly for it’s drabness, or seeming non-importance in the mind of the World.

Wicked of course misses this vein of the original story, and is simply concerned with constructing a sympathetic excuse for the wickedness portrayed by the Witch of the West, a task in which it utterly fails. This is where I believe the film fails to understand itself. I will present an alternate approach to understanding the story as it actually stands.

There is an ancient Greek idea that the natural landscape is divided between Nomos and Physis. Nomos being our understanding of things, including such domains as scientific understanding, language, art, etc. Physis is the world as it actually is, the order of nature, for nature’s sake, with no regard for how well it is understood. I contend that the story of Wicked is a battle between Nature and Science, or, Physis and Nomos. The Wizard of Oz is the ‘God of Nomos.’ Through his fantastical technological prowess, he imitates the power of magic, or of nature. Nature here does not refer to some kind of pantheist ‘Mother Earth.’ Rather nature is the created order. The World as it truly is, before and outside human understanding. Magic in Wicked is a thing of nature. Returning to our previous exploration of Magic in the Wizard of Oz, there is nothing preternatural as such about this Magic. Elfaba is not consulting with the dead, or summoning evil spirits, as a witch might in the classical sense. Rather her most prominent trick, a soporific use of poppies, is simply an unleashing of the power already residing in the flower. The story of Wicked is principally this, that a hero in cooperation with the forces of nature, one could say the ‘Goddess of Physis’, outside and in opposition to the forces of science and technology that have descended over our heads and compelled us to worship them, makes war with the overbearing and deceitful rule of Nomos. In so doing she comes into relationship with, even falls in love with, the character of pure imitation that is Gelinda. Gelinda is concerned after all only with ‘popularity'. She is an attractive woman as people understand attractiveness, existing purely to fulfill that fantasy. Elfaba is a character outside of attractiveness as it is understood. She is green for one thing, and dresses in a ‘froat,’ a term of derision for her outdated and unfashionable combination of frock and coat. However, her contact with reality as such, outside of the disconnected social order, makes her attractive to the Prince, who as a result, begins to think! (Much to the chagrin of Gelinda) Thought as such begins when our Nomos, what we have been told about the world by others, contacts Physis, the world as it truly is. This love between the two magical women does not last, it cannot. However it is indicative of the inherent desire that Nomos has to ‘know’ reality, and the requisite desire of reality to ‘be known.’ To quote an ancient Sufi Sheik, God is the priceless gem, who created the world in order to be discovered.

So then Wicked fails in its task of explaining Wickedness, I contend it does not even address it. Rather it pulls on the ancient mythological thread of Cupid and Psyche, the god who desires to be known through love, but cannot be seen by the rational mind without destroying it, and the mind, who desires to see God, so much so that it will risk eternal pains for a glimpse. In fact I could not help view the character of Elfaba through the lens of Orual from C S Lewis’s novel ‘Till We Have Faces,’ and that, I suppose, was my ultimate and final frustration with Wicked. In addition to failing in it’s exploration of the origin of Wickedness, it does not even attempt treatment of redemption, or the great mystery of how wicked souls, which all men and women possess, can be made good. Orual is transformed by the story of her own life. The Magic of the Wizard of Oz is exacty this power, the transforming power of revisiting our own past and present in the lives of fictional characters, and it is entirely disregarded. Orual, who is every bit wicked witch as the novel unfolds, learns to love God as such, through discarding her accusations of Him, and realizing that the choice to be offended, to take offense, to allow the oppression of the world into our souls, to sieze upon it as our right, our perogative, is in the final analysis,

Wicked.