THE WONDERFULLY WICKED WIZARD OF OZ

or, the wild world of evil and love; or, these visions blurred indistinct and calamitous; or, a clamor

Wicked is a movie adaptation of a stage musical adaptation of a novel by Gregory Maguire, which is itself a revisionist imagining of the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank L Baum but also of its movie adaptation of the stage musical adaptation of Baum’s novel.

It’s all quite weird and wonderful, this double helixing and compounding variations on what I’d call a two stringed melody.

My wife wanted to see the movie so we saw it a few days before Christmas and then I read the Frank L Baum novel on Christmas Eve and then I read Maguire’s Wicked about a week later and then we rewatched The Wizard of Oz, so every possible iteration—excepting the stage musicals—are fresh enough in my mind that I may as well talk about this. And one may ask: why do all this?

Do you really love Wicked or the Wizard of Oz?

Not especially, to be honest. I mean, I like them well enough! But I suppose it all comes down to my mild obsession with adaptation as a process¹. And I think Wicked actually offers something blaringly strange about what may happen during the adaptation process.

But before we get there, let’s roll the clocks back to 1900.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Make no mistake, there’s nothing wonderful about this wizard!

This is a brief and fast moving novel meant for children so there’s not much preamble before we find ourselves in Munchkin Country, with a dead witch under a house. From there, we really get on with it and Dorothy collects her cohorts, but not before first meeting a Munchkin named Boq, which is relevant 90 years later.

You know the story. I needn’t summarize here. The main difference is that there’s more of it here and it’s actually quite a bit stranger than the movie we’ve all seen a score of times by virtue of growing up in the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s. For you younger readers, I don’t know what TV was like after that for I am old and was off doing things better left unmentioned for much of my teenagedom and early twenties.

A few differences are that the Ruby Slippers are silver in the novel and that the Flying Monkeys are bound to another magical item called the Golden Cap, which allows its owner to command them three times. There’s a bit more about the social structure of Oz, albeit implicit and oblique, and there’s quite a bit more stuff after they discover that the Wizard of Oz is, as they say, a humbug.

But most interesting is the political situation of the novel. Or rather, the situation outside the novel, in the real life world.

Dorothy’s Kansas is dry and arid and farmers scrape by to make a living, whereas Munchkin Country is a land of bounty! There’s food everywhere. And in this way, we get contrast. In contrast exists critique.

The late 19th century was one of massive political upheaval. Robber barons ruled the second half of the 19th century and populist progressive movements across the country sought to change that. Anarchism had also been on the rise, along with political assassinations. Even a president had been assassinated! There were multiple financial crashes and America seemed to have become a land of corruption and oligarchy.

One may find a similar state these days, if you have eyes to see, ears to hear.

And so Baum was writing about his own world, but also showing a more hopeful world where food and land were plenty, where tyrants were taken down, where liars and conmen were unmasked.

And, yes, he’d rather have a man of stuffed straw in charge than a thieving conman.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

There are many interesting elements to this movie, but the most obvious is the color. Such vibrant, wondrous color! And such attention put into the sets, the costuming, the singing, the dancing.

While the novel was focused on Dorothy, the movie adaptation (and, presumably, the stage musical that preceded it) has much more of an emotional core. The novel glides over the surface of emotion, to busy darting from place to place, helter skeltering across the land of Oz, which must be quite small, considering how quickly they traverse it. But the movie really brings it all down to the human level and keeps it there.

We live and breath, laugh and cry, by Dorothy.

This is especially apparent if you old men and women like myself watch this with a child. There’s a terror present in the movie that’s not really in the book, and it’s because of the omnipresent danger to Dorothy, the wild and weird spectacles assaulting her.

But, again, this movie came out of a politically volatile time. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl ravished the middle of the country. The robber baron class was finally overthrown and antitrust laws were set in place to protect regular people, but we were also marching to war with the rest of the world.

We could discuss the conditions on set, but perhaps it’s best to let the magic linger in you rather than worry about the brutality of the conditions that ruined a few lives and sent a few to early graves.

The world felt drab and brutal and so we escape, once more, to a magical, bountiful, colorful world with fascinating people and legible morality, where tyrants are toppled as easily as a falling house or a splash of water.

As popular as Baum’s novels were, they would have likely faded from view without the musical. I mean, how many people still read Baum’s novel? How many people are even aware that he wrote more than one or that this movie is based on a book?

And the music is stunning. I don’t need to tell you that. You probably have most of the songs memorized, even if you don’t realize it. But put on the soundtrack or rewatch the movie sometime this week and marvel how deep these songs are inside you.

There was a certain kind of magic to these old movies. The choreography is great, the cinematography is easy and well constructed. Each scene legible. Every scene gives the actors room to breathe and act, rather than the current era of editing where there’s a cut every three seconds. Here, we have long sequences where blocking matters, where the whole body is allowed to act. We’re not locked into close ups of everyone’s faces for 90 minutes but instead able to take in the background, foreground, and the action of the main cast.

I do think the performances are where this is most noticeable, but we’ll get to the contrast in a bit.

What more needs to be said about this weird, wonderful movie?

Wicked (1995)

If you’ve seen the musical, I must say that you have literally no idea what’s in store for you when you open this novel. If you think Baum’s original was wacky and weird, you’re about to be stunned by what happens here.

I’m actually not going to spoil the novel here in the main text (though check this footnote if you want spoilers²) since I imagine most people have not read this. I mean, a whole lot of people did, obviously. It sold well enough to earn several sequels and it became a longrunning acclaimed Broadway musical and now a very successful movie, so it’s not like this is some arcane, obscure text.

But considering the differences between the novel and the adaptation, it may as well be.

Now, I do think this began a trend that I find quite dumb, which is the revisionist story where we learn about why the bad guy from some children’s story was just misunderstood.

Boohoo, et cetera, and so forth.

But what Maguire does here isn’t simply give the Wicked Witch of the West a backstory. No, he invents Oz.

And I mean that quite seriously. For all that Baum did to make an interesting marvelous place, it’s more akin to Narnia, I think, than any lived in reality.

Maguire brings politics and religion to Oz and he does it in fascinating ways. I cannot even begin to fathom how he looked at Oz and saw such fertile ground for a story about revolutionary politics, but I suppose it’s oddly fitting, given the lived experiences and contexts of Baum that went into the creation of Oz nearly a century earlier.

Wicked takes place a few decades earlier than The Wizard of Oz and goes up until the end of the Wizard of Oz, so the Wicked Witch does meet her wet end, but how we get there feels like it’s from another world, despite sharing much of the same roots and actions.

Elphaba, the girl who would become the witch, is born green, and this sets her apart. But rather than this simply being a story about racism, we get something much more interesting. For while her skin sets her apart, it also just becomes another characteristic. I mean, this world is full of talking animals teaching at universities and tiny people and witches and so on. While being green is unusual, it’s not all that sets her apart.

No, what sets her apart is a state of lovelessness.

It is a cruel fate, to be born to the people she was born to.

Her mother was a runaway heiress who married a small time preacher as an act of rebellion and she regrets it almost always. Not that she doesn’t love him, but she also, through boredom, finds infidelity excitement enough to keep her going. Thus and so, Elphaba is born.

And then there’s the whole situation with Turtleheart, but check the spoilerful footnote below if you want to see some of the stranger aspects of the novel. We get a lot of groundwork early on, showing us Elphaba’s childhood, but also dealing with the politics of the world.

Oz was a monarchy but this Wizard who appeared from the sky led a bloody revolution to topple the government. While Oz was struggling with droughts and famines, the Wizard brought technology and industrialization to the land. We see in the Wizard of Oz how this led to bountiful harvests, but here, in Wicked, we see the human toll of this work.

An oppressive, totalitarian regime forms and it devastates communities, leading to what amounts to near genocide for certain regions of Oz. And then there is the Animal question, prominent in the movie and novel, that reduces our speaking, thinking Animals into, well, animals.

Here inside the novel is a metastasized metaphor for Elphaba.

You become what society makes you.

If you are forced to live as an animal, you will become one.

And we see how Elphaba interacts with this pressure. She is an outcast because of her skin, but her actions exacerbate that rather than attempt to alleviate it. While she’s welcomed and befriended by people at Shiz University, she keeps them perpetually at a distance and often ensures her own isolation.

We see this go on in the novel. Her Wicked moniker is well deserved, even if she was unfairly pushed in that direction.

Wicked (2024)

How this is an adaptation of the novel, I will never know! The only commonality, honestly, are character names and the setting. The politics are largely stripped out of the movie or flattened to a very black and white kind of morality.

Elphaba is only misunderstood and demonized unfairly because of her skin.

We can all see the racism analogy or maybe even the homophobia analogy or, perhaps, the trans analogy. Its flatness, its blunt politics make it consumable, relatable, understandable, and, ultimately, toothless.

But no matter! This isn’t really about politics, though it may occasionally wear such clothes.

The novel has a much more nuanced and complicated approach to all this. But that’s for book readers and long talkers, for essayists and floundering intellectuals who spend all their days writing and talking about things like art and politics and their intersection.

The movie is a success despite being one of the most baffling adaptations I can think of. What this has to do with the novel is essentially a mystery, but that’s all right.

This is a fun, funny, and exciting movie. It has lots of singing and dancing and color.

Though my main quibble with the movie is the way it looks.

Apparently all the sets were made by hand. They spent hundreds of hours making these sets. And I’m sure they look great in real life, but the post-production team decided to slap on some effect that makes them look like CGI.

This is absolutely baffling and makes the movie look much worse than it should. Because so much of every movie is dressed in CGI, you can barely find a genre movie where the sets are not greenscreened in. Film has become trapped in big studios, in empty warehouses where actors pretend to be somewhere while they’re surrounded by nothing, and all that nothing will eventually be filled in my CGI.

It makes everything look like shit. And it’s quite sad that the effects team here slapped slop over all the hard work of all those craftspeople.

This bleeds over into the performances. We have choreography that was clearly rehearsed and practiced and looks great, for the glimpses we get of it. Much has been made of the livesinging approach to the musical, where the actors sing live rather than lip sync, but both the choreography and the singing are masked by editing.

The biggest dance number is Dancing through Life, which has dozens of people dancing and singing together. But the camera is constantly in motion, often obscuring the dancing. There are so many cuts in the scene that you may think that the actors only learn the choreography five seconds at a time. And this is a shame, and a stark contrast to The Wizard of Oz, where we really inhabit those performances.

We are allowed to see the dancing, the choreography, and this allows us to appreciate it, to marvel at it.

And this is true of all the choreography. The editing gets in the way and we’re stuck with flashes of choreography, of bodies in motion, rather than a full scene where we can sit back in awe of the performances, of the sheer physicality of a scene where thirty or fifty people are dancing and singing, stomping their feet, belting out with their biggest voices.

And it really is a shame because I think these performances were great. I’m not exactly what anyone would call a fan of musicals, but my wife is. And so I see more than I would if I were choosing solely for myself. But Wicked has moments of greatness and I think it’s too bad that modern filming conventions box it in so often.

Because I do love choreography. It’s why I love Jackie Chan and Jet Li movies. It’s why I love ballet. Dancing is a beautiful, wondrous art form, but the way we film it now makes it almost impossible to experience.

Even so, even despite all this, the movie is a very great time.

What’s all this then?

Well, I don’t really have some conclusion or bigger point to make. But these many versions of the same story fascinate me. From the Baum and Garland versions up through today, we have such strange twists on a world that seems more thrown together by accident than anything else.

But the refraction and interaction of all these visions, of these characters, of this world, imbued with politics and theologies and philosophies make them worth experiencing individually or in concert.

Of course, if you must only experience two, I’d watch the 1939 movie and read Maguire’s book.

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Free novels:

• Strong Female Characters

• The Hero’s Dilemma

• Dark SF

• Book O’Clock

• The Occult and Supernatural

1. Here are a list of times I’ve written here about adaptations:

• Shogun

• The Wheel of Time

• Interview with the Vampire

• Cowboy Bebop

• One Hundred Years of Solitude

• House of the Dragon

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

• Warcraft

• The Little Mermaid

2. Turtleheart, Turtleheart, where for art thou, Turtleheart. We begin this novel with quite some big differences, but Turtleheart being in a threeway sexual and romantic relationship with the Wicked Witch’s parents is certainly something I did not expect. But his kindness is, I think, what gives Elphaba the moral courage she shows throughout the novel.

This moral courage leads her to become a terrorist trying to topple the Wizard of Oz’s regime! But it also stays her hand at a crucial moment. And what we see from Elphaba is a frustrating lack of action. She is frustrated by her own life, by morality, by her life. She wants to do, to be great, yet she often recedes rather than moves forward. This keeps her from becoming and it allows naming to control her.

She is made an outcast and rather than do, she becomes. I don’t mean this to become esoteric or confusing, but I think this is important in understanding her character. She could take action and change Oz or her life, but she almost always turns away from such steps. And this leads her on a frustrating path of inaction, of being, of tolerating people’s assumptions and beliefs about her. And, of course, this ultimately leads her to her showdown with Dorothy that ends so miserably for her, for everyone.

The novel is very much about the nature of evil and the nature of things. Who and what we are and why we are these things. It’s an interesting approach and a not always very satisfying novel, but it is bubbling with possibility and inventiveness. Especially considering the starting point.