In the big-screen adaptation of “Wicked,” Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) uses magic to defend her sister and unwittingly destroys a courtyard mural of the Wizard at Shiz University. When her outburst shatters the wall, it also unearths an image that has been intentionally covered up: the school’s original founders, animal professors whose ability to speak, teach humans, and organize politically posed a threat to the Wizard’s autocratic reign.
This surprising fact is revealed early on, but as I watched it, I realized Elphaba’s discovery came too late.
As a repeat viewer of Broadway’s “Wicked,” I’m usually fascinated by how the story’s retrospective lens encourages us to sympathize with Elphaba, who eventually will become the Wicked Witch of the West. Her rich back story — she’s a perennial outsider and highly empathetic person — has forced me to rethink my assumptions about her and reflect on how easily I accepted L. Frank Baum’s own prejudices and his representation of her as a one-dimensional villain in his novel, “The Wizard of Oz.”
But, unlike the stage version, which tracks Elphaba as a young adult to her fateful encounter with Dorothy, the movie delves even more into Elphaba’s biography. It follows her to Shiz University, where she ends up rooming with her frenemy, Galinda, later renamed Glinda (Ariana Grande), whose jealousy of Elphaba’s magical powers leads to conflict. The film ends at the characters’ climactic midpoints. “If Part One is about choices,” the director, Jon M. Chu, recently told Entertainment Weekly, “Part Two is about consequences.”
But for now that also means the story remains unresolved. At the end of the Broadway version, there’s relief in the surprise ending when we learn that the Wicked Witch was far kinder than we gave her credit for and that she successfully challenged the Wizard’s dominance.
Instead, onscreen, Elphaba is left suspended in midair (on her broom), made a scapegoat by the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) as the Shiz professor Madam Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), falsely warns the people of Oz about an enemy who must be captured. Madam Morrible goes even further, blasting on the loudspeaker, “Her green skin is but an outward manifestorium of her twisted nature. This distortion! This repulsion! This wicked witch!”
With Elphaba’s expulsion as the final scene, the focus of the entire movie becomes Oz’s authoritarian fate, and suddenly a 21-year-old stage show becomes inescapably entangled with our current political moment.
Before Gregory Maguire published his 1995 novel “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” which the musical and movie are based on, he initially wanted to write about the nature of evil, specifically the origins of Adolf Hitler’s psychopathy.
“I decided very quickly on that I did not have the intellectual cojones, as it were, to master that particular project,” McGuire said in a 2009 interview. So he reflected on the stories that had shaped his earliest understandings of who is good and who isn’t. “And I began to sort of think, well, what would be more comfortable for me? And who else really scared me in childhood — and scares me today? And really, the Wicked Witch of the West was who I came up with.”
But fairy tales weren’t his only source of inspiration. He also drew on formative moments in his political consciousness. “Some of my portrayal of the Wizard and some of my understanding about the depths of his villainy was definitely predicated around Nixon and his lying and his cheating and his spying and his plumbers and his attempt to subvert the Constitution.”
Like President Richard M. Nixon, the Wizard (fueled by his paranoia) wants to use surveillance (the flying monkeys) against those he considers his rivals. In “Wicked,” he is threatened by the talking animals, who now meet in secret because they fear he will take away their ability to speak and cage them for their political dissent. But while the Wizard is consistently manipulative across all tellings of this story, Glinda’s decision to join him and Madam Morrible in “Wicked: Part One” was even more disturbing.
When Glinda arrives at Shiz, decked in princess-pink couture and accompanied by her sycophant friends, her obsession with social acceptance and desire to be admired only for her beauty, makes her less likely than the green-hued, heady Elphaba to stand up to abusive authority and embrace an outsider label. But, Glinda also seems to evolve the most in this adaptation: she becomes less superficial and more kindhearted and loyal. Because she has no magic of her own, she is an everyperson in contrast to Elphaba’s exceptionality. Not only is she more like the average citizen of Oz, but her ordinariness also encourages those of us in the audience to identify with her, too.
This may be why the decision to let Elphaba go into exile alone and to accept Madam Morrible’s approving hand on her shoulder is so heartbreaking at the end of “Part One,” for she willingly enables the Wizard’s consolidation of power in the hands of two over that of the many. The choice holds echoes of our recent presidential election, in which, as my colleague Lisa Lerer wrote, American voters opted to put the country “on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.” Now, Glinda’s betrayal of Elphaba feels less like a cautionary tale about this type of rule than like the culmination of it.
There’s another year until “Wicked: Part Two” and we learn whether Glinda, as the Good Witch of the South, will redeem herself and temporarily join forces with Elphaba, or reject the Wizard and Madam Morrible’s suppression of dissent and stoking of populist fear.
While that is a long time to wait for a character to grow, it’s a terribly short time for a slide into tyranny.
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