When Glinda and Elphaba, the leads of the new movie adaptation of “Wicked,” clap eyes on each other, it’s loathe at first sight.
Glinda shrieks (but charmingly). In response, Elphaba smirks and asks if she’s got something in her teeth. Glinda, short for Galinda, played by Ariana Grande, is pale and pretty in pink. Elphaba, played by Cynthia Erivo, is glowering in glasses and green skin. “No, I am not seasick; yes, I have always been green; and no, I did not eat grass as a child,” she says.
And right then, you know where you are: Act One of a classic frenemy love story.
These two young women, classmates and roommates — one giggly, glamorous and beloved, the other studious, plain and lonely — seem destined to despise each other forever, or at least until graduation. But if you’re a connoisseur of this particular genre, there is no question what happens next. Glinda could be Vivian Kensington clocking Elle Woods on the quad in “Legally Blonde” or Cher Horowitz when she first sees Tai Frasier in “Clueless.”
Swap green skin for an off-trend outfit, set your story in the merry old land of Oz instead of Harvard or a Beverly Hills high school, and you’ve got “Wicked,” a frenemy story nonpareil, offering the promise of a platonic love that will leave you better than you’ve been, changed inside and out for good.
And who could resist that? In a typical boy-meets-girl story, a woman wishes, hopes, prays that a man will fall for her (or she swears that she would never in a thousand years be interested in someone like that or that she’s not looking for love or that she’s in love with her job or any of the other familiar variations). Three hundred pages, 90 minutes or eight streaming episodes later, he informs her that she’s bewitched him body and soul or that he loves her just as she is. Regardless of how many wobbles there may be along the way, we know where we’re going to end up.
Frenemy stories do something more complicated. By their emotional logic, it’s not the ending that matters; it’s the journey. The main characters draw each other out and learn from each other not in order to achieve the cliché of happily ever after but for the experience of friendship in its own right.
The stories are powered by the shifting dynamics between love and hate, gratitude and resentment, and admiration and contempt, and that’s what makes them so resonant. What woman has not experienced that careful negotiation, that constant subtle recalibration when she’s with a friend: What do I need from her? What does she need from me? Who are we to each other? And in the best of all possible worlds, who can we become? The female frenemy plot takes those oft-hidden tensions and makes them larger than life for our enjoyment and catharsis.
“Wicked” the movie — based on “Wicked” the musical, adapted from “Wicked” the Gregory Maguire novel, a retelling of L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” — wants to be many things. It’s a timely examination of the uses of propaganda and a strongman’s rise. It is Super Bowl Sunday for theater kids, and it’s a balm for despondent Democrats, who will relish a tale of two women (one played by a Black actress, the other played by a white one) working to take down a deceitful and unworthy ruler, especially because that sisterhood largely failed to materialize on Nov. 5.
But it’s the frenemy fantasy — enemies who become friends, who unite to fix a broken world — that makes “Wicked” work.
All the familiar beats are there. First, there’s opposites failing to attract. Elphaba thinks Glinda is shallow and stupid and silly. Glinda thinks Elphaba’s glum, unfun and, again, green. “Every little trait, however small, makes my very flesh begin to crawl,” the two sing. In full mean-girl mode, Glinda regifts her roommate a frumpy, pointed black hat. When Elphaba wears the hat to a party (the first one she’s ever attended!), it’s just as cringe as Elle Woods cluelessly showing up at a law school mixer in full Playboy Bunny regalia.
It gets worse when Elphaba, refusing to be shamed, performs a mannered interpretive dance solo. To the surprise of everyone in the movie but perhaps no one in the audience, Glinda joins her, mirroring her awkward moves, wiping the tears from her cheek. It’s a recognition that Elphaba has what Glinda does not: the courage to be herself.
Inevitably, a makeover scene follows; by the movie’s climactic song, it is Elphaba who extends her hand to Glinda, promising that together they’ll be “the greatest team there’s ever been” with both of them singing, “Dreams the way we planned ’em/If we work in tandem/There’s no fight we cannot win.”
The female enemies-to-friends trope plays out from timeless young-adult classics to of-the-moment novels by Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante, offering viewers and readers possibilities a marriage plot never could. Do the heroines want to befriend each other? Do they want to be each other? Newer, more modern possibilities: Maybe they want to be with each other or used to be with each other, as with Frances and Bobbi in Ms. Rooney’s “Conversations With Friends.” Or maybe half the internet has simply decreed that they should be. (Google “Gelphie fan fic” if you dare.)
There’s Laverne and Shirley, schlemieling and shlemazeling their way through life; Blair and Serena, feuding in designer clothing on “Gossip Girl”; and even Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, releasing competing diss tracks before burying the hatchet with a literal mailed olive branch and hamburger-and-fries costumes. In Claire Messud’s “The Woman Upstairs,” a shy teacher named Nora and a glamorous artist named Sirena engage in a long game of obsession and exploitation, while in Toni Morrison’s “Sula,” Nel and Sula’s friendship survives deaths, betrayals and a shared secret. A frenemy relationship is the driving force behind “Orange Is the New Black” and “Killing Eve.” “Insecure” concludes with two happy endings for Issa: She gets the guy, but she also gets her best friend back, and of the two, it’s the second that seems the more significant.
Across time, across generations, across genres, in fiction and in real life, the pairings recur — now friendly, now feuding, now friends again. And audiences, female audiences especially, get to watch, experiencing the emotions and attachments on the screen or the page, reflecting on our own histories and friendships.
Love in a rom-com can feel inevitable. Respect can be harder to come by, especially from someone initially immune to your charms. That kind of reassessment from that kind of friend isn’t just affirming; it’s life-changing. And for audiences, seeing a character we’re emotionally invested in as she blossoms into her fullest self makes it possible to believe that we, too, are capable of transformation. And right now, as the days and the timeline get darker, the idea of a hater turned celebrator who can see the best in you, even when you can’t see a thing, has never been more welcome.
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