I saw this movie a little over 6 months ago on a date night with my wife and I was truly blown away by how much I liked it. I went in expecting to enjoy the visuals and the music, but I definitely did not expect to find it as thematically engaging as it was. I wanted to write a review immediately after I finished watching it but I never got around to it. Until now.
I was expecting a fun time. I have loved the Wizard of Oz universe since childhood. I knew that this movie would be worth watching for the visual effects, costume design, and musical numbers. I didn't know anything about the plot at all (other than that it was a prequel). I was expecting a lighthearted and fluffy movie - not an allegory on demagoguery, filled with some really pointed historical allusions. The basic premise is that Elphaba is born as a green witch. Like another famous green outcast, Elphaba is possesses tantalizing powers but excruciatingly little control over them, leading her to be seen as a menace. From birth must she navigate constant ostracization (including from her own parents). She goes to college, where she is identified as a prodigy and begins apprenticing in witchcraft - for her, an opportunity to finally harness her curse into a blessing. Eventually she gets tapped to meet the famed Oz - only to learn that he is a mere charlatan who wants to co-opt her powers towards his totalitarian desires. In particular, Oz is commandeering a clandestine operation to strip animals of their ability to speak, thus relegating them to second-class citizens.
A lot of the imagery in this movie invites natural comparisons to The Holocaust. When Oz talks about uniting the population by identifying a common enemy (in this case, the animals), he might as well be reading straight from Adolf Hitler's rhetorical playbook. Recall that one of Hitler's and Goebbels's most common propaganda tactics was to denounce Jews as Vermin; they knew that animal imagery would help to (literally) dehumanize them, thus decreasing the public's intolerance for caging and slaughtering them. It's no coincidence that the most prominent victim is a (scape)goat. The graffiti that shows up on Dr. Dilllamond's projector looks like the kind of message you might have seen spray-painted on many a Jewish business in 1930's Berlin. Oz's spell that makes the monkeys sprout wings through an excruciating generation process mirrors Josef Mengele's horrific experiments. However, for me personally this narrative felt just as closely tied to the story of America's indigenous population. While the cages that the baby animals were put in could easily symbolize the ghettos and/or the concentration camps, I think the element of linguistic extermination made me connect it to the Native Americans being shoehorned into reservations. The nightly strategy meetings could be analogized to Tecumseh's confederacy. But I have an even deeper, more personal reason why I latched onto this less obvious historical allegory. For those of you who don't know, my PhD research studies how different biological systems take decentralized approaches to overcoming obstacles and carrying out the tasks necessary for survival. By understanding how these systems have evolved to operate, I hope to reverse-engineer distributed computing algorithms that can reproduce even a fraction of Mother Nature's efficiency and elegance. One of the highlights of graduate school was the chance to go to Mexico for field work and observe tree-dwelling ants deftly navigate the tortuous jungle vines without the help of a smartphone or even a paper map. I was humbled by how nimble and adaptable the real ants were compared to my rigid simulation algorithms. If there's one thing my research has taught me, it is that humans may have knowledge, but animals have wisdom. When I see a movie about human characters subjugating rather than mutualistically co-existing with animals, I can't help but think about the struggle between the Native Americans and the European settlers, specifically because both conflicts embodied the knowledge/wisdom duality. When the Europeans settled in the Americas, they brought with them a wealth of scientific knowledge. While Native American tribes didn't possess the same advanced agricultural technology, what they did have was superior wisdom on land use - not just from an ecological perspective, but also an economic (specifically, a Georgist) perspective. A better world would have resulted from integrating these two complementary strengths - but instead the former was tragically harnessed towards forcibly conquering the latter.
Whichever metaphor you prefer, I think the movie wants to depict how demagoguery and mob mentalities lead to destructive outcomes for the most arbitrary and senseless reasons. Circling back to the Holocaust metaphor, Galinda's arc made me think about Schindler's List. That movie, and specifically the contrast between Oskar Schindler and Amon Goth, spoke to me about the difference between sins of omission vs. sins of commission. Genocidal movements depend on wicked individuals actively choosing to perpetrate evil; but they also depend on onlookers passively choosing to do nothing in the face of evil. They're two isotopes of the oxygen that feed the same flame. Like Shchindler, Galinda is amoral and transactional, eventually siding with Oz over Elphaba not because it is right but because it is easy and comfortable. For every one Oz there are hundreds of Galindas who could, collectively, stem the tide of demagoguery and prejudice but choose not to out of pure convenience (and lie to themselves about their degree of complicity).
Looking forward to part 2! A couple of stray thoughts to close:
- This movie is a great depiction of the well-established contact hypothesis from social psychology. Elphaba spent much of her childhood being cared for and supported by animals. This type of direct, deeply personal exposure helped her develop immunity to the anti-animal propaganda that so many others in Oz fell for.
- Pretty much the only thing I knew about Wicked was that it was the subject of an infamous South Park episode. After we saw the movie my wife told me that she knew several people who had trekked to the theaters multiple times during the opening week. The next day I insisted that we watch Broadway Bro Down. Here's the best part: in the opening scene, Randy's co-worker reveals that he didn't watch the Broncos game because he was watching Wicked with his wife. My wife and I were watching Wicked while the rest of Austin was watching Texas try to beat Georgia in the SEC Championship Game (though we did manage to catch the overtime period).
