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jadelotusflower · 5 months ago

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Rewatch: Return to Oz (1985)

I've been on a bit of an Oz kick recently, revisiting the original Baum books and of course anticipating Wicked coming out later this year (which I'm managing expectations for to avoid disappointment).

Return to Oz was a staple (and nightmare fuel) for many a millennial childhood, at the tail end of the "dark fantasy" era popularised by The Neverending Story and The Dark Crystal, the antithesis of the Technicolour, musical world of MGM's The Wizard of Oz - a dystopian future that reflects the fracturing of Dorothy's mind and her inability to reconcile the trauma of her previous Kansas-Oz journey.

Return lives in a sort of mirror world to the 1939 film, taking elements such as the ruby slippers (for which Disney had to pay MGM a hefty fee), but returning to the original illustrations for the character designs, and drawing inspiration from Baum's novels but not explicitly adapting them. It also returns Dorothy to a child rather than Garland's quasi-teenager, which is important as I feel Baum (an advocate of women's suffrage) had a keen interest in the empowerment of girls as the heroes of their own stories.

To evoke that other turn of the century fantasy classic, Dorothy is to early modern American folklore as Alice is to English, and if The Wizard of Oz is Wonderland, Return to Oz is Through the Looking Glass. In fact Return relies heavily on the mirror motif, not only literally, in the mirror that entraps Ozma, but Ozma herself as a mirror to Dorothy. Return also takes the Kansas/Oz dichotomy from the film in reflecting people Dorothy knows in Kansas to characters of Oz (a concept not found in the books), but while in Wizard it’s Dorothy’s trio of friends that are personified in the Scarecrow, Tinman, and Cowardly Lion, in Return it is her trio of antagonists from Kansas who appear in Oz - the Dr Worley/The Nome King, Nurse Wilson/Mombi, and the Orderly/Wheeler.

Her Oz friends in Return are instead pulled from inanimate objects - Ozma gives her a pumpkin that personifies in Jack Pumpkinhead, Tik-Tok resembles the "Electrical Therapy" machine with the face, and the gump...well, I guess they forgot about that one.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Fairuza Balk was just 11 but has a compelling screen presence - her Dorothy is troubled and serious, befitting the overall darker tone of the film. While she would go on to embody "witchy" energy in later roles, here there's a world-weariness yet innate strength to her Dorothy.

Aunt Em helpfully tells us it's been six months since the tornado and Dorothy can't sleep. Her body may be back in Kansas, but her mind remains in Oz.

The film doesn't really pick a lane between the "it was all a dream" of the 1939 film and the "Oz is an actual place" of the books, leaving it for the viewer to decide. We are told the old house was "lost" but that can suit either interpretation, same with the OZ key being either delivered by shooting star or the key to the old house (as Em posits). Dorothy's inability to sleep is either unresolved trauma from the tornado, or longing to return to her friends in Oz and/or sensing that there is trouble in Oz.

I'm much more sympathetic to Em as an adult - she has a husband unable or unwilling to finish building the new house, Dorothy won't stop rabbiting on about nonsense rather than helping with chores, and she has to borrow money from her sister to pay for medical treatment to try and cure Dorothy's insomnia.

Justice for Aunt Em! Played with grace by three-time Oscar nominee Piper Laurie (for The Hustler, Carrie, and Children of a Lesser God respectively).

Poor Toto doesn't get to come on this adventure, but hey, he's still around, guess Mrs Gulch didn't make good on her threat to have him destroyed (or she died in the tornado, which is probably likely given the Witch's fate).

Just a guy patronizing a child that the machine intended to surge electricity through her brain is perfectly safe because it has a face.

But there is a face in the machine - Ozma, stuck in the glass.

Nicol Williamson is our villain, with a fantastic voice. Mostly known for theatre and Shakespeare, you may remember him as Merlin from that other dark fantasy classic Excalibur, or as Little John from Robin and Marian.

Jean Marsh is our witch, complete with black gown and pointed sleeves - to continue our fantasy bingo she was Queen Bavmorda in Willow (which I've actually never seen) and Rose in the original Upstairs Downstairs (which I've never seen either). She'll always be creepy Mombi to me.

We see Ozma in the glass again before she appears in Dorothy's room, ethereal barefoot child gifting her a carved pumpkin because "it's Halloween soon". Okay, whatever you have to do to get there.

On that note, the screenplay was written by Gill Dennis (who would go on to co-write Walk the Line) and Walter Murch, who also directed. Murch was film school friends with George Lucas, and they wrote THX-1138 together - Lucas has a "special thanks" credit on this film. Murch worked steadily in sound design and editing (nominated for 10 Oscars with 4 wins), but after Return was a box office failure he never directed another film, which is a real shame.

Dorothy "combs" the pumpkins hair, which I find very charming.

The growing tension of Dorothy's isolation, being strapped to the gurney, the squeaking wheels, the far-off screaming: this is a horror film for children.

My sister and I used to re-create Ozma and Dorothy's escape on our grandmother's porch all the time.

Because we’re in a mirror, the streaming river of Kansas becomes the deadly desert of Oz - water, of course, also being a mirror and common pathway/doorway between worlds.

Billina the hen also appears, because Dorothy needs an animal companion, who can now talk because she is in Oz. The question is whether Toto could also talk, as all animals can in Oz, and simply chose not to (iirc in the books he didn't because he could "make himself understood" without words or something). The chicken puppetry is really quite good, I'll always prefer puppets/animatronics over cgi.

The voice of Billina is provided by Denise Bryer, who was the "junk lady" in Labyrinth (have we got that bingo yet?).

Another reflection - the packed lunch that was taken from Dorothy at the sanitarium in Kansas is returned to her in the form of a lunch pail tree in Oz, which leans towards the reading that Oz is a projection of Dorothy's mind as a way to cope and resolve/repair the traumas of her Kansas life.

Dorothy comes across her old house that is seemingly not in Munchkinland, the broken remains of the yellow brick road nearby. How much time has passed in Oz? Since everyone was turned to stone it could be hundreds of years and we're in a Narnia situation - at least long enough for a forest to grow where there once was a munchkin town square.

Glinda is conspicuous by her absence - probably because the plot couldn't happen if she was around.

Also absent are any stone munchkins which has very dark implications - the Emerald City still has ruins and stone inhabitants, but Munchkinland has been completely obliterated.

lol, Dorothy runs to the Emerald City in literally minutes, a journey that previously took half a film.

Sleep well, kids!

If we go with the interpretation that Oz is a manifestation of Dorothy's mind (maladaptive daydreaming?), it is interesting how she projects people and objects from her real life into her fantasy life - obviously her threats in the sanitarium become the villains, but the Electric Shock machine becomes Tik-Tok, her erstwhile protector. In this, she transforms a threat into an ally, and yet much is made that he isn't, and cannot be, "alive."

Many of the elements of this film - Billina, the Wheelers, Tik-Tok, the Nome King, and the princess with a hundred heads - came from Ozma of Oz, while Ozma herself, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the witch Mombi (combined in this film with Princess Langwidere) originate in the earlier The Marvellous Land of Oz, with a different backstory.

Oh to be a wicked witch, playing a mandolin, in a gilded, mirrored palace.

I enjoy this costume! Reflective of the high structured sleeves of nurse but sharp to emphasise the danger Mombi poses, and with the same mechanical accents/coloiur scheme as the Wheelers

Those cabinets full of heads are still so creepy. The way they watch Dorothy - are they alive and aware the whole time? Horrifying.

Jack Pumpkinhead was voiced by a young Brian Henson (who also acted as puppeteer).

I always used to fast-forward the scene where Dorothy steals the key and gets chased by headless Mombi as a kid, it was just too tense.

I mean maybe this isn't scary to kids today, but it sure freaked the fuck out of me. Especially with all of those heads screaming in their cabinets.

But how exactly was zombie Mombi snoring without a head?

Interesting that the cabinet with Mombi's original head is the only one without transparent glass, but instead has a mirror. Her original head is also kept in cabinet 31, which was Dorothy's room in the sanitarium. As a kid I was always dead set that Oz was real and Dorothy really went there, but now I'm leaning more towards Oz as a manifestation, or at least a world directly influenced and constantly adapting based on Dorothy's experiences. Was she unable to sleep in Kansas because she knew Oz was in trouble, or was Oz in trouble because of her mental discord?

"If his brain's run down, how can he talk?" "It happens to people all the time Jack!" is a nice callback to "Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking don't they?"

In which we strain the metaphor.

But all these mirrors also serve a story purpose as well as a metaphorical one - the mirror world is where Mombi has trapped Ozma, so she can look on every surface and see her victory. The mirror is also a connection with the real world, and how Ozma can reach Dorothy and draw her back to Oz. Mirrors are reflections, but they are also doorways, as we see in this very scene as Ozma directs Dorothy to the right passage to get back up to the tower.

We also get another Dorothy/Ozma parallel, in which she becomes a surrogate mother to Jack in place of Ozma, his creator.

There's almost some social commentary in the Nome King's grievances: "All the previous stones in the world are made here in my underground dominions...so imagine how I feel when someone from the world above digs down and steals my treasures? All those emeralds in the Emerald City really belong to me. I was just taking back what was mine to begin with." But of course he didn't just take back the emeralds, he turned the populace to stone or into inanimate objects so that does undercut his point a bit.

Her descent visually recalls (deliberate or not) Alice's fall down the rabbit hole in Wonderland. The VFX are pretty rough though.

Dorothy points out that he has so much, implying perhaps he could share, and the Nome King retorts "that's not the point." It is the point in later books, where under Ozma's leadership the Emerald City is essentially a utopian communal living society.

She also points out that the Scarecrow didn't take the emeralds rather they were there when he was made king, but the film is uninterested in exploring the culpability around generational wealth and repatriation of cultural property.

But it's interesting how much the Oz story revolves around powerful objects and theft and/or appropriation of them. Glinda steals the Witch of the East's ruby slippers and gives them to Dorothy, who then steals the Witch of the West's broom to give to the Wizard, Mombi steals Ozma, someone stole the emeralds from the Nome King, who steals them back, Mombi steals heads, Dorothy steals the Powder of Life, etc etc

At this point the Nome King is merely a face in the stone, but when he comforts Dorothy he starts to takes a more humanoid rock form, with a hand to reach out to her.

Is his sympathy genuine or feigned? I'm going with the latter, since he manipulates her into playing the "guessing game" to try and get the Scarecrow back.

Worst production of Starlight Express ever.

When I was a kid I always wanted to try the limestone pie and hot silver drink, but now it looks super gross.

The Gump chose…poorly.

The Nome King making points again - Dorothy and co didn't ask what would happen if they got it wrong, even Tik-Tok only brings it up after the Gump has already gone in. But they press on in order of most expendable, Jack (with Billina hiding in his head) and then Tik-Tok.

As each get turned into ornaments, we see the Nome King become more and more humanised in his rock form - a nice subtle indication that his motives aren't purely spite and he gains power from turning living (or living-adjacent) things into inanimate objects, the opposite (mirror) of Dorothy's power in turning inanimate objects into living things in the journey from Kansas to Oz. If Dorothy had chosen wrong too, he says he would have become completely human - would he have been able to access the path to the human world? Was his goal to eliminate Oz, the fantasy world, in favour of the human world, much like Worley was obsessed with harnessing electricity and the "modern" world?

It's revealed that Chekhov's ruby slippers that Dorothy earlier told Dr Worley had fallen off on her way back to Kansas the first time were found by the Nome King, and their power enabled him to conquer the Emerald City.

It's unclear whether the rubies were first mined from the Nome King's caverns, but Dorothy really can't complain given the shoes were magicked off the feet of a dead woman and onto her own.

I'm actually surprised that they kept the ruby slippers in given the license fee they had to pay, since nothing really turns on their inclusion, other than the Nome King's offer to send her home with them, allowing Dorothy the choice between her own safety and the lives of her friends, of course the parallel to Worley offering the ECT to wipe her mind of Oz. I do like the callback, but it didn't need to be the ruby slippers rather than some other power the Nome King had.

Hee, the Nome King's little stone feet kicking out of his stone robe with the ruby slippers is so camp.

It is interesting through to think about the chain of events - Dorothy, eager to get back home, lets go of the ruby slippers, they fall into the Nome King's hands, he uses them to conquer Oz and install Mombi, who has imprisoned Ozma in the mirror (at some point long in the past). The fracturing of Oz influences Dorothy's mental state which drives her to Worley, where Ozma is able to contact her through the mirror world and bring her back to Oz, depose the Nome King/Mombi, and restore Ozma to her throne. It's quite neat writing.

There's an interesting green/red dichotomy - red seems to represent the witch's power, the ruby slippers that originally belonged to the Witch of the East, Mombi's ruby key, fire/red smoke being used by the Witch of the West, and even pink was the colour associated with Glinda in the 1939 film, while green represents Oz in the ornaments they turn into, the Emerald City, the Gump is green, etc. Both rubies and emeralds are present in the Nome King's costuming, perhaps indicating that the raw items did come from his dominions.

When Dorothy chooses correctly, the Nome King reverts to his claymation rock form, and the room turns red. I don't think it's explicitly green=good and red=bad (the Witch of the West had green screen after all), but both are associated with power.

I always used to fast forward this sequence as well. The Nomes coming out of the walls? *shudder*

The Nome King, felled by a classic egg poisoning.

Dorothy liberates the ruby slippers from another dead body, lol.

At the celebration in Oz, the costuming does lean heavily into either red or green - so maybe that was just standard complementary colour palette and I'm reading too much into things.

We get a nice long pan over the mirrored ceiling of the parade, just to really hit the point home.

Oh hey, the Wheelers are here too! All is forgiven I guess? Except Mombi, she gets to be paraded about in her cage by the woman whose heads she stole. Hey, at least she's able to smirk about her villainy.

Dorothy turns down queenship of Oz but wishes she "could be in both places at the same time" - the ruby slippers grant her wish and Ozma is released from the mirror.

Ozma's backstory: "Her father was king of Oz before the Wizard came. Ozma grew up as Mombi's slave, but when the Nome King promised Mombi thirty beautiful heads if she kept Ozma a secret, she enchanted her into the mirror." The first part is the much the same in the book, although there we get some interesting gender-bending stuff where Mombi transforms her into a boy name Tip and she doesn't discover her true nature until much later.

Dorothy gives Ozma the ruby slippers, combining the power of green and red (I'm just going with it now), therefore healing the kingdom of Oz from the discord first created when the Wizard arrived (in the book he was the one who gave baby Ozma to Mombi), and drawing Ozma's real world counterpart Dorothy to fix it by deposing the Wicked Witches and then the Nome King. But with Ozma returned, there is no need for Dorothy to remain in Oz, the two sides of herself are split and no longer warring inside her.

Billina however remains, to be Ozma's animal counterpart to Dorothy's Toto.

As a kid I coveted this gown, and I still kind of dig the headdress. Well, the OZ circlet anyway.

I also acted out the pulling Ozma from the mirror scene many times.

Although kind of a bitch move on Ozma's part to send Dorothy back before she could give her proper goodbyes. It's like, off you pop, thanks for freeing me but this is my kingdom now.

Dorothy wakes up beside the river (with a close up of a reflective pool of water/Dorothy's eye), and again, this could either be her actually returned by Ozma, or her simply waking from her delirium.

But the real world counterparts have met the same fate as their Oz reflections - Worley died in the fire and Wilson is carried off in a police cart.

Henry, after the shock of almost losing Dorothy, is motivated to finish building the house, and Dorothy is able to look back fondly at Oz through her reflection, but has learned to keep it a secret and not let it consume her life.

Her trauma is resolved, Oz is at peace; Dorothy and Ozma can live contentedly in parallel, with a connection between both worlds.

This is also a nice callback to the books, where Ozma would check in on Dorothy once a day through her magic mirror to see if she needed her assistance.

Maybe it's just my nostalgia goggles, but this film really holds up for me! Yes the effects are a little dated and it's on the darker side for kid's fare, but overall the story and acting is strong, there's meaty subtext around the importance - but necessary limits - of fantasy as escapism, it unequivocally centers girls/women as the heart of the story with their own agency and harnessing their own power. It's well worth the rewatch.

What do you think? Am I blinded by nostalgia? Reading way too much into a kids movie? Am I just rambling into the void here?

#jlf watches #return to oz #jlf's nostalgia rewatch #the wizard of oz #l frank baum #80's movies #dark fantasy #meta #film analysis #long post

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jadelotusflower · 2 months ago

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And Kansas, she says, is the name of the star

So, Wicked. I actually saw it two weeks ago but have been letting my thoughts marinate a bit. As with anything currently dominating the cultural zeitgeist, the film has received both overwhelming praise and unmitigated hate - although the latter seems to be directed more towards its stars than the film itself, where the line between playful meme-ification and genuine unkindness has been crossed.

Like many, I've been a fan of the world of Oz since I was a child, not only the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, but the quasi-sequels Return to Oz (check out my rewatch/analysis here) and the animated Journey Back to Oz (yes, the one with Liza Minelli). I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz at some point in my childhood (and have been making my way through the rest this year) but it was the films that really captured my imagination. Also a long time fan of musicals, I was first exposed to Wicked through the documentary Broadway: The American Musical, and was able to see the show in London in 2007 with Kerry Ellis and Helen Dallimore (+ Miriam Margolyes), and subsequently in Australia with Lucy Durack and Jemma Rix (interestingly, Glinda and Elphaba billing swapped for this production). I also read Gregory Maguire's novel shortly after first seeing the show, although have yet to read the sequels.

I very much enjoyed the film, even if for me it isn't really the definitive version, but simply another interpretation of a classic story, a different telling of the same fairy tale. Oz is particularly malleable in this way, the story very much of its time and yet also timeless. As Gregory points out in his preamble of the Wicked musical program: "Tolkein's Middle-Earth reinvigorated readers' interest in older narrative conceits of the hero in battle just as Europe was tumbling towards its mid-century paroxysms of genocide and war. Lewis Carroll, three quarters of a century earlier, had gently mocked Victorian certainties and niceties by portraying Wonderland as an anarchic dreamscape...While Oz was being invented and charted by Baum at the turn of the twentieth century, the American experiment in democracy was coming to resemble, in ways both bad and good, a great and powerful empire."

Maguire wrote his own revisionist tale in 1990, at the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Gulf War, the musical adaptation premiered on Broadway just after the invasion of Iraq, and now the film is released in times that are no less turbulent, and in which the threat of fascism and the power of propaganda are more acute than ever. It's a story that was resonant in 1900, and is resonant now - albeit in different ways and through different perspectives.

It's all a parable - whether it be Baum's fairyland of childhood adventure, MGM's loving devotional to "the young at heart", Disney's dark fantasy of a splintered mind (and later, their own take on the villain/anti-hero origin story), Maguire's exploration on the nature of evil, the musical's bittersweet ode to the power of friendship, and the film's empowering of the other - a folk tale, a dream, a prophecy, a cautionary tale, a tick of the Time Dragon Clock.

But my thoughts! Here they are. Needless to say, spoilers for the film, stage musical, and all other Oz-related media.

Oz has always been a story that centered its heroines - in the books the arrival of the Wizard disrupts the natural order of the world by usurping Ozma, his power an illusion compared that of the women who surround him - good in Glinda the witch of the South and the unnamed witch of the North, and the wicked in the witches of the East and West. The Wizard and his successor the Scarecrow must both be deposed - the former by Dorothy (albeit unintentionally), and the latter by Jinjur and her girl army, until finally harmony is restored when Ozma returns to her throne.

Wicked of course plays with this notion, where good and evil are not so linear, where Elphaba (in the musical) is the only witch with actual magic - other than Madame Morrible, the true power behind the Wizard’s throne. It's not so simple as restoring a queen to the throne to benevolently reside over a utopia - Elphaba's activism either ends with her death (in the novel) or her escape from Oz (in the musical), Glinda replaces the Wizard as figurehead with the Grimmerie she doesn't know how to read, and the intention to deploy her other skills and popularity this time "for good" - whether she succeeds is unknowable. But I'm getting ahead of myself, because the film is only Part I, aka Act I of the stage musical.

On that point, it was absolutely the right decision to split into two films, even if Part I is almost double the runtime of Act I and seems to add very little (although I enjoyed what it did add). It’s Part II that will benefit from breathing room to pack in a lot of plot (and hopefully flesh out some of the holes). Although from the audible groans in my theatre when the “to be continued” title came up the marketing did its job hiding the split.

But back to my point, it's so gratifying to see not only a big-budget musical that's unashamed and unapologetic to actually be a musical, but one that so unequivocally is a story about women, not only their own struggles, but embracing their own power and exercising their own agency. Elphaba's faith in the Wizard as the cure for all her problems, both internal and external, is viciously shattered and she must take responsibility for her own destiny, Glinda as the epitome of privilege must learn to look beyond the superficial of both herself and others.

It's almost reflective of the classic golden age musicals that were often driven by women and their stories - Maria in The Sound of Music, Eliza in My Fair Lady, Anna in The King and I, Dolly Levi in Hello Dolly!, Fanny in Funny Girl, Mama Rose in Gypsy, and of course the (literal) mother of them all, Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. And I think Wicked in some ways does hearken back to that classic style of movie musical in the setpieces and choreography, though not as much as I would like (more on that later). I don't think its a coincidence that Wicked's audience is skewed 70% female and it's been enormously successful, and much like last year's Barbie, has shown that women will show up an support a film about women when the story and characters are captivating rather than just lazy girlboss faux-empowerment sludge.

The casting is across the board good - I admit I had my reservations about Ariana Grande and while I don’t think she quite hits the rich vocal heights of Chenoweth, she certainly sells the comedy moments, even if there is more calculation and less ditz to her Galinda - there’s very little Billie Burke in her. Which is not a criticism, it's a valid take and her reverence for the musical is clear so of course that's her guiding light, while also making the role her own.

But the emotional core of Part I is Cynthia Ervio’s Elphaba, her isolation and otherness powerful astride her vulnerability and immense inner strength. I’ve always felt in the musical Glinda is the meatier role just because she has a more dramatic character arc, but splitting the film into two has really allowed the first part to centre Elphaba, and Ervio brings the emotional moments - her faith in the Wizard and subsequent loss of it in particular, as well as her humiliation at the Ozdust Ballroom which is just heart-shattering and so relatable. Ervio brings a fragility to the role where on stage there was hostility, and I actually think she is my favourite interpretation.

Michelle Yeoh brings steely manipulation to Madame Morrible, it was a good change to siphon off the comedic elements to new character Miss Coddle (heh) and lean into Yeoh’s natural gravitas. Yes, she talks on pitch rather than sings but who cares. There’s a menace to this Morrible, and yet we see her manipulation of Elphaba so very deftly (setting up Elphaba to need to prove her powers to the Wizard by reading the Grimmerie for example). I'll watch Yeoh in anything, although I do wish we'd seen her actually deliver "this wicked witch" line rather than Elphaba both times.

Jonathan Bailey is appropriately handsome and charming as Fiyero, with enough fluidity of movement to foreshadow his transformation into the Scarecrow (although not to the extent of my favourite Fiyero Adam Garcia, whose limbs were practically liquid).

Jeff Goldblum is doing Jeff Goldblum things, although leans into the sinister - the Wizard is genuinely wicked and fascistic in this version even moreso than the musical. It is kind of amusing that there is absolutely no hiding his distinctive voice in No One Mourns the Wicked so it's blatantly obvious he's Elphaba's father even for those who haven't seen the musical. I do wonder if they are going to make him well aware rather than being told by Glinda at the end - the way he plays A Sentimental Man it's certainly possible.

On that point, the screenplay is actually very faithful to the musical's book, which makes sense since Winnie Holtzman wrote the former and contributed to the latter. There’s some great changes that tweak and tighten the narrative - the relationship between Nessarose and Boq is given greater foundation, as is Elphaba’s connection with Dr Dillamond and her meet-cute with Fiyero. Making Glinda's minions Bowen Yang (Pfannee) and Brownwyn James (Shenshen) comic relief was also a great addition - "Elphaba, love you and your shoulderpads" made me cackle and I kind of wish there was more of them.

However I do feel there were some opportunities missed - I had thought with Act I being it’s own film we may get a bit more meat to Elphie and Glinda after they become friends - we do see that they form a group with Fiyero, Boq, and Nessa but more would have been nice (there were evidently scenes filmed we may see in flashback in Part II). I did appreciate the setup of the Wizard and his diorama (a nice way to visualise Oz) but could have done without Glinda naming the Yellow Brick Road. Not everything needs a reference!

I wish there were some references to Ozma, but it makes sense that the Wizard’s propaganda would erase her from history in favour of the “wise ones” (perfect cameos for Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth). It's interesting that, like in Oz the Great and Powerful, they invoke a prophesy the Wizard co-opts - this really is a mashup of all the Oz lore than came before it.

It also seems they cut "I got what I wanted" from the Ozdust scene (unless I missed it?) which is one of my favourite Glinda moments, so that was a shame.

I did find John M. Chu’s direction oft-times too frenetic. While this is effective and dynamic in numbers such as What is this Feeling? cross-cutting between Elphaba and Galinda and their early rivalry across various school activities, in many others I was desperate for the camera to slow down (or stop!) already and let me see what was on screen. There were so many beautiful things to see! But I missed half of them because the dolly was seemingly fixed to a rollercoaster. The set piece in the library and rotating bookshelves for Dancing Through Life was fantastic, but most of the choreography is muddled by frenzied camera motion, as is the cacophony of the Emerald City. Coming back to classic musicals, I wish he'd taken more a lead from them in locking a wide shot and letting us see the dancing.

Perhaps this is just my sensibility, but although a movie musical must justify its existence and rise above simply becoming a filmed version of the stage performance, there’s power in keeping the camera still and letting the performance speak for itself. In The Wizard and I Elphaba speeds through Shiz passing lakes and hallways and people - now there’s coloured glass! now there’s a cave! now she’s running through a field! now she’s looking over the Deadly Impassable Desert! (a change I'm assuming was made to allow Elphaba and Fiyero to leave Oz through it at the end of Part II). Even I’m not that Girl has luminescent flowers blooming in the background as Elphaba wanders yet again, this time in the dark. It’s almost as if Chu doesn’t trust the audience not to be bored unless there are Things to look at every moment.

I also think it was a mistake to set so many scenes at night rather than leaving that for the narrative turn with the Wizard. The Ozdust Ballroom re-imagined as undeneath the lake at Shiz is inspired, but ultimately is gloomy and dull because of the way it's lit (or rather, not lit). The sets however, particularly Shiz, are genuinely beautiful so I give Chu a great deal of credit for not going full cgi.

There’s also been a lot of criticism of the colour grading and I don’t disagree with it, “muddy” effects and muted palette seems par for the course these days and the camera movement was much more distracting for me. I can appreciate that Chu wanted this to be a less colourful Oz to contrast to '39 visually as well as thematically, but I still would have preferred a bit more vibrancy, especially in Shiz and the Emerald City.

I also didn’t care for Defying Gravity to be so broken up - it’s like that on stage, but still feels like it’s all building to towards that incredible climax. But the film inexplicably breaks up the final verse which absolutely halts the momentum, rather than the build of So if you care the find me/Look to the western sky to And nobody in all of Oz/No wizard that there is or was, we get an interlude of the Unlimited motif which prevents the final lines from soaring as they should. I get what they were going for, but it seems that Elphaba delivers the lines about the West, then flies out and sees it, and comes back to deliver her denouncement when it should have been the other way around. For all the papering over of possible holes in the musical’s book, it’s odd that there wasn’t some foundation to Elphaba’s reason for choosing to go West. For example, if that’s where the Animals said they were going, or if she and Fiyero had discussed his homeland.

However these are minor quibbles! I enjoyed the film enormously, and is a worthy contributor to the Oz canon.

On that point, I've been interested to see fandom discussions around the film, and have noticed that quite a few viewers now see Wicked as "the true story" to the Wizard of Oz's "propaganda". While it's certainly a valid interpretation, if the goal is to interrogate narratives, who is telling the story, and why, to replace one version wholesale with another and declare it "the truth” seems simplistic. This is storytelling, it is both truth in its purest form and propaganda, as all art is on some level. There is not, and cannot be, a "true" version of the story - just different perspectives, and different retellings.

It’s easy to forget that while 1939 has defined so many iconic aspects of the story (ruby slippers, green skin), it was made after forty years of books and staged productions exploring the world of Oz - which the '39 film acknowledges in its opening text. This has always been a story that has grown and changed, been added to and subtracted from, each version taking what they want and discarding the rest, building upon what came before.

And perhaps this is an unpopular opinion - but Wicked (be it book, musical, or film) does not work as a strict prequel to either Baum's novels or the 1939 film - Elphaba is clearly not the Wicked Witch we see in ‘39 (there’s no way this Elphaba would ever try to straight up murder a child to get her hands on shoes), similarly Fiyero and Boq becoming the Scarecrow and Tin Man respectively is fine as a throwaway on stage but just doesn’t line up with the film characters. It's a different version of the same fairy tale - much like Barrie's Peter Pan is different to Disney's, which is different to Hook, which is different to Once Upon a Time etc etc.

If Dorothy’s Oz in is a dream where she needed to find the strength within herself, Maguire’s Oz is gritty nightmare where fate is inescapable. Wicked the musical finds balance between the two, although I am interested to see how they incorporate Dorothy in Part II, as she is very much a bridge between all adaptations as her character changes very little between them (I've yet to see Dorothy as the villain, and honestly hope I never do).

Baum’s vision was an American folk tale, the ‘39 film framing of “it was all a dream”, the stage musical takes place inside the Time Dragon Clock, a mechanical propaganda machine inside which book!Elphaba is literally born. Even this film opens with the haunting voiceover of Glinda’s announcement of witch’s death, purporting to tell the "true story" but even that can only be from her own perspective, coloured by her own guilt. Maguire’s novel bills itself as the “Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” - it’s the telling of a story, the employing of a literary device.

I love thematic mirror, and the Oz of Wicked is in many ways a mirror-verse of the Oz of Baum/MGM - flipping the narrative to re-examine good and evil, to see familiar characters from the other side of the glass. Mrs Gultch takes Toto away on her bicycle to be destroyed, Elphaba take the Lion away on her bicycle to save him from captivity. Ruby slippers return to being silver shoes, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion are not just happenstance companions of Dorothy but the result of Elphaba's magic - even Elphaba's "i want" song in The Wizard and I can be mirrored to Dorothy's Somewhere Over the Rainbow, their respective unmasking of the Wizard as a fraud can be contrasted, and in the end the Wizard abandons Dorothy, but pursues Elphaba.

Glinda is perhaps one of the most fascinating mirrors from previous works - where she is the ultimate deus ex machina, stepping in at just the right time to save the day. But she is removed from the action, the hand of god, arguably the most powerful being in all of Oz. Wicked seems to both tear down this goddess figure and feed into it - in Part I Glinda wants to be seen as benevolent and perfect and kind when she starts as anything but, and ultimately Glinda the Good is a persona she adopts, like the Wizard she has no real power herself, only the power of myth-making.

Each of the character arcs in Wicked revolves around the stories they tell themselves/others juxtaposed against who they really are. This is a further mirror to the archetypes in Oz - the good witch, the bad witch, the powerful wizard. Elphaba's wickedness is confected, her otherness amplified to make an enemy of the people, but even before this she was using her exclusion as a shield, as Glinda observes, she cares deeply what others think of her, she just pretends she doesn't - and by the end of the film she throws off those shackles, willing to be cast as a wicked witch rather than betray her cause. Fiyero pretends to be "deeply shallow" while Elphaba sees through to his unhappiness, Morrible presents herself as wise mentor but is revealed as cruel puppetmaster, etc etc.

However, even Baum plays with this notion of artifice - the Emerald City is not in fact made out of emeralds, instead visitors don green-tinted glasses on entry, even his Wizard proclaims himself “a good man, just a very bad wizard” but the narrative condemns him as the man behind the curtain - although the subsequent books can never really quite decide if he a lovable rogue with pockets of enchanted piglets, or is he a sly trickster who deposed Ozma. Ultimately, he is both. He is a man from our world transplanted into a fantasy world, and cannot help but corrupt it.

I really have so much more to say! I love Oz in all its various incarnations but have probably rambled long enough.

#wicked 2024 #wicked movie spoilers #wicked part 1 #the wizard of oz #jlf watches #wicked #wicked meta #long post #(but of course)

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