#i miss dorothy west.... so much... | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

luvly-writer · 10 months ago

Text

XOXO

Ch. 14 A broken heart is fixed by another

-•-

Author’s note: I am so so sorry for the delay, i really took my vacations to relax and enjoy the time i had with my family and friends. I finally got to sit down and make this chapter. Hope you enjoy!

Warnings: Fighting and yelling

Taglist: @w31rdg1rl @mxtokko @loonymoonystuff @granstrangerphanthom @1lellykins @cangosleepnow @dreamspectrum @its-maemain @tamimemo @nightw-izhu @trasshy-artist @gabriiiiiiii

masterlist:

-•-

To admit that my father had shaken me up a little would tear apart a bit of my ego. I mean, all my life I have been going head to head with the man yet not once had I gone as far as I had now. I had sent a text to Tim, telling him that I would be spending Christmas Eve having dinner with my family to which he responded worriedly that if anything went wrong, the doors to the Wayne manor were always open. I finish getting ready for the dinner and call Donnie. Oh Donnie, he has been my driver ever since I was a child and constantly took me under his wing. I grab the bag that holds the presents I had bought the day I met Tim and take out Donnie’s. It was my small tradition with my family’s staff, every year on Christmas Eve, I would buy them a present as gratitude for the year of service. I had begun it when I was 13 and hadn’t stopped ever since. I see him waiting for me once I gather everything I need and open the door. He steps out of the car and opens the door for me showing me a small bouquet of my favorite flowers waiting for me next to where I usually sit.

“Oh Donnie, you are a sweetheart! Thank you so much!” I say and hug him once I stash all of my families presents in the trunk. I give him his present and smile as he gasps of joy. Long time ago, Donnie had told him that he had exchanged his silver harmonica for a watch for his wife. Unbeknownst to him, his wife had done the same thing and exchanged her locket for a case for his harmonica. In front of him sat a beautiful silver harmonica and a gorgeous golden locket, I had been able to track their missing belongings and bought and polished them for them. I feel Donnie shake as he brings me in for a hug and I don’t mention the tears that soak my coat. “Happy Christmas, Donnie, to you and Linda” I hug him tighter and smile. “happy Christmas, miss Vanderbilt!” He says smiling and we both get in the car. The ride to Vanderbilt mansion was pleasant at best. He had decided to give an update on how my family have been. Aurora and my mother had moved to the West wing ever since the debutants ball. My sister was enraged about the selling of my painting and was doing almost every she could to find a way to buy it back. My mother was doing her best to help her in that. Charlisse and my father remained in the east wing. Charisse what stayed trying to keep father company but it was no use, he has been stuck in his study the entire time and only seemed to go out for supper. Not only that, my grandmother’s plane had been delayed due to the weather conditions and she was not going to be present until who knows when. That bit of news is what dulled me the most I think. It was no secret I was my grandmother’s favorite and it would have been a relief to have someone my father can’t control.

Finally, we arrive. Donnie opens my door and helps me carry my presents inside. There, Dorothy, my maid, takes them and goes to place them under the tree. “wait! Thea!” I say and she stops looking at me, waiting for my response. I take the bags and pull out three gifts. I put two in my purse and give the las one to her, “Happy Christmas, Thya!” I say with a big smile. She gives me a hearty laugh and wishes me a happy Christmas. She also tells me that I will find her present for me in my room. I smile and go on a search for my favorite butler. I find him ordering the kitchen staff around for the dinner and give him his present whilst wishing him a Happy Christmas. I give him a hug and run upstairs to drop my coat. In my bed, two beautiful presents are laid. I place the flowers in my nightstand and open them. Dorothy gave a three books, one of Monet, one of Van Gogh and another on Da Vinci; and Bartie gave me a gorgeous knitted sweater with a kite saying his wife made it for me. I hug all of my presents and decide to finally show up at the dining room, knowing my father will be impatient by now.

Before I enter the dinner, I straighten my back and wipe my dress making sure everything is perfect. Finally, Bartie opens the door and announces my arrival. Aurora comes straight away towards my and hugs me tightly. She whispers in my ear, “I miss you baby sis..and no matter what happens today, I am on your side!” She pulls away and smiles at me. Mom walks towards me next almost cautiously, last time we had spoken I had not been that welcoming towards her. I open my arms and she releases a sigh and envelopes me in her arms. “Hi, my little pearl, Merry Christmas” she says as she squeezes me tightly. “Mom! You are leaving me without air” I laugh out causing Aurora and my mother to laugh. Next is Charlisse. She squeezes me in a big hug and tries to ruffle my hair. I deflect it with a laugh and pat it down. Finally I meet my father’s gaze.

“Father”

“Y/n”

We stay staring at each other until, Mark, Aurora’s husband coughs and I look at him. He gives me a big hug and we laugh. Charlisse’s husband, Antoine, raises a glass at me and gives me a wink. I roll my eyes at him and discreetly give him the middle finger. He laughs, choking on his drink and nods in approval. They both have always been like my older brothers. Finally, we begin and sit down to eat. Like always, Dorothy, Bartie, and Donnie, with some of the other staff, sit down to eat with us in order to celebrate the festivities. We begin mindless chatter around the table as we eat. Even though it’s still a little tense between my father and I, we engage in some conversation. We finish dinner and change into the living room.

Everything was going perfect, until it wasn’t.

I was telling Charlisse about the ski trips with Tim when my father lets out a displeased grunt. We ignore him for the most part until he interrupts. “Where is Timothy by the way? Is he not supposed to be your boyfriend?” I turn to him and narrow my eyes. “Whatever you are implying father, it is far from that. You specifically told me tonight was about family and that I couldn’t bring him” I defend and he glares at me, “I am sure that would have not stopped a real gentleman, for example, Francis would have come and joined us” he said waiting for my reaction. I catch Charlisse scrunch up her nose in distaste. During the last few weeks, my sisters and I had a conference call where they asked about Mr. Morris. Aparantly my sisters had no knowledge of how much of a creepy man he was. Charlisse thought my father was just going to the extremes in order to push me towards the family business and was even entertained by me defying my father’s authority, but once she had heard everything, she was no longer amused. “Father, I don’t believe that is exactly fair for Y/n” Charlisse began but was interrupted by my father screaming, “I say what is fair in this household and Y/n has done nothing to honor our family name! She has only raked it through the mud parading with that boy toy of hers and engaging in activity unfit for a Vanderbilt!”

“I hardly think it’s something to shame her father, she was just having a little fun” tried Charlisse again and Aurora continued with “She’s young and in love, that’s all”

Our father was positively fuming. “You see what you have caused, Y/n. Your little act of rebellion has caused your sisters to step out of line and it might cause them their future titles. We wouldn’t want that, would we?” He said darkly looking at both of my sisters who shrunk under his gaze and gave me an apologetic smile.

“Don’t be unfair on the girl, William.” My mother tried to intervene when I interrupted her,

“Oh so I am a little rebel now! Is that what you are calling it?!?! Is that what you call anyone that doesn’t bend to your every will just because heaven forbid William Vanderbilt doesn’t get what he wants!?” I yell back and my father’s fury rises once again

“Enough! It’s Christmas Eve, for heaven’s sake! We are spending time as a family and these matters should be left for later!” My mother tried once again but it wasn’t enough.

“You are young, Y/n, there are many things that you don’t understand-“

“And you are old father, there are many things you have forgotten!” I responded looking at him dead in the eyes

“What is that supposed to mean?” He got closer to me, my mother was doing her best to push him back and Antoine and Mark stood up, ready for anything that was to come.

“You are selfish, arrogant, and cruel. You believe that everything should be done according to your plans yet you forget that we are our own people! We should live how we like and love who we want and be who we choose to be. You push your precious hotel agenda so far down our throats that you suffocate us! The only thing you do is push our family apart instead of bringing it together. I remember you used to tell us how much you hated your dad for forcing you to take on the company yet yOU DO THE SAME DAMN THING TO US!” I threw in his face and then snapped my hand to my mouth. My sisters gasped and my mother looked between my father and me. Everyone stood still for a moment. That wasn’t a subject we never brought up.

“Leave.” Was all my father said and it was the restraint in his body that made me run. I grabbed my purse, took a random coat from the closet and ran out of the manor. I could hear people calling out my name and yelling at my father but I paid no mind to it, I just ran. It was freezing, snow had begun falling and I was just in my short dress and heals. I knew Wayne manor was close so I just ran and ran until I got to its shiny golden gates. There I pressed the buzzer as many times as I could until I heard a posh British accent answer, “Yes?”

“H-h-hi A-a-Alfred, is T-t-Tim the-ere?” I asked, shivering.

“Goodness miss, YN, what are you doing in the snow! Master Tim! There’s an urgent matter you need to attend to, come quick!” Alfred said rapidly recognizing my voice and opened the gate. I began the long walk it takes to get to the manor and in the distance I see a body open the door. It starts to run towards me as I get closer and closer. Finally, it clears up and I recognize that shadow to be Tim.

“Fuck, angel what are you doing here at this hour and under so much snow, come on let’s get you inside” he says as he drapes another coat on me and picked me up. “I didn’t know where else to go…” I said softly and he squeezes me harder. I don’t know if it was because how much I am shaking or because of what I said.

Quickly I am taken in and brought to Tim’s room. He places me in the toilet and begins heating a bath for me.

“There you go, I’ll go get you a few things to change into later, see if Steph, Babs or Cass has something that can fit you” he says and is about to leave when i realize I don’t want to be alone right now, “Tim…”

“Yes?” He says turning back to me and looks at me, worry clouding his eyes.

“Can you stay with me?” I ask and he stiffened, suddenly I remember our situation and what I am asking of him, “never mind, sorry if I-“

“Let me get everything that you might need and I’ll be right back, okay? I’ll come back” he says softly.

The bath fills up and stops suddenly, I begin to shed the layers of coats I have until I am left only in my soaking dress. I am about to take it off when I realize the zipper is frozen and it is getting difficult for me to take it off. I struggle for a few seconds until Tim arrives again.

“I got you some pants and socks from Babs and a shirt and clean underwear from Steph. I also have many sweaters you can borrow. They are in the bed and here are some shampoos, conditioners, bath bombs, soaps and essential oils. Let me place some on the tub, Alfred said they can help you not get sick and help your body relax and recover as well. Why aren’t you our of your dress?” He rambles as he pours the liquids until he sees my struggling figure.

“It’s stuck and ruined” I say still, struggling.

“Let me help you, angel” he says softly. I turn around and feel his warm fingers on my shoulders. He ties my hair up and behind to tug the zipper down as careful as he can. Once it’s open, he turns around and lets me take the rest of my clothes off. I sink in the tub and almost moan out of relief. The warmth starting to seep into my bones.

“You can turn around, Timmy” I say laughing softly at his stiff and awkward posture, “the bubbles cover me quite well”

He turns around slowly and sits on top of the toilet. I can see his face red with embarrassment and muffle a giggle with my hand. He looks positively adorable. His eyes take in my face with soft adoration.

“What happened, angel?” He asks softly. I let out a sigh and sink completely into the bath. Thankfully the tub is big enough to still cover me completely. When I come back up, I see Tim rolling his sleeve and pouring shampoo in his hands. He pulls a stool to get sit closer to me in the bathroom and softly whispers “come here”

I get closer, changing positions and giving him my back. As he begins to wash my hair with utter care and devotion I begin to tell him everything that happened. He makes sure to listen to every single one of my woes and hums in response as he works the tangles out of my hair and massages my scalp. He rinses and gets the conditioner and I continue my rant. Somewhere along the line, I begin to cry, exhausted by both the emotions of the day and the horrible walk here. He rinses again and begins to pour soap into his hands. He whispers softly, “may I?” And I nod as he begins to massage my neck and shoulders. I finish my account and just numbly state at the wall.

“Well, you are safe now, safe and warm. We have an amazing feast going on, Alfred’s treat if you are hungry. They just started the movie marathon and soon we will be playing a bunch of board games, so there’s that. Alfred said you are lucky to have gotten here so fast cause the storm got stronger and we are most probably snowed in, which you don’t have to worry about because we have a lot of guest bedrooms. You are alright okay” he speaks rinsing the soap out of his hand, “and I’ll stay here as long as you need me here.” He gives me a soft kiss on the head.

We stayed there for a while until I decided to get out finally feeling warm enough and relaxed. He hands me a towel and leads me to his room where he turns around and let’s me chance into everything. I ask him for a sweater and he searches for one and and tells me to guard it because it is his favorite as he winks. That gets a laugh out of me. Finally we head downstairs where Steph bolts and gives me a hug, “girl! Next time call Tim! Don’t walk around in the snow alone!!” She says making me smile sheepishly. Everyone speaks in agreement. The Wayne’s hold a very special place in my heart and their worry for me just secures that place even more.

“So, Tim said movies and game night, Jason, Damian, ready to get your asses beat by me again?” I ask smiling and Jason looks insulted whilst Damian scoffs half heartedly and responds, “you wish!” As the rest holler.

We spend the rest of the night watching Christmas movies and playing board games and I laugh so hard the evening I almost forget the events prior to this evening. Once we all retire, Tim starts walking me to one of the guest rooms. I hesitate before going in…I really don’t want to spend the night alone knowing that I have probably been casted as an outsider by my father and shunned from the family. It must have been visible in my face because Tim puts his hand out and says, “you can spend the night in my room, I don’t mind”

I take his hand and he leads me back to his room where an extra toothbrush is set. We wash our teeth and both get under the covers, each on one side of the bed. I try to get some sleep but the shudder from the cold returns. I try to contain it as much as possible so that I don’t wake Tim. Suddenly I feel a hand get a hold of my waist and pull me towards a body.

“You’re freezing, come here” he says and i whisper a small thanks.

“It’s a surprise you are going to bed, Timmy” I say and he must have understood the implications of my statement cause he answers, “Crime usually lowers these days because of the holidays and the excessive cold so we don’t usually patrol around this time as much. Bruce might go out and sometimes one of us if we want but it is rarely the case so this is the one time a year we get to lay back and relax.” I feel him murmur into the crook of my neck. He wraps his arms around me and cuddles closer to me, “plus, I always sleep better when you are around so why would I waste a chance like that” he says and I feel my face warm up. I take one of his hands and bring it to my lips giving it a soft kiss and say, “thank you for everything, Timmy.” In return, he squeezes me harder and says, “Merry Christmas, angel”.

And we both fall asleep into a blissful slumber.

-•-

80 notes · View notes

mask131 · 5 months ago

Text

So you want to know about Oz! (5)

Now that we looked at the MGM-continuity of movie and cartoons adaptation, I propose you in those post some adaptations that are either more in line with the original novels or... just not following either the novels or the MGM movie, and just doing their own thing. Since there is a lot of Oz adaptations, for this movie I will stay by American productions, post-1939.

First my three faves, and the rest will be under the cut.

2005's The Muppets' Wizard of Oz

This movie did quite poorly upon its release - and of all the Muppets movies, it is not considered to the best in any way. There is notable use of some old CGI that aged very poorly when it comes to the Wizard's scenes... But, not only does it have one of the most hilarious depiction of the Witches of Oz ever (what do you expect when they are played by Miss Piggy?) and some cool songs - this movie has the honor of being the most book-accurate, book-faithful adaptation of The Wizard of Oz there ever was. (Well outside of Japanese animes I'll talk about later). Yep... this Muppets parody is the closest you can get to experiencing the original novel as a movie. Crazy, right?

2011's The Witches of Oz

Originally it was released as a mini-series in two parts ; and in 2012 it was recut and edited as a single movie known as "Dorothy and the Witches of Oz" (but the single-movie version deleted a lot of scenes and segments from the complete mini-series). It tells a sort-of sequel to the Oz books (yes ALL of the Oz books), while mixing it with urban fantasy - as young real-life Dorothy, all grown-up in 2000s Oz, is depicted as the current author of Oz books, only for her to discover the fictional adventures in Oz that were written about her are real, and Oz is coming to New-York to get her...

Now... this mini-series aged VERY badly. The special effects are so cheap, most of the characters are insufferable, the plot is very weak... BUT! BUT this mini-series deserves to get some attention and to be known due to specific elements, such as, the most badass depiction of Langwidere ever ; Christopher Lloyd delightfully playing the Wizard of Oz... And the Wicked Witch of the West! This incarnation of the Witch is without a doubt one of my favorit reimaginings of the character, striking the perfect balance between the character of the original novel and the MGM Wicked Witch. Just in design she is the coolest Wicked Witch of the West there ever was. Too bad the rest of the mini-series is... quite cringe.

2017's Emerald City

Yet another proof of the "Oz curse" that plagues most of Oz adaptations - because the series got cancelled after its first season, leaving the show unfinished.

What is Emerald City? It was an Oz television series from the era of "post-Game of Thrones". Since the success of GoT, every channel and network tried to create its own dark and gritty big-budgeted high fantasy series... And "Emerald City" is what happened when Oz got caught in the trend.

People were very divided on the show (hence why it ended up cancelled) - some people adored its beginning and got tired of it by the end, others hated the first episodes but by the final ones were eagerly awaiting for the next season. On one side, most people agree that it is too much and that the show handled itself in a strange way, everything being a bit crammed-in. This TV show is actually adapting simultaneously THREE different Oz novels (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz), all mixed together in a new, dark, adult iteration of Oz, so yes, that's a LOT.

However the show does work out several very cool and interesting concepts, playing around with both the MGM and the novel heritages. And while the story can get a bit convoluted due to the so-many plots and subplots mixing each other in a complicated way and not giving each other enough time to breath, the visuals are 10/10. There was a real visual effort on this show that makes it entirely worth the watch, if just as an eye-candy. They literaly used GAUDI ARCHITECTURE for the Emerald City, come on, how cool is that?

And also it is one of these shows were several actually working languages were created by experts, so that's always cool. I always stand by fictional linguistics.

Now I'll go a bit quicker for these ones because else it's going to be one LONG post:

In the 1960s, there was one animated show that dominated the Ozian landscape. 1961's Tales of the Wizard of Oz.

One of the early creations of the future Rankin/Bass studios, it is a cartoon that reuses the settng and characters of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"... But not the plot X) Basically Dorothy and Toto end up entering Oz by... by a hole, as if she was Alice. And there she meets her companions and each episode is about them trying to have a wish granted by the Wizard of Oz, or trying to avoid the schemes of the Wicked Witch. So... it is quite a VERY loose adaptation, and the modern cartoon "Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz" is kind of a modern heir to this old cartoon.

After 114 episodes, there was an animated special created to conclude the show. Called "Return to Oz", it IS actually an adaptation of the plot and events of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"... But happening after all of the events of the cartoon, and thus taking a different direction in terms of set-up.

1969's The Wonderful Land of Oz

This low-budget movie was an adaptation of the second Oz book, "The Marvelous Land of Oz". There's quite a lot of interesting stories surrounding this production - from Judy Garland supposedly having been intended as the narrator, to the background actresses having appeared in nude films created by the movie's director... However the movie tend to be ignored or forgotten compared to the other 60s Land of Oz adaptation...

1960's "The Land of Oz". First episode of the second season of Shirley Temple's Storybook

This was a much more famous adaptation of "The Marvelous Land of Oz", if only because of Shriley Temple's name. Retrospectively, I should have added it in my previous Oz post because this mini-movie takes a lot of visual cues from the MGM's Wizard of Oz, such as the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman being designed after their MGM incarnation, or Glinda's outfit calling for the MGM Glinda's design.

1980's "Thanksgiving in the Land of Oz"

An animated special for Thanksgiving of the year 1980, which is - as the title says - about Dorothy going to celebrate Thanksgiving in Oz. In 1981 it was re-cut to become "Dorothy in the Land of Oz" (with most Thanksgiving references being removed so the animated short could be aired at any time of the year - which is quite a challenge since the special is ALL about Thanksgiving... Dorothy is literaly brought to Oz by a "giant green turkey ballooon", come on!)

1987's Dorothy meets Ozma of Oz

This animated middle-sized movie is an adaptation of the novel "Ozma of Oz", and remained for quite a long time the only adaptation of Ozma of Oz alongside Disney's Return to Oz.

1997's The Oz Kids

A direct-to-video cartoon series that is just what it says. We follow the adventures of the children of the various protagonists of the Oz novels. Dot and Neddie, Dorothy's children ; Bela and Boris the children of the Cowardly Lion ; Tin Boy and Scarecrow Junior ; the son of the Nome King, and more...

2007's Tin Man

Ah, Tin Man! A cult-classic a lot of people remember fondly - especially on Tumblr. This mini-series was part of the long suite of SyFy "dark sci-fi" fantasy reimaginings (2011's Neverland ; 2009's Alice, etc).

Described as an "adult steampunk reimagining" of the Wizard of Oz, it depicts the adventures of DG, a waitress of Kansas, as she gets taken by an interdimensional storm to the otherwordly "Outer Zone", and there befriends a telepathic leonine humanoid, a man who lost half of his brain, and a former cowboy-like law enforcer of the dictature a wicked witch-queen set upon the Outer Zone...

Speaking of steampunk, the last two Oz adaptations I want to talk about are...

2015's Lost in Oz

This animated show was part of Amazon Prime Video early days at producing its own content. Originally it was just a pilot episode released in 2015. Since the pilot episode proved good, it became a three-episodes mini-series in 2016. Since THIS mini-series proved good, it became a full season in 2017. And since this first season proved good, a second season was released in 2018. And then they stopped.

At first it seems that this show is just an "updated" version of The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy and her dog Toto gets transported to the Land of Oz, and must find a way to get back home while making friends and all together fighting through the many plots and scehmes dividing the land... Except that this Oz is a more modern and updated Oz filled with magi-tech, and Dorothy's companions are not exactly your traditional band... Turns out Dorothy has to team up with Ojo, here depicted as a "giant Munchkin", and a teenage witch by the name of... West. Yes, she is the (not so) wicked witch "of the west".

And thus starts a quite unique retelling of Oz where the three teenagers must face various threats taken from later Oz books: Langwidere, here West's evil aunt ; the mysterious Crooked Magician ; and Roquat, the Nome King.

And a last steampunk Oz for the road: 2018's "The Steam Engines of Oz". This Canadian animated movie is actually an adaptation of an Oz graphic novel of the same name, by Erik Hendrix and about a modernized Oz set after the events of "The Wonderful Wizard". A young mechanician of the Emerald City, Victoria, is chosen by the Good Witch of the North to help fight the ever-growing expansion and industrialization of the Emerald City, pushed by a Tin Man who became a cruel dictator of Oz...

#oz #so you want to know about oz #oz adaptations #land of oz #oz cartoons #oz series #the marvelous land of oz #ozma of oz #the wonderful wizard of oz #tin man #emerald city #the muppets' wizard of oz #the witches of oz #lost in oz #the oz kids

28 notes · View notes

princesssarisa · 8 months ago

Note

Do you think Dorothy from the books was a better role model for girls than in the MGM Wizard of Oz film?

Just to answer this, I reread The Wonderful Wizard of Oz over the last two days. I'm not very familiar with the rest of the Oz books, but since the movie is only based on the original book, I suppose it's best to compare just the two of them.

I don't think either the book's Dorothy or the MGM film's Dorothy is a better role model than the other. They're just slightly different.

I understand why a lot of people consider Baum's Dorothy a better role model than movie Dorothy. She has more of a down-to-earth, can-do attitude than movie Dorothy, whom some critics think is reduced to a weepy damsel in distress. I especially understand why some people are annoyed by the movie's rewrites to the scenes at the Wicked Witch's castle, where Dorothy's three male friends come to her rescue and where she splashes the Witch with water by accident. In the book the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman are destroyed by the Winged Monkeys, while the Lion is captured along with Dorothy and locked in a pen; Dorothy stands up to the Witch when she tries to take her silver shoes and throws the water on her in anger (not knowing it will melt her, but it's still a deliberate act); and afterwards, she frees the Lion and then rallies the Winkies to repair the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman. I won't deny that the movie's rewrite adheres more to traditional gender roles and probably reflects Hays Code standards of how a "good girl" should behave.

But I don't mind the fact that movie Dorothy is slightly more vulnerable and emotional than Baum's Dorothy. In the first place, she's older than Baum's Dorothy: even if she's younger than Judy Garland's 16 years, she must be at least 12, while Baum's Dorothy might be as young as 6. Between hormones and higher emotional intelligence, it's natural for teenage or preteen girls to be more emotional than little girls. Secondly, movie Dorothy's added soulfulness and dreaminess are part of her appeal. I'm not sure "Over the Rainbow" would seem in character for Baum's no-nonsense little Dorothy to sing.

There's also the fact that the movie's Wicked Witch of the West is much more powerful and dangerous than Baum's Witch. In the book, she can't physically harm Dorothy because the Good Witch of the North's magic kiss protects her, so she just makes her work as a scullery maid. She's also a bit of a scaredy-cat: she's afraid of the Cowardly Lion, and she can't steal the silver shoes at night while Dorothy is sleeping because she's afraid of the dark! With the movie's far more imposing Witch and the real danger Dorothy faces of being killed, it's hard to blame movie Dorothy for being more terrified. She also has more to deal with in Kansas than Baum's Dorothy does: there's no Miss Gulch trying to have Toto killed in the book.

Last but not least, movie Dorothy is still spunky! She still slaps the nose of a lion in Toto's defense (not yet knowing that he's a coward), she stands up to the Wizard even when she thinks he's a fearsome giant head with immense magical powers, and in the Witch's castle, even though her friends free her from the hourglass room, she's still the one who ultimately saves the day. She deserves credit for her presence of mind when she spots the pail of water and throws it onto the Scarecrow to save him from burning, even if it is by accident that she splashes the Witch too.

I think both Dorothys are good characters and role models: Baum's Dorothy for her resilience, optimism, and down-to-earth intelligence, and movie Dorothy for her relatable character arc of longing to escape from her troubles, only to learn that it's not worth the price of leaving her home and her loved ones behind. Not to mention the qualities they both share: warmth, kindness, courage, loyalty, and affection.

#dorothy gale #the wizard of oz #the wonderful wizard of oz #book vs. movie #comparison #fictional characters

21 notes · View notes

weirddude54 · 4 months ago

Text

Descendants 4 is baffling

So recently I watched Descendants: Rise of Red and I personally really enjoyed it. Despite what a lot of people say the quality of the sets, outfits, and even wigs has not really changed. Dcoms are always going to be ridiculous and ultimately any judgement towards this movie does not matter because people (myself included) are going to watch Descendants 5 anyway.

Putting that aside this movie is very baffling. Unlike the first three Descendants movies this one isn’t a complete story. Now I’d have to rewatch it to tell you all the plot structure things they missed but I know a significant portion of the mid point and act three are missing most notably the second pinch point.

Now if you have you have no idea what pinch points are they’re essentially the parts of a story that pushes your character towards something.

The first pinch point is pushing a character to run away from something. Ex: Dorothy meeting the wicked witch of the west.

The second pinch point is supposed to push a character towards something. They’ll have to make a lasting decision. Ex: Loki being brought onto The Helicarrier as a prisoner . This will then push them towards the plot turn and then darkest moment (aka when everything falls apart).

We sort of get this when Red decides they have to break into the principals office and Chloe goes to see Ella but I barely see that as a pinch point. One it would be a very short pinch point and two that means there is no darkest moment. You could also say them finding out about the villain’s plan is a pinch point which is much better argument but again it’s very rushed. Also no matter which one of these you argue there would be no darkest moment or plot turn.

It’s just all of it feels so rushed they probably still could’ve had their cliffhanger even if they didn’t rush the third act. All Descendants movies technically have cliffhangers they literally all end almost the exact same way. Even if there wasn’t a cliffhanger people would still come back to watch the 5th one.I don’t understand why Disney couldn’t just make a complete story. They do it all the time.

Also I really wished we could’ve gotten to see the Merlin Academy VKs more. They seem so fun. Honestly all of Merlin Academy seems fun. A spin-off show there would be so cool.

Bridget and Morgie are the best new characters argue with a wall.

#descendants #descendants 4 #descendants rise of red #morgie le fay #bridget descendants #red descendants

18 notes · View notes

justforbooks · 1 year ago

Text

Lonely, as words go, is a bit of a loner. As the critic Christopher Ricks writes, it pleasingly has “only” one rhyme, and no real synonyms. After all, being alone and being lonely are quite different things. For all this, poets and writers, from Audre Lorde to Philip Larkin, have made much of loneliness, drawn to the challenge of bringing us close to an emotion whose very nature is to stay at a distance.

Some lonely renderings turn out to be a bit of a sham. Records show that when Wordsworth “wandered lonely as a cloud”, his sister Dorothy was strolling companionably beside him, and she liked the daffodils too. Thoreau’s standing as the poster-boy of solitude, living “alone” and “Spartan like” by Walden Pond, starts to unravel when one actually reads his book, which contains a hefty chapter on “Visitors”. (The fact that Thoreau’s mum probably helped out with his laundry has also – maybe unfairly – raised a few eyebrows.)

It is, of course, perfectly possible to feel lonely in the company of others. “Loneliness”, as Olivia Laing writes, “doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection”. Her Lonely City is a powerful account of the loneliness explored and expressed by writers ranging from Alfred Hitchcock to Billie Holiday, combined with Laing’s own experience as a “citizen of loneliness”: “I often wished”, she writes, “I could find a way of losing myself altogether until the intensity diminished”.

Loneliness may be a condition that’s tricky to categorise but it is also, in Laing’s words, “difficult to confess”. Indeed, loneliness’s favourite companion seems to be shame. One of the many beauties of Kent Haruf’s small-town love story, Our Souls At Night, is the way in which his heroine breaks this seeming taboo, surprising her neighbour with an unconventional proposal, not of marriage, but of a kind of lo-fi pyjama party. “I’m lonely”, Addie candidly states. “I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk”.

For some, such as Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant, loneliness is a lived atmosphere, a kind of chronic condition. For others, it comes from a tectonic shift – a sudden loss or bereavement. As Juliet Rosenfeld writes in her memoir, The State of Disbelief, the painful force of her husband’s death made her feel as if she’d been captured by an unseen captor: “I learnt quickly that to protest would make no difference, and choice-less, I submitted to this saboteur with no prospect at all of release or freedom. I believed for a long time that I would never feel differently. I felt a painful absence and loneliness all of the time.”

“We read to know we are not alone”, as C S Lewis famously didn’t say (the line belongs to his on-screen persona in Shadowlands). So it is a sad irony that books which might best provide company nearly didn’t see the light of day. Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness was banned, after its first publication, for more than 30 years, accused of promoting “unnatural practices between women”. Because of that judgment, many readers missed an encounter with the beauty of the novel’s prose, its tender account of the heroine as she reflects on her childhood home. She dreams of “the scent of damp rushes growing by water; the kind, slightly milky odour of cattle; the smell of dried rose-leaves and orris-root and violets”, and knew “what it was to feel terribly lonely, like a soul that wakes up to find itself wandering, unwanted, between the spheres”.

This sense of loneliness as a kind of between-ness, an uncharted territory, is movingly captured in Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel, The Lonely Londoners. This Windrush chronicle charts the trials of those arriving at Waterloo from the West Indies, as they struggle to navigate the “unrealness” of London. Selvon’s hero, Moses Aloetta, becomes, over time, the reluctant guide to this latter-day Waste Land. Selvon leaves us with Moses’s lyrical and allusive understanding of the city’s “great aimlessness”. Standing on the banks of the Thames, he conjures a vision of a world in which we are all, in the end, alone together:

As if … on the surface, things don’t look so bad, but when you go down a little, you bounce up a kind of misery and pathos and a frightening – what? He don’t know the right word, but he have the right feeling in his heart. As if the boys laughing, but they only laughing because they ’fraid to cry.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #lonelly #loneliness

9 notes · View notes

fandoms-my-fandoms · 2 years ago

Text

Here is a list of 50 of my current all time theatre dream roles (musicals and non-musicals) because I am a female acting major who is having trouble in believing my dreams for my future are attainable at this current moment:

1. Christine Daaé - Phantom of the Opera

2. Emily Webb - Our Town

3. Belle - Beauty and the Beast

4. Katherine Plumber - Newsies the Musical

5. Elizabeth Bennet - Pride and Prejudice

6. Veronica Sawyer - Heathers the Musical

7. Maria - The Sound of Music/or/West Side Story

8. Hodel - Fiddler on the Roof

9. Zazzalil - Firebringer

10. Eliza - Hamilton

11. Laurie Williams - Oklahoma

12. Cinderella - Into the Woods/or/Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella

13. Narrator - Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat

14. Princess Anna - Frozen the Musical

15. Hermia - A Midsummer Nights Dream

16. Elphaba - Wicked

17. Glinda - Wicked

18. Éponine - Les Misérables

19. Winnifred the Woebegone - Once Upon A Mattress

20. Miss Honey - Matilda the Musical

21. Ariel Moore - Footloose the Musical

22. Dorothy Gale - The Wizard of Oz

23. Lucy van Pelt - You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown

24. Princess Fiona - Shrek the Musical

25. Viola - Twelve Night

26. Hermione Granger - A Very Potter Musical Trilogy

27. Ginny Weasley - A Very Potter Musical

28. Eliza Doolittle - My Fair Lady

29. Leading Player - Pippin

30. Natalie Haller - All Shook Up

31. Miss Saundra - All Shook Up

32. Cosette - Les Misérables

33. Princess Ariel - The Little Mermaid the Musical

34. Eva Peron - Evita

35. Maureen Johnson - RENT

36. Mary - It’s A Wonderful Life

37. Sue Snell - Carrie the Musical

38. Truly Scrumptious - Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

39. Johanna Barker - Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

40. Molly Aster - Peter and the Starcatcher

41. Gertrude Fail - Failure: A Love Story

42. Brooke Ashton - Noises Off

43. Megara - Hercules the Musical

44. Mary Poppins - Mary Poppins

45. Nora Helmer - A Dolls House

46. Queen Elsa - Frozen the Musical

47. Charity Hope Valentine - Sweet Charity

48. Fanny Brice - Funny Girl

49. Anya - Anastasia

50. Jane - Tarzan

There’s probably even some that I forgot to put on this list that should probably be in the place of some of these other roles, but I did want to incorporate roles from non-musicals as well. I do acknowledge that this list is still very much mostly musicals, but I fear I have not read many straight plays. Also, most of the work I’ve already done is musical theatre. Which is why I’m an acting major. I want to be exposed to more pieces of theatre that don’t have singing and dancing. There are a bunch of shows that I would love to be in, but don’t necessarily have dream roles solely because they are either ensemble heavy productions or they would just be really fun projects to work on. For example, my school, Illinois State University, just did Bonnie and Clyde the Musical. That shit was GUT WRENCHING. I would have loved to be apart of that project. I don’t exactly have a dream role in that show because every role in Bonnie and Clyde is so essential to telling that story. I am however, working on my first MainStage production here at ISU. I am playing the Nurse in Equus. Again, not a show that I had any dream role going into being cast in this project. But, this story is very heavy and unique. I have never worked on a show as different and dramatic as this one. I am really excited to be part of this cast, and I will be happy to post information about this show in the weeks to come, or you can message me and ask for more details! Thanks for reading my extra long blog post for today! :)

18 notes · View notes

fredzeppelin · 1 year ago

Text

This is a photo and related article my grandfather sent me by Email, I hope you guys enjoy

It Happened In The 60s

Before Beatlemania set in, George Harrison visited his sister in Illinois on 16 September 1963, becoming the first Beatle on American soil.

Beatle John has the story:

“When a young man with long dark hair and a thick British accent first told Dorothy Burkitt, a chaperone at the old West Frankfort Teen Town, that he played in a band called the Beatles, she laughed. ‘Why would you name a band after an insect?’ she asked. But other than that she didn’t give it much thought.

At the time, Burkitt and her husband, Fred, were both chaperones at the teen town, which was located above Van-Wood Electric in a two-story building on West Main Street. It was there that she had her brief encounter with George Harrison, although she doubted much of what he said. ‘He was so sweet,’ she recalls. ‘We must have talked for a good hour, but I’m sorry I didn’t even shake his hand.’ Burkitt said George told her he was visiting over here from England with his sister, and he came to the teen town to see the band and hear its vocalists. She remembers him sitting on an old red couch in the lobby.

The next time Burkitt saw George Harrison, he was on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ several months later. ‘Oh, my gosh, Fred, there’s that kid that came to our teen town,’ she said. ‘He was telling the truth.’”

- Before He Was Fab: George Harrison’s First American Visit (2000)

Additional background from George:

According to George, “I went to New York and St Louis in 1963, to look around, and to the countryside in Illinois, where my sister was living at the time. I went to record stores. I bought Booker T and the MGs’ first album, Green Onions, and I bought some Bobby Bland, all kind of things.” George also bought James Ray’s single “Got My Mind Set On You” that he later covered in 1987.

When the Harrisons arrived in Benton, George and Louise hitchhiked to radio station WFRX-AM in West Frankfort, Illinois taking a copy of “She Loves You” which had been released 3 weeks earlier in Britain and on the day of George’s arrival in America. “She Loves You” got a positive review in Billboard but very little radio play, although WFRX did play it. According to DJ Marcia Raubach: “He was unusual looking, he dressed differently than the guys here. He was very soft-spoken and polite.”

It’s often claimed that in June 1963 Louise took a British copy of “From Me To You” to WFRX that she had been sent by her mother and that Raubach played it. This is probably true but the claim that this was the first time The Beatles’ music was broadcast in America is not. “From Me To You” was released in Britain in late April and then topped the British singles’ chart for seven weeks’. With the Beatles at No. 1 in Britain, Vee Jay Records released their single of ‘From Me To You’ / ‘Thank You Girl” as VJ 522 on May 27, 1963. The single was made ‘Pick Of the Week’ by Cash Box magazine, but was not a success.

With the Beatles success in Britain in early 1963, Parlophone were anxious to take advantage of their new asset and so contacted their sister label in America, Capitol Records that was owned by EMI. Capitol was underwhelmed by the Beatles records and so decided against releasing any of their records. Instead, Parlophone turned to a small US label called Vee Jay, a company started by a husband and wife in Gary, Indiana that specialized in black R & B music.

It was an irony probably not lost on the Beatles who loved and had been influenced by exactly that kind of music. In February 1963, two days after “Please Please Me” made No. 1 in Britain, Vee Jay released it as a single in the US. VJ 498 did get some airplay from the major Chicago top 40 radio station WLS and it even made their own chart for a couple of weeks, but nothing happened nationally on the Billboard charts. Not helping the band was the fact that Vee Jay managed to miss-spell the band’s name on the record as “Beattles.”

Article thanks to Richie Havers at www.udiscovermusic.com

#the beatles #Beatles #george harrison #60s #classic rock #pop #R&B #history #music

6 notes · View notes

saving-word-crawls · 1 month ago

Text

Wizard of Oz Word Crawl

By: streetcarnamedmaddie

Hello fellow WriMos! My favorite movie of all time has always been The Wizard of Oz. I even have the entire movie memorized! I often have it on while writing as background noise, so I decided to come up with this Wizard of Oz word crawl inspired by a previous year’s Harry Potter word crawl. This challenge borders on intense, so feel free to skip any rounds if you need. I hope you enjoy!

Uh oh! Toto got into Ms. Gulch’s garden again! Complete a five minute sprint as you run home to tell Aunt Em.

Somewhere over the rainbow is your next milestone. Write to the next thousand as you contemplate life outside of Kansas.

You have to get away…you have to run away! Sprint for three minutes to escape the wrath of Ms. Gulch.

You stumble upon a wagon advertising Professor Marvel, a fortune teller esteemed by the crowned heads of Europe. Roll a six-sided die and multiply the number by 100 to determine your next total as he reads your fortune in his crystal.

It’s a twister! It’s a twister! Complete a fifty headed hydra as your house is whirled around by the tornado.

We must not be in November anymore… You’ve ended up in a strange and colorful land you’ve never seen before. Write 250 words as you explore your new surroundings.

We welcome you to Munchkinland! You are the national hero (or heroine) of Munchkinland. As they celebrate the death of the witch who has tormented them, write for ten minutes .

I’m afraid you’ve made rather a bad enemy of the Wicked Witch of the West. The sooner you write 500 words , the safer you’ll sleep.

Follow the yellow brick road to the next thousand!

Now which way do we go? Roll a six-sided die and multiply the number by 100 to determine your next total as you decide which way to go.

Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking—and writing. To prove it, write to the next thousand.

Why, it’s a man! A man made out of tin! Write 3% of your word count as you oil him up.

Here, Scarecrow, wanna play ball? Help the scarecrow put the fire out by completing a fifty headed hydra.

Lions and tigers and bears…oh my! Show you aren’t afraid of them and write 500 words.

Poppies will put them to sleep. Complete a word war to wake up your friends. If you win, move onto the next challenge. If you lose, write until you beat the other person’s total.

Your friends woke up and now Emerald City is closer and prettier than ever! Sprint for five minutes as you get out of the woods and step into the sun and into the light.

Take a ride with a horse of a different color through the Emerald City by—you guessed it— completing a fifty headed hydra.

Surrender, Dorothy—it’s time for another word war! If you win, move onto the next challenge. If you lose, add 100 more words before continuing.

Imagine what it would be like if you were King of the Forest and write 500 words.

The Wizard will see you now, though he doesn’t have much time. Write 100 words as you explain your wish.

I’d turn back if I were you… Complete a three digit challenge as you fend off the spooks in the forest.

I’m frightened, Auntie Em, I’m frightened…because you have to write 1000 words for this challenge.

I’ve got a plan how to get into the castle of the Wicked Witch: roll a six-sided die . If it is even, you only need to write 100 words. If it is odd, multiply your roll by 100 and write that many words.

Going so soon? Why, our little party’s just beginning! As you race to get out of the castle, sprint to the nearest thousand.

Ding, dong, the witch is dead (is that the right song?!). Celebrate your accomplishment by writing for five minutes .

The Wizard is a very good man, but a very bad wizard. Fortunately, he has gifts! Write three paragraphs as your friends get their wishes granted.

Oh, no! The Wizard’s balloon has left without you! Now how will you get home? As you ponder this, write 250 words .

It’s time to say goodbye, and I think I’ll miss you most of all. Write for five minutes as you bid your friends farewell.

Tap your heels together three times and complete a three digit challenge as you think to yourself: there’s no place like home…

Wake up. It’s Aunt Em, darling. Write to the nearest thousand because there’s no place like home.

#medium #medium crawls #extreme crawls #word crawl #word crawls #wizard of oz crawl #wizard of oz

0 notes

the-firebird69 · 4 months ago

Text

160,000 and that's really a teeny bit of money and back then they were not charging huge amounts of interest because the banks were not giving people that much money and interest they put it in there so someone couldn't steal it and you're kind of paying for a service. That's how it was for a long time yet up to the old West and after that things changed a little and people started investing in big projects and developed the United States from anew and they needed a lot of money. It helps to know history. He understands it pretty quick and he knows about the finances and how it works but we know what happened. With that said and he's been paid the whole time and his grandma dot or Dorothy she was paying him $25 a year and Jim was having her do it. And she is actually Queen Elizabeth the second is not true it was not his real wife and she was a woman and she was a Mac proper so she didn't like our son that much they got the fights and he said she's saying you two go outside you animals but still they were acting that way so they didn't care one day she said that he's a dirty little boy and says bad things to people. And she has told you to wait till lunch to eat and you said I can't wait i'm hungry and she said you have to and she cooked this huge dinner and he's sitting there hungry the whole time and she's not aware of his situation so he said I'm a baby size wise and she says when is he talking about looked into it and said he's probably in pain and she had you a little snacks later no she said suck it up and it wasn't right. And she died and went into a grave and was held there and it's actually gone. So people are angry about that on the Mac side and our son is not too angry about the meals because he learned to look forward to the meal and wait for it instead of ruining it with snack foods and have three squared a she's smiling and said you're right you can learn it's a fairly well I'm your size at least she started laughing and said it's not that bad i'm stunted for some reason and so she goes around and she says he's a baby and that would explain the she felt better because it was kind of embarrassing you're firing and burping and farting. Said believe me if I could stop I would I get stories now and she smiles and says terrific. And I'm reading them and usually it makes the story really famous and she tried to print and a few people wanted it and she did. She felt pretty good and she was really huge so and she left really liking her grandson and she heard it she heard she was sick and he wanted to go see her and she couldn't get out of there and he called home and they wouldn't get him up there and she said tell him I miss him and he was crying and she's staying be a big boy and he said you need a way out so I've had enough of this crap don't you want to see me when I'm huge so she tried a few things and said Jim this stuff you need to know and it really is. So she didn't get out and Jim couldn't do it. We're talking about what he was doing back then a little bit. But he's lost a lot of people and their friends too. Bob Marr said it he doesn't know if I'm a mac and doesn't really check and says we're human beings too if I were one. He says I can do the fake wrestling thing and he says we don't have to throw anybody down or fall over and they'll punching and Bob Marsh used to jump in front and say okay so we're just going to slap and says that's what it is but not like they do in the slap contest. This is what like a couple gay boys I said no. Maybe what we're doing like if you took it and you animated it and truck us both down to look like the guys from AEW AEW yes. So now he's laughing pretty good. Probably put you back in the circu

Thor Freya

Olympus

Zues Hera

0 notes

quoteoftheweekblog · 9 months ago

Text

5/2/24 - DOROTHY L. SAYERS

' "Harlequin!" ' (Sayers, 2023, p.213).

…

' "You might kiss me, Harlequin." '(Sayers, 2023, p.172).

…

' "Take me home, Harlequin - I adore you!" ' (Sayers, 2023, p.79).

…

REFERENCE

Sayers, D.L. (2023 [1933] ) 'Murder must advertise’. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

*****

OTHER MEMBERS HAVE READ

…

BURNING ROSES

‘I love these books, historically accurate and a great story woven round the facts.’

…

GROWN UPS

‘An enjoyable book but not one of her best.’

…

THE INK BLACK HEART

‘ … again quite an enjoyable book but not one of her best.’

📚

…

BLEEDING HEART YARD

‘ … routine detective story. Easy read, I wanted to check out this author as our daughter in law asked for a forensic detective novel for Christmas. This one wasn't forensic but one of her other characters is a pathologist.’

…

THE BULLET THAT MISSED

‘ … light hearted and tongue in cheek, mature detectives on the loose.’

…

THE TWIST OF A KNIFE

‘ … set in a West End theatre where Horowitz plays himself as the playwight. A Christmas present and very enjoyable.’

MEANWHILE THE OTHER HALF

…

ACT OF OBLIVION

‘ … which he is enjoying. Another Christmas present … must have read something else!’

📚

…

WHOSE BODY?

‘The first Lord Peter Wimsey.’

📚

…

BOOK GROUP

*****

QUOTE OF THE WEEK 2011 - 2024

…

12 EPIC YEARS

FROM THE ARCHIVE

…

31/7/23

*****

0 notes

mask131 · 5 months ago

Note

What do you think about the people who insist in treating Wicked as some sort of official prequel to MGM's Wizard of Oz?

Like, I know both the musical and the Maguire book are heavily inspired by the 1939 movie instead of the L Frank Baum's book, but both of these contain so much divergent points to the movie that it's impossible for them to be in the same continuity.

The most obvious evidence being how in the musical there's a scene of the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion leading an angry mob, in true Beauty and the Beast fashion, to the castle to kill Elphaba and rescue Dorothy, when in the movie they along with the Scarecrow invaded the castle completely on their own.

Also, the musical glosses over the Wicked Witch of the West's oppression of the Winkies.

I talked about this before: this annoys me, deeply, but honestly? It is just a case of misinformation and kids being kids. Literaly.

Because I want to separate two cases, both easy to find on the Internet. On one side you have people who love Wicked (it can be the musical, it can be the novel, it can be both or just one while they hate the other with all their heart), and so decide to include it in their own perception and imaginings of Oz. And there's nothing wrong with that. People have been adding the MGM elements to the world created by the Baum books for a long time, and Wicked is the next popular thing ; same way there's nothing wrong with people taking elements from Return to Oz or any other popular Oz adaptations to mix with their personal retellings and imagination! (As long as it stays non-commercial, you know? Because that's the important thing - Wicked, the MGM movie, Return to Oz and all that are NOT in public domain, unlike Baum's novels. Oz is in public domain, but the Oz ADAPTATIONS are not, and that's another confusion people seem to not really get)

That being said, it is just one of the two cases. The other case is people who LITERALY consider that Wicked (the novel, and the musical derived from it) is MEANT to be the "official" prequel to The Wizard of Oz. We are talking people who sincerely designate the novel as "canon" somehow. And... I know they exist, I have seen them post and write comments online. But I literaly cannot understand their way of thinking, and the only explanation I can give to this is that they must be ignorant people, in the literal sense: they did not do their research, they have such secondary-source exposition to things they actually miss the most basic and crucial parts of each work, and so they come to believe not only that the MGM movie was its own thing, the movie that started it all, the "OG" version of the story (so no Baum involved), but that somehow Maguire got the legal rights and authority to write an officiel prequel novel for the movie? While missing the fact Maguire was literaly doing a parody/deconstruction/twist on the movie, and doing that PRETTY HEAVILY...

My other guess is that this is mostly children. Not just because children infest the Internet today, but also - having been a child myself - I know that kids often take at face value the way things are described to them, they are very first-degree minds. And when you see on the Internet people talk of a book that is the "true life" of the Wicked Witch of the West, the "real chronicles" of the Land of Oz, that is about "what truly happened" in Oz... First-degree mind of kids (especially if the kid doesn't have the novel and just Wikipedia recaps) will go: "Oh yeah, that's the official prequel, and that's like the real biography of the character!"

A similar phenomenon happened with the release of the "Maleficent" movie and how a lot of people decide to consider the backstory of Maleficent in this movie the "official" backstory of Maleficent in the original animated movie - entirely missing the fact the Maleficent movie is an inversion, or a reversal, of the original movie, and the two are not part of the same continuity...

On another side, it is quite amusing to see that Disney TRIED so hard to create the same "official backstory" phenomenon with "Oz The Great and Powerful", and yet failed so hard because nobody ever goes "Yes, Theodora IS the real name of the Wicked Witch of the West".

I guess there's also something to be said about how Elphaba forms a very compelling anti-hero, and as a result people are more likely to use this tragic backstory as a material when fleshing out the Wicked Witch, because so far it is the most complex depiction of the character we had? I don't know... But the whole thing of "Should the Witches be complex or simple characters, should they be explained or stay mysterious" is yet another debate...

#the wizard of oz #wicked witch of the west #elphaba #wicked #ask #oz

13 notes · View notes

thewritermuses · 10 months ago

Text

Hidden Figures

Unedited Thoughts - This is part of my unedited thoughts series. Based on true events - this never bodes well. We meet Katherine as a child and we immediately know that she is gifted. The way that the community rally around her and her parents is fantastic. There is a great film making moment setup here when her teacher asks her to solve the complex problem on the board she takes the chalk that is handed to her and solves it. This is referenced in a later scene when she is at a department of defence briefing and the exact same thing happens and she blows them all out of the water with her brilliance. The first scene that we meet three ladies when they are grown up is great. Their car is broken down on the way to work at Langley and a white cop stops. We know there is going to be trouble and from this one scene we learn the state of play - race relations and the sexism that the three leads will face. We also get to meet the three ladies forceful nature and the different ways it manifests itself as they get this police officer to escort them to work. Truly great script writing. The use of the African American ladies as 'computers' feels demeaning at first. But there is a lot going on here. First, computers isn't necessarily the derogatory term that it sounds like. Second these are relatively good positions for such talented ladies. Also looking back now at the term it has a powerful ring to it. You were so good at math you are called a computer. The polish engineer who is working on the re-entry vehicle is a great counter point to Mary who is encouraged to become an engineer by him. He makes the point about escaping Nazi Germany and launching people into space - if he can do that what can she do? Then our heroine, Katherine, is placed in the Space Team headed by Al Harrison, Kevin Costner. She spends much of her time trying to fight against the ridiculous restrictions placed on her. One of the mathematicians redacts all of his reports so that it is almost impossible for Katherine to check his work - but she finds a way. The racist oppression is something else - They don't want her drinking out of their coffee percolator so get a crappy one installed - etc etc. By far the worst is that there is no bathroom for Katherine in this section of Langley so she has to treck across the base to the west side to the coloured bathroom. While this is powerful the first time - and frustrating the second. The third time is just ridiculous. Her boss blows up at her the last time that this happens - And she lets loose back. He had no idea that there were no bathrooms and about how she was been treated. After storms out of the room he paces over to the coffee cart and dumbfoundedly pulls the 'coloured' label off the percolator. This was a powerful scene and the tension in the room was palpable. Yet the very next scene destroys it all. Harrison is taking a sledge hammer to the 'coloured' bathroom sign in the Western section - which is the bathroom that Katherine has been travelling to this entire time. The signs he should have been removing were the 'white's only' in his building. I cannot believe that this got missed as it feels like a mistake - but it's there so I have to rate the film on it. The undertone of sexism in the black community feels a bit shoehorned in for me. At the church picnic right at the start both Mary's partner and Katherine's would-be husband make a big deal over what women can and can't do. Then nothing really at all. You can't try to force further 'ism' discussion and then leave it dead. There are some truly terrible lines in this film. "We all pee the same colour" is up there. There are some fantastic moments as well. Dorothy's character has been trying to negotiate a supervisor position for herself and when the IBM arrived - protect her girls jobs. She does both by teaching herself fortran. This culminates in a great scene of her leading the entire group over to the new computer room. When Jim finally proposes to Katherine the reaction of her and the kids is actually really touching - "Why are you crying? He hasn't asked you yet." To which Katherine responds - "He will." Turns to Jim "Won't you?!?". It has a realness about it that is just fantastic. Then after Katherine has saved them all - many many times - they fire her - because the IBM is much faster. Then, just as they are about to launch Harrison recognises that the numbers are off. He confers with Stafford - Katherine's co-worker - who agrees. The big flop for me here is that neither of them recognise that they need her to check the numbers. The call for her comes from Glen - the man they are about to launch. This is fine as they set him up from the moment he comes on screen as been progressive - he ignores the rules when they arrive at Langley to meet the African American ladies. So it makes sense for him to request this - especially after her display at the Department of Defence briefing. It's just sad that it isn't Harrison or Stafford who make the call. Katherine's checking the figures is another brilliant scene as she calculates the landing zone and the telecast of the launch is happening on the TV in front of her. Overall a fun movie but just a bit too Disney. Some nice scenes but also some poor ones. Read the full article

0 notes

readingsrantsrambles · 10 months ago

Text

Out of Kansas: Revisiting The Wizard of Oz by Salman Rushdie

New York Magazine - May 4, 1992

Photograph from Everett

I wrote my first story in Bombay at the age of ten; its title was “Over the Rainbow.” It amounted to a dozen or so pages, dutifully typed up by my father’s secretary on flimsy paper, and eventually it was lost somewhere on my family’s mazy journeyings between India, England, and Pakistan. Shortly before my father’s death, in 1987, he claimed to have found a copy moldering in an old file, but, despite my pleadings, he never produced it, and nobody else ever laid eyes on the thing. I’ve often wondered about this incident. Maybe he didn’t really find the story, in which case he had succumbed to the lure of fantasy, and this was the last of the many fairy tales he told me; or else he did find it, and hugged it to himself as a talisman and a reminder of simpler times, thinking of it as his treasure, not mine—his pot of nostalgic parental gold.

I don’t remember much about the story. It was about a ten-year-old Bombay boy who one day happens upon a rainbow’s beginning, a place as elusive as any pot-of-gold end zone, and as rich in promises. The rainbow is broad, as wide as the sidewalk, and is constructed like a grand staircase. The boy, naturally, begins to climb. I have forgotten almost everything about his adventures, except for an encounter with a talking pianola, whose personality is an improbable hybrid of Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, and the “playback singers” of Hindi movies, many of which made “The Wizard of Oz” look like kitchen-sink realism. My bad memory—what my mother would call a “forgettery”—is probably just as well. I remember what matters. I remember that “The Wizard of Oz”—the film, not the book, which I didn’t read as a child—was my very first literary influence. More than that: I remember that when the possibility of my going to school in England was mentioned it felt as exciting as any voyage beyond the rainbow. It may be hard to believe, but England seemed as wonderful a prospect as Oz.

The Wizard, however, was right there in Bombay. My father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, was a magical parent of young children, but he was prone to explosions, thunderous rages, bolts of emotional lightning, puffs of dragon smoke, and other menaces of the type also practiced by Oz, the Great and Powerful, the first Wizard De-luxe. And when the curtain fell away and his growing offspring discovered, like Dorothy, the truth about adult humbug, it was easy for me to think, as she did, that my Wizard must be a very bad man indeed. It took me half a lifetime to work out that the Great Oz’s apologia pro vita sua fitted my father equally well—that he, too, was a good man but a very bad Wizard.

I have begun with these personal reminiscences because “The Wizard of Oz” is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults; a film that shows us how the weakness of grownups forces children to take control of their own destinies, and so, ironically, grow up themselves. The journey from Kansas to Oz is a rite of passage from a world in which Dorothy’s parent substitutes, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, are powerless to help her save her dog, Toto, from the marauding Miss Gulch into a world where the people are her own size and she is never, ever treated as a child but as a heroine. She gains this status by accident, it’s true, having played no part in her house’s decision to squash the Wicked Witch of the East; but, by her adventure’s end, she has certainly grown to fill those shoes—or, rather, those ruby slippers. “Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness,” laments the Wicked Witch of the West as she melts—an adult becoming smaller than, and giving way to, a child. As the Wicked Witch of the West “grows down,” so Dorothy is seen to have grown up. This, in my view, is a much more satisfactory reason for her newfound power over the ruby slippers than the sentimental reasons offered by the ineffably loopy Good Witch Glinda, and then by Dorothy herself, in a cloying ending that seems to me fundamentally untrue to the film’s anarchic spirit.

The weakness of Auntie Em and Uncle Henry in the face of Miss Gulch’s desire to annihilate Toto leads Dorothy to think, childishly, of running away from home—of escape. And that’s why, when the tornado hits, she isn’t with the others in the storm shelter and, as a result, is whirled away to an escape beyond her wildest dreams. Later, however, when she is confronted by the weakness of the Wizard of Oz, she doesn’t run away but goes into battle—first against the Wicked Witch and then against the Wizard himself. The Wizard’s ineffectuality is one of the film’s many symmetries, rhyming with the feebleness of Dorothy’s folks; but the different way Dorothy reacts is the point.

The ten-year-old who watched “The Wizard of Oz” at Bombay’s Metro Cinema knew very little about foreign parts, and even less about growing up. He did, however, know a great deal more about the cinema of the fantastic than any Western child of the same age. In the West, the film was an oddball, an attempt to make a sort of live-action version of a Disney cartoon feature despite the industry’s received wisdom that fantasy movies usually flopped. (Indeed, the movie never really made money until it became a television standard, years after its original theatrical release; it should be said in mitigation, though, that coming out two weeks before the start of the Second World War can’t have helped its chances.) In India, however, it fitted into what was then, and remains today, one of the mainstreams of production in the place that Indians, conflating Bombay and Tinseltown, affectionately call Bollywood.

It’s easy to satirize the Hindi movies. In James Ivory’s film “Bombay Talkie,” a novelist (the touching Jennifer Kendal, who died in 1984) visits a studio soundstage and watches an amazing dance number featuring scantily clad nautch girls prancing on the keys of a giant typewriter. The director explains that the keys of the typewriter represent “the Keys of Life,” and we are all dancing out “the story of our Fate upon that great machine.” “It’s very symbolic,” Kendal suggests. The director, simpering, replies, “Thank you.” Typewriters of Life, sex goddesses in wet saris (the Indian equivalent of wet T-shirts), gods descending from the heavens to meddle in human affairs, superheroes, demonic villains, and so on, have always been the staple diet of the Indian filmgoer. Blond Glinda arriving at Munchkinland in her magic bubble might cause Dorothy to comment on the high speed and oddity of the local transport operating in Oz, but to an Indian audience Glinda was arriving exactly as a god should arrive: ex machina, out of her own machine. The Wicked Witch of the West’s orange smoke puffs were equally appropriate to her super-bad status.

It is clear, however, that despite all the similarities, there were important differences between the Bombay cinema and a film like “The Wizard of Oz.” Good fairies and bad witches might superficially resemble the deities and demons of the Hindu pantheon, but in reality one of the most striking aspects of the world view of “The Wizard of Oz” is its joyful and almost total secularism. Religion is mentioned only once in the film: Auntie Em, spluttering with anger at gruesome Miss Gulch, declares that she’s waited years to tell her what she thinks of her, “and now, well, being a Christian woman, I can’t say it.” Apart from this moment in which Christian charity prevents some good old-fashioned plain speaking, the film is breezily godless. There’s not a trace of religion in Oz itself—bad witches are feared and good ones liked, but none are sanctified—and, while the Wizard of Oz is thought to be something very close to all-powerful, nobody thinks to worship him. This absence of higher values greatly increases the film’s charm, and is an important aspect of its success in creating a world in which nothing is deemed more important than the loves, cares, and needs of human beings (and, of course, tin beings, straw beings, lions, and dogs).

The other major difference is harder to define, because it is finally a matter of quality. Most Hindi movies were then and are now what can only be called trashy. The pleasure to be had from such films (and some of them are extremely enjoyable) is something like the fun of eating junk food. The classic Bombay talkie uses a script of appalling corniness, looks by turns tawdry and vulgar, or else both at once, and relies on the mass appeal of its stars and its musical numbers to provide a little zing. “The Wizard of Oz” has stars and musical numbers, but it is also very definitely a Good Film. It takes the fantasy of Bombay and adds high production values and something more—something not often found in any cinema. Call it imaginative truth. Call it (reach for your revolvers now) art.

But if “The Wizard of Oz” is a work of art it’s extremely difficult to say who the artist was. The birth of Oz itself has already passed into legend: the author, L. Frank Baum, named his magic world after the letters “O-Z” on the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. His original book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” published in 1900, contains many of the ingredients of the magic potion: just about all the major characters and events are there, and so are the most important locations—the Yellow Brick Road, the Deadly Poppy Field, the Emerald City. But the filming of “The Wizard of Oz” is a rare instance of a film improving on a good book. One of the changes is the expansion of the Kansas section, which in the novel takes up precisely two pages at the beginning, before the tornado arrives, and just nine lines at the end; and another is a certain simplification of the story line in the Oz section: all subplots were jettisoned, such as the visits to the Fighting Trees, the Dainty China Country, and the Country of the Quadlings, which come into the novel just after the dramatic high point of the Witch’s destruction and fritter away the book’s narrative drive. And there are two even more important alterations. Frank Baum’s Emerald City was green only because everyone in it had to wear emerald-tinted glasses, but in the movie it really is a futuristic chlorophyll green—except, that is, for the Horse of a Different Color You’ve Heard Tell About. The Horse of a Different Color changes color in each successive shot—a change that was brought about by covering six different horses with a variety of shades of powdered Jell-O. (For this and other anecdotes of the film’s production I’m indebted to Aljean Harmetz’s definitive book “The Making of The Wizard of Oz.”) Last, and most important of all, are the ruby slippers. Frank Baum did not invent the ruby slippers; he had silver shoes instead. Noel Langley, the first of the film’s three credited writers, originally followed Baum’s idea. But in his fourth script, the script of May 14, 1938, known as the DO NOT MAKE CHANGES script, the clunky metallic and non-mythic silver footwear has been jettisoned, and the immortal jewel shoes are introduced. (In Shot 114, “the ruby shoes appear on Dorothy’s feet, glittering and sparkling in the sun.”)

Other writers contributed important details to the finished screenplay. Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf were probably responsible for “There’s no place like home,” which, to me, is the least convincing idea in the film. (It’s one thing for Dorothy to want to get home, quite another that she can do so only by eulogizing the ideal state that Kansas so obviously is not.) But there’s some dispute about this, too; a studio memo implies that it could have been the assistant producer, Arthur Freed, who first came up with the cutesy slogan. And, after much quarrelling between Langley and the Ryerson-Woolf team, it was the film’s lyricist, Yip Harburg, who pulled together the final script: he added the crucial scene in which the Wizard, unable to give the companions what they demand, hands out emblems instead, and, to our “satiric and cynical” (the adjectives are Harburg’s own) satisfaction, they do the job. The name of the rose turns out to be the rose, after all.

Who, then, is the auteur of “The Wizard of Oz”? No single writer can claim that honor, not even the author of the original book. Mervyn LeRoy and Arthur Freed, the producers, both have their champions. At least four directors worked on the picture, most notably Victor Fleming, who left before shooting ended, however, so that he could make “Gone with the Wind” which, ironically, was the movie that dominated the Academy Awards in 1940, while “The Wizard of Oz” won just three: Best Song (“Over the Rainbow”), Best Original Score, and a Special Award for Judy Garland. The truth is that this great movie, in which the quarrels, firings, and near-bungles of all concerned produced what seems like pure, effortless, and somehow inevitable felicity, is as near as you can get to that will-o’-the-wisp of modern critical theory: the authorless text.

The Kansas described by Frank Baum is a depressing place. Everything in it is gray as far as the eye can see: the prairie is gray, and so is the house in which Dorothy lives. As for Auntie Em, “The sun and wind . . . had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now.” And “Uncle Henry never laughed. . . . He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots.” The sky? It was “even grayer than usual.” Toto, fortunately, was spared grayness. He “saved [Dorothy] from growing as gray as her other surroundings.” He was not exactly colorful, though his eyes did twinkle and his hair was silky. Toto was black.

Out of this grayness—the gathering, cumulative grayness of that bleak world—calamity comes. The tornado is the grayness gathered together and whirled about and unleashed, so to speak, against itself. And to all this the film is astonishingly faithful, shooting the Kansas scenes in what we call black-and-white but what is in reality a multiplicity of shades of gray, and darkening its images until the whirlwind sucks them up and rips them to pieces.

There is, however, another way of understanding the tornado. Dorothy has a surname: Gale. And in many ways Dorothy is the gale blowing through this little corner of nowhere, demanding justice for her little dog while the adults give in meekly to the powerful Miss Gulch; Dorothy, who is prepared to break the gray inevitability of her life by running away, and who, because she is so tenderhearted, runs back when Professor Marvel tells her Auntie Em is distraught that she has fled. Dorothy is the life force of Kansas, just as Miss Gulch is the force of death; and perhaps it is Dorothy’s feelings, or the cyclone of feelings unleashed between Dorothy and Miss Gulch, that are made actual in the great dark snake of cloud that wriggles across the prairie, eating the world.

The Kansas of the film is a little less unremittingly bleak than the Kansas of the book, if only because of the introduction of the three farmhands and of Professor Marvel—four characters who will find their “rhymes,” or counterparts, in the Three Companions of Oz and the Wizard himself. Then again, the film’s Kansas is also more terrifying than the book’s, because it adds a presence of real evil: the angular Miss Gulch, with a profile that could carve a joint, riding stiffly on her bicycle with a hat on her head like a plum pudding, or a bomb, and claiming the protection of the Law for her crusade against Toto. Thanks to Miss Gulch, the movie’s Kansas is informed not only by the sadness of dirt-poverty but also by the badness of would-be dog murderers.

And this is the home that “there’s no place like”? This is the lost Eden that we are asked to prefer (as Dorothy does) to Oz?

I remember, or I imagine I remember, that when I first saw the film Dorothy’s place struck me as a dump. Of course, if I’d been whisked off to Oz, I reasoned, I’d naturally want to get home again, because I had plenty to come home for. But Dorothy? Maybe we should invite her over to stay; anywhere looks better than that.

I thought one other thought, which gave me a sneaking regard for the Wicked Witch: I couldn’t stand Toto! I still can’t. As Gollum said of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in another great fantasy, “Baggins: we hates it to pieces.” Toto: that little yapping hairpiece of a creature, that meddlesome rug! Frank Baum, excellent fellow, gave a distinctly minor role to the dog: it kept Dorothy happy, and when she wasn’t it had a tendency to “whine dismally”—not an endearing trait. The dog’s only really important contribution to Baum’s story came when it accidentally knocked over the screen behind which the Wizard stood concealed. The film Toto rather more deliberately pulls aside a curtain to reveal the Great Humbug, and, in spite of everything, I found this change an irritating piece of mischief-making. I was not surprised to learn that the canine actor playing Toto was possessed of a star’s temperament, and even, at one point in the shooting, brought things to a standstill by staging a nervous breakdown. That Toto should be the film’s one true object of love has always rankled.

The film begins. We are in the monochrome, “real” world of Kansas. A girl and her dog run down a country lane. “She isn’t coming yet, Toto. Did she hurt you? She tried to, didn’t she?” A real girl, a real dog, and the beginning, with the very first line of dialogue, of real drama. Kansas, however, is not real—no more real than Oz. Kansas is a pastel. Dorothy and Toto have been running down a short stretch of “road” in the M-G-M studios, and this shot has been matted into a picture of emptiness. “Real” emptiness would probably not be empty enough. This Kansas is as close as makes no difference to the universal gray of Frank Baum’s story, the void broken only by a couple of fences and the vertical lines of telegraph poles. If Oz is nowhere, then the studio setting of the Kansas scenes suggests that so is Kansas. This is necessary. A realistic depiction of the extreme poverty of Dorothy Gale’s circumstances would have created a burden, a heaviness, that would have rendered impossible the imaginative leap into Storyland, the soaring flight into Oz. The Grimms’ fairy tales, it’s true, were often brutally realistic. In “The Fisherman and His Wife,” the eponymous couple live, until they meet the magic flounder, in what is tersely described as “a pisspot.” But in many children’s versions of Grimm the pisspot is bowdlerized into a “hovel” or some even gentler word. Hollywood’s vision has always been of this soft-focus variety. Dorothy looks extremely well fed, and she is not really but unreally poor.

She arrives at the farmyard, and here (freezing the frame) we see the beginning of what will be a recurring visual motif. In the scene we have frozen, Dorothy and Toto are in the background, heading for a gate. To the left of the screen is a tree trunk, a vertical line echoing the telegraph poles of the previous scene. Hanging from an approximately horizontal branch are a triangle (for calling farmhands to dinner) and a circle (actually a rubber tire). In midshot are further geometric elements: the parallel lines of the wooden fence, the bisecting diagonal wooden bar at the gate. Later, when we see the house, the theme of simple geometry is present again: everything is right angles and triangles. The world of Kansas, that great void, is defined as “home” by the use of simple, uncomplicated shapes—none of your citified complexity here. Throughout “The Wizard of Oz,” home and safety are represented by such geometrical simplicity, whereas danger and evil are invariably twisty, irregular, and misshapen. The tornado is just such an untrustworthy, sinuous, shifting shape. Random, unfixed, it wrecks the plain shapes of that no-frills life.

Curiously, the Kansas sequence invokes not only geometry but arithmetic, too, for when Dorothy, like the chaotic force she is, bursts in upon Auntie Em and Uncle Henry with her fears about Toto, what are they doing? Why do they shoo her away? “We’re trying to count,” they admonish her as they take a census of chicks—their metaphorical chickens, their small hopes of income—which the tornado will shortly blow away. So, with simple shapes and numbers, Dorothy’s family erects its defenses against the immense and maddening emptiness; and these defenses are useless, of course.

Leaping ahead to Oz, it becomes obvious that this opposition between the geometric and the twisty is no accident. Look at the beginning of the Yellow Brick Road: it is a perfect spiral. Look at Glinda’s carriage, that perfect, luminous sphere. Look at the regimented routines of the Munchkins as they greet Dorothy and thank her for the death of the Wicked Witch of the East. Move on to the Emerald City: see it in the distance, its straight lines soaring into the sky! And now, by contrast, observe the Wicked Witch of the West: her crouching figure, her misshapen hat. How does she arrive and depart? In a puff of shapeless smoke. “Only bad witches are ugly,” Glinda tells Dorothy, a remark of high Political Incorrectness which emphasizes the film’s animosity toward whatever is tangled, claw-crooked, and weird. Woods are invariably frightening—the gnarled branches of trees are capable of coming to menacing life—and the one moment when the Yellow Brick Road itself bewilders Dorothy is the moment when it ceases to be geometric (first spiral, then rectilinear), and splits and forks every which way.

Back in Kansas, Auntie Em is delivering the scolding that is the prelude to one of the cinema’s immortal moments.

“You always get yourself into a fret over nothing. . . . Find yourself a place where you won’t get into any trouble!”

“Some place where there isn’t any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be.”

Anybody who has swallowed the scriptwriters’ notion that this is a film about the superiority of “home” over “away, that the “moral” of “The Wizard of Oz” is as sentimental as an embroidered sampler—“East, West, Home’s Best”—would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice as her face tilts up toward the skies. What she expresses here, what she embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of leaving—a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots. At the heart of “The Wizard of Oz” is a great tension between these two dreams; but, as the music swells and that big, clean voice flies into the anguished longings of the song, can anyone doubt which message is the stronger? In its most potent emotional moment, this is inarguably a film about the joys of going away, of leaving the grayness and entering the color, of making a new life in the “place where you won’t get into any trouble.” “Over the Rainbow” is, or ought to be, the anthem of all the world’s migrants, all those who go in search of the place where “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” It is a celebration of Escape, a grand paean to the Uprooted Self, a hymn—the hymn—to Elsewhere.

One of the leading actors in the cast complained that “there was no acting” in the movie, and in the usual sense this was correct. But Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” did something extraordinary: in that moment she gave the film its heart, and the force of her rendition is strong and sweet and deep enough to carry us through all the tomfoolery that follows, even to bestow upon it a touching quality, a vulnerable charm, that is matched only by Bert Lahr’s equally extraordinary creation of the role of the Cowardly Lion.

What is left to say about Garland’s Dorothy? The conventional wisdom is that the performance gains in ironic force because its innocence contrasts so starkly with what we know of the actress’s difficult later life. I’m not sure this is right. It seems to me that Garland’s performance succeeds on its own terms, and on the film’s. She is required to pull off what sounds like an impossible trick. On the one hand, she is to be the film’s tabula rasa, the blank slate upon which the action of the story gradually writes itself—or, because it is a movie, the screen upon which the action plays. Armed only with a wide-eyed look, she must be the object of the film as much as its subject, must allow herself to be the empty vessel that the movie slowly fills. And yet, at the same time, she must (with a little help from the Cowardly Lion) carry the entire emotional weight, the whole cyclonic force, of the film. That she achieves both is due not only to the mature depth of her singing voice but also to the odd stockiness, the gaucheness, that endears her to us precisely because it is half unbeautiful, jolie-laide, instead of the posturing adorableness a Shirley Temple would have brought to the role—and Temple was seriously considered for the part. The scrubbed, ever so slightly lumpy unsexiness of Garland’s playing is what makes the movie work. One can imagine the disastrous flirtatiousness young Shirley would have employed, and be grateful that Twentieth Century Fox refused to loan her to M-G-M.

The tornado, swooping down on Dorothy’s home, creates the second genuinely mythic image of “The Wizard of Oz”: the archetypal myth, one might say, of moving house. In this, the transitional sequence of the movie, when the unreal reality of Kansas gives way to the realistic surreality of the world of wizardry, there is, as befits a threshold moment, much business involving windows and doors. First, the farmhands open up the doors of the storm shelter, and Uncle Henry, heroic as ever, persuades Auntie Em that they can’t afford to wait for Dorothy. Second, Dorothy, returning with Toto from her attempt at running away, opens the screen door of the main house, which is instantly ripped from its hinges and blown away. Third, we see the others closing the doors of the storm shelter. Fourth, Dorothy, inside the house, opens a door in her frantic search for Auntie Em. Fifth, Dorothy goes to the storm shelter, but its doors are already battened down. Sixth, Dorothy retreats back inside the main house, her cry for Auntie Em weak and fearful; whereupon a window, echoing the screen door, blows off its hinges and knocks her cold. She falls upon the bed, and from now on magic reigns. We have passed through the film’s most important gateway.

But this device—the knocking out of Dorothy—is the most radical and the worst change wrought in Frank Baum’s original conception. For in the book there is no question that Oz is real—that it is a place of the same order, though not of the same type, as Kansas. The film, like the TV soap opera “Dallas,” introduces an element of bad faith when it permits the possibility that everything that follows is a dream. This type of bad faith cost “Dallas” its audience and eventually killed it off. That “The Wizard of Oz” avoided the soap opera’s fate is a testament to the general integrity of the film, which enabled it to transcend this hoary, creaking cliché.

While the house flies through the air, looking like the tiny toy it is, Dorothy “awakes.” What she sees through the window is a sort of movie—the window acting as a cinema screen, a frame within the frame—which prepares her for the new sort of movie she is about to step into. The special-effects shots, sophisticated for their time, include a lady sitting knitting in her rocking chair as the tornado whirls her by, a cow placidly standing in the eye of the storm, two men rowing a boat through the twisting air, and, most important, the figure of Miss Gulch on her bicycle, which is transformed, as we watch it, into the figure of the Wicked Witch of the West on her broomstick, her cape flying behind her, and her huge, cackling laugh rising above the storm.

The house lands; Dorothy emerges from her bedroom with Toto in her arms. We have reached the moment of color. But the first color shot, in which Dorothy walks away from the camera toward the front door of the house, is deliberately dull, an attempt to match the preceding monochrome. Then, once the door is open, color floods the screen. In these color-glutted days, it’s hard for us to imagine ourselves back in a time when color was still relatively rare in the movies. Thinking back once again to my Bombay childhood, in the nineteen-fifties—a time when Hindi movies were all in black-and-white—I can recall the excitement of the advent of color in them. In an epic about the Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, entitled “Mughal-e-Azam,” there was only one reel of color photography, featuring a dance at court by the fabled Anarkali. Yet this reel alone guaranteed the film’s success, drawing crowds by the million.

The makers of “The Wizard of Oz” clearly decided that they were going to make their color as colorful as possible, much as Michelangelo Antonioni did, years later, in his first color feature, “Red Desert.” In the Antonioni film, color is used to create heightened and often surrealistic effects. “The Wizard of Oz” likewise goes for bold, Expressionist splashes—the yellow of the Brick Road, the red of the Poppy Field, the green of the Emerald City and of the Witch’s skin. So striking were the film’s color effects that soon after seeing the film as a child I began to dream of green-skinned witches; and years afterward I gave these dreams to the narrator of my novel “Midnight’s Children,” having completely forgotten their source. “No colours except green and black the walls are green the sky is black . . . the stars are green the Widow is green but her hair is black as black”: so began the stream-of-consciousness dream sequence, in which the nightmare of Indira Gandhi is fused with the equally nightmarish figure of Margaret Hamilton—a coming together of the Wicked Witches of the East and of the West.

Dorothy, stepping into color, framed by exotic foliage, with a cluster of dwarfy cottages behind her, and looking like a blue-smocked Snow White, no princess but a good, demotic American gal, is clearly struck by the absence of her familiar homey gray. “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” she says, and that camp classic of a line has detached itself from the movie to become a great American catchphrase, endlessly recycled, and even turning up as one of the epigraphs to Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth paranoid fantasy of the Second World War, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” whose characters’ destiny lies not “behind the moon, beyond the rain” but “beyond the zero” of consciousness, in a land at least as bizarre as Oz.

But Dorothy has done more than step out of the gray into Technicolor. Her homelessness, her unhousing, is underlined by the fact that, after all the door play of the transitional sequence, and having now stepped out-of-doors, she will not be permitted to enter any interior at all until she reaches the Emerald City. From tornado to Wizard, Dorothy never has a roof over her head. Out there amid the giant hollyhocks, which bear blooms like old gramophone trumpets, there in the vulnerability of open space (albeit open space that isn’t at all like the Kansas prairie), Dorothy is about to outdo Snow White by a factor of nearly twenty. You can almost hear the M-G-M studio chiefs plotting to put the Disney hit in the shade—not simply by providing in live action almost as many miraculous effects as the Disney cartoonists created but also by surpassing Disney in the matter of the little people. If Snow White had seven dwarfs, then Dorothy Gale, from the star called Kansas, would have a hundred and twenty-four.

The Munchkins were made up and costumed exactly like 3-D cartoon figures. The Mayor of Munchkin City is quite implausibly rotund; the Coroner sings out the Witch of the East’s Certificate of Death (“And she’s not only merely dead, she’s really most sincerely dead”) while wearing a hat with an absurdly scroll-like brim; the quiffs of the Lollipop Kids, who appear to have arrived in Oz by way of Bash Street and Dead End, stand up more stiffly than Tintin’s. But what might have been a grotesque and unappetizing sequence in fact becomes the moment in which “The Wizard of Oz” captures its audience once and for all, by allying the natural charm of the story to brilliant M-G-M choreography (which alternates large-scale routines with neat little set pieces like the dance of the Lullaby League or the Sleepy Heads awaking mobcapped and be-nightied out of cracked blue eggshells set in a giant nest), and, above all, through Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg’s exceptionally witty “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead.” Arlen was a little contemptuous of this song and the equally unforgettable “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” calling them his “lemon-drop songs,” and perhaps this is because the real inventiveness in both tunes lies in Harburg’s lyrics. In Dorothy’s intro to “Ding Dong!” Harburg embarked on a pyrotechnic display of a-a-a rhymes (“The wind began to switch/the house to pitch”; until, at length, we meet the “witch . . . thumbin’ for a hitch”; and “what happened then was rich”)—a series in which, as with a vaudeville barker’s alliterations, we cheer each new rhyme as a sort of gymnastic triumph. This type of verbal play continues to characterize both songs. In “Ding Dong!” Harburg begins to invent punning, concertinaed words:

Ding, dong, the witch is dead!

This technique found much fuller expression in “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” becoming the real “hook” of the song:

We’re off to see the Wizard,

The wonderful Wizzerdovoz

If everoever a Wizztherwozz

The Wizzerdovoz is one because . . .

And so on.

Amid all this Munchkining we are given two very different portraits of adults. The Good Witch Glinda is pretty in pink (well, prettyish, even if Dorothy is moved to call her “beautiful”). She has a high, cooing voice, and a smile that seems to have jammed. She has one excellent gag line, after Dorothy disclaims witchy status: pointing at Toto, Glinda inquires, “Well, is that the witch?” This joke apart, she spends the scene looking generally benevolent and loving and rather too heavily powdered. Interestingly, though she is the Good Witch, the goodness of Oz does not inhere in her. The people of Oz are naturally good, unless they are under the power of the Wicked Witch (as is shown by the improved behavior of her soldiers after she melts). In the moral universe of the film, then, evil is external, dwelling solely in the dual devil figure of Miss Gulch/Wicked Witch.

(A parenthetical worry about the presentation of Munchkinland: Is it not a mite too pretty, too kempt, too sweetly sweet for a place that was, until the moment of Dorothy’s arrival, under the absolute power of the evil and dictatorial Witch of the East? How is it that this squashed Witch had no castle? How could her despotism have left so little mark upon the land? Why are the Munchkins so relatively unafraid, hiding only briefly before they emerge, and giggling while they hide? A heretical thought occurs: Maybe the Witch of the East wasn’t as bad as all that—she certainly kept the streets clean, the houses painted and in good repair, and, no doubt, such trains as there might be running on time. Moreover—and, again, unlike her sister—she seems to have ruled without the aid of soldiers, policemen, or other regiments of repression. Why, then, was she so hated? I only ask.)

Glinda and the Witch of the West are the only two symbols of power in a film that is largely about the powerless, and it’s instructive to “unpack” them. They are both women, and a striking aspect of “The Wizard of Oz” is its lack of a male hero—because, for all their brains, heart, and courage, it is impossible to see the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion as classic Hollywood leading men. The power center of the film is a triangle at whose points are Glinda, Dorothy, and the Witch; the fourth point, at which the Wizard is thought for most of the film to stand, turns out to be an illusion. The power of men, it is suggested, is illusory; the power of women is real.

Of the two Witches, good and bad, can there be anyone who’d choose to spend five minutes with Glinda? Of course, Glinda is “good” and the Wicked Witch “bad”; but Glinda is a silly pain in the neck, and the Wicked Witch is lean and mean. Check out their clothes: frilly pink versus slim line black. No contest. Consider their attitudes toward their fellow-women: Glinda simpers upon being called beautiful, and denigrates her unbeautiful sisters, whereas the Wicked Witch is in a rage because of the death of her sister, demonstrating, one might say, a commendable sense of solidarity. We may hiss at her, and she may terrify us as children, but at least she doesn’t embarrass us the way Glinda does. It’s true that Glinda exudes a sort of raddled motherly safeness while the Witch of the West looks—in this scene, anyhow—curiously frail and impotent, obliged to mouth empty threats (“I’ll bide my time. . . . But just try to stay out of my way”). Yet just as feminism has sought to rehabilitate pejorative old words such as “hag,” “crone,” and “witch,” so the Wicked Witch of the West can be said to represent the more positive of the two images of powerful womanhood on offer here. Glinda and the Wicked Witch clash most fiercely over the ruby slippers, which Glinda magics off the feet of the dead Witch of the East and onto Dorothy’s feet, and which the Wicked Witch seemingly has no power to remove. But Glinda’s instructions to Dorothy are oddly enigmatic, even contradictory. She first tells Dorothy, “Their magic must be very powerful or she wouldn’t want them so badly,” and later she says, “Never let those ruby slippers off your feet for a moment or you will be at the mercy of the Wicked Witch of the West.” Now, Statement No. 1 suggests that Glinda is unclear about the nature of the ruby slippers, whereas Statement No. 2 suggests that she knows all about their protective power. Neither statement hints at the ruby slippers’ later role in helping to get Dorothy back to Kansas. It seems probable that this confusion is a hangover from the long, dissension-riddled scripting process, in which the function of the slippers was the subject of considerable dispute. But one can also see Glinda’s obliquities as proof that a good fairy or a good witch, when she sets out to be of assistance, never gives you everything. Glinda, after all, is not so unlike her description of the Wizard of Oz: “Oh, very good, but very mysterious.”

“Just follow the Yellow Brick Road,” says Glinda, and bubbles off into the blue hills in the distance; and Dorothy—geometrically influenced, as who would not be after a childhood among triangles, circles, and squares—begins her journey at the very point from which the Road spirals outward. And as she does so, and while both she and the Munchkins are echoing Glinda’s instructions in tones both raucously high and gutturally low, something begins to happen to her feet: their motion acquires a syncopation, which by beautifully slow stages grows more and more noticeable until at last, as the ensemble bursts for the first time into the film’s theme song, we see, fully developed, the clever, shuffling little skip that will be the leitmotif of the entire journey:

You’re off to see the Wizard,

The wonderful Wizzerdovoz.

You’ll find he is a Wizzovawizz

If ever a Wizztherwozz. . . .

In this way, s-skipping along, Dorothy Gale, who is already a National Heroine of Munchkinland, who is already (as the Munchkins have assured her) History, who “will be a Bust in the Hall of Fame,” steps out along the road of destiny, and heads, as Americans must, into the West: toward the sunset, the Emerald City, and the Witch.

I have always found off-camera anecdotes about a film’s production simultaneously delicious and disappointing, especially when the film concerned has lodged as deep down inside as “The Wizard of Oz” has. It was a little sad to learn about the Wizard’s drinking problem, and to discover that Frank Morgan was only the third choice for the part, behind W. C. Fields and Ed Wynn. (What contemptuous wildness Fields might have brought to the role!) The first choice for his female more-than-opposite number, the Witch, was Gale Sondergaard, not only a great beauty but, prospectively, another Gale to set alongside Dorothy and the tornado. Then I found myself staring at an old color photograph of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and Dorothy, posing in a forest set, surrounded by autumn leaves, and realized that what I was looking at was not the stars at all but their stunt doubles, their stand-ins. It was an unremarkable studio still, but it took my breath away; for it, too, was both melancholy and mesmeric. In my mind, it came to be the very epitome of the doubleness of my responses.

There they stand, Nathanael West’s locusts, the ultimate wannabes. Garland’s shadow, Bobbie Koshay, with her hands clasped behind her back and a white bow in her hair, is doing her brave best to smile, but she knows she’s a counterfeit, all right: there are no ruby slippers on her feet. The mock-Scarecrow looks glum, too, even though he has avoided the full-scale burlap-sack makeup that was Ray Bolger’s daily fate. If it were not for the clump of straw poking out of his right sleeve, you’d think he was some kind of hobo. Between them, in full metallic drag, stands the Tin Man’s tinnier echo, looking as miserable as hell. Stand-ins know their fate: they know we don’t want to admit their existence, even though our rational minds tell us that when we watch the figure in this or that difficult shot—watch the Wicked Witch fly, or the Cowardly Lion dive through a glass window—we aren’t watching the stars. The part of us that has suspended disbelief insists on seeing the stars, and not their doubles. Thus, the stand-ins are rendered invisible even when they are in full view. They remain off camera even when they are onscreen.

However, this is not the reason for the curious fascination of the photograph; that arises from the fact that, in the case of a beloved film, we are all the stars’ doubles. Our imaginations put us in the Lion’s skin, fit the sparkling slippers on our feet, send us cackling through the air on a broomstick. To look at this photograph is to look into a mirror; in it we see ourselves. The world of “The Wizard of Oz” has possessed us. We have become the stand-ins. A pair of ruby slippers found in a bin in a basement at M-G-M was sold at auction in May, 1970, for the amazing sum of fifteen thousand dollars. The purchaser was, and has remained, anonymous. Who was it who wished so profoundly to possess—perhaps even to wear—Dorothy’s magic shoes?

On being asked to pick a single defining image of “The Wizard of Oz,” most of us would, I suspect, come up with the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy s-skipping down the Yellow Brick Road. (In point of fact, the skip continues to grow throughout the journey, and becomes a full-fledged h-hop.) How strange that the most famous passage of this very filmic film—a film packed with technical ingenuity and effects—should be the least cinematic, the most “stagy,” part of the whole! Or perhaps not so strange, for this is primarily a passage of surreal comedy, and we recall that the equally inspired clowning of the Marx Brothers was no less stagily filmed; the zany mayhem of the playing made any but the simplest camera techniques impossible.

The Scarecrow and the Tin Man are pure products of the burlesque theatre, specializing in pantomime exaggerations of voice and body movements, pratfalls (the Scarecrow descending from his post), improbable leanings beyond the center of gravity (the Tin Man during his little dance), and, of course, the smart-ass backchat of the crosstalk act:

TIN MAN (rusted solid): (Squawks)

DOROTHY: He said “Oil can”!

At the pinnacle of all this clowning is that fully realized comic masterpiece of a creation, Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion, all elongated vowel sounds (“Put ‘em uuuuuuuup”), ridiculous rhymes (“rhinoceros” and “imposserous”), transparent bravado, and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbering terror. All three—Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion—are, in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, hollow men. The Scarecrow, of course, actually does have a “headpiece filled with straw, alas,” but the Tin Man, the ancestor of C-3PO in “Star Wars,” is completely empty—he bangs on his chest to prove that his innards are missing, because “the Tinsmith,” his shadowy maker, forgot to provide a heart—and the Lion lacks the most leonine of qualities, lamenting:

What makes the Hottentot so hot?

What puts the ape in apricot?

What have they got that I ain’t got?

Perhaps it is because they are all hollow that our imaginations can enter them and fill them up so easily. That is to say, it is their anti-heroism, their apparent lack of Great Qualities, that makes them our size, or even smaller, so that we can stand among them as equals, like Dorothy among the Munchkins. Gradually, however, we discover that, along with their “straight man,” Dorothy (she occupies in this sequence the role of the unfunny Marx Brother, the one who could sing and look hunky and do little else), they embody one of the film’s “messages”—that we already possess what we seek most fervently. The Scarecrow regularly comes up with bright ideas, which he offers with self-deprecating disclaimers. The Tin Man can weep with grief long before the Wizard gives him a heart. And Dorothy’s capture by the Witch brings out the Lion’s courage, even though he pleads with his friends to “talk me out of it.” For this message to have its full impact, however, it is necessary that we learn the futility of looking for solutions outside. We must learn about one more hollow man: the Wizard of Oz himself. Just as the Tinsmith was a flawed maker of tin men—just as, in this secular movie, the Tin Man’s god is dead—so too must our belief in wizards perish, so that we may believe in ourselves. We must survive the Deadly Poppy Field, helped by a mysterious snowfall (why does snow overcome the poppies’ poison?), and so arrive, accompanied by heavenly choirs, at the city gates.

Here the film changes convention once again, becoming a portrait of hicks from the sticks arriving in the metropolis—one of the classic themes of American films, with echoes in “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” and even in Clark Kent’s arrival at the Daily Planet in “Superman.” Dorothy is a country hick, “Dorothy the small and meek”; her companions are backwoods buffoons. Yet—and this, too, is a familiar Hollywood trope—it is the out-of-towners, the country mice, who will save the day.

There was never a metropolis quite like Emerald City, however. It looks from the outside like a fairy tale of New York, a thicket of skyscraping green towers. On the inside, though, it’s the very essence of quaintness. Even more startling is the discovery that the citizens—many of them played by Frank Morgan, who adds the parts of the gatekeeper, the driver of the horse-drawn buggy, and the palace guard to those of Professor Marvel and the Wizard—speak with what Hollywood actors like to call an English accent. “Tyke yer anyplace in the city, we does,” says the driver, adding, “I’ll tyke yer to a little place where you can tidy up a bit, what?” Other members of the citizenry are dressed like Grand Hotel bellhops and glitzy nuns, and they say—or, rather, sing—things like “Jolly good fun!” Dorothy catches on quickly. At the Wash & Brush Up Co., a tribute to urban technological genius with none of the dark doubts of a “Modern Times” or a “City Lights,” our heroine gets a little Englished herself:

DOROTHY (sings): Can you even dye my eyes to match my gown?

Most of the citizenry are cheerfully friendly, and those who appear not to be—the gatekeeper, the palace guard—are soon won over. (In this respect, once again, they are untypical city folk.) Our four friends finally gain entry to the Wizard’s palace because Dorothy’s tears of frustration undam a quite alarming reservoir of liquid in the guard. His face is quickly sodden with tears, and, watching this extreme performance, you are struck by the sheer number of occasions on which people cry in this film. Besides Dorothy and the guard, there is the Cowardly Lion, who bawls when Dorothy bops him on the nose; the Tin Man, who almost rusts up again from weeping; and Dorothy again, while she is in the clutches of the Witch It occurs to you that if the hydrophobic Witch could only have been closer at hand on one of these occasions the movie might have been much shorter.

Into the palace we go, down an arched corridor that looks like an elongated version of the Looney Tunes logo, and at last we confront a Wizard whose tricks—giant heads and flashes of fire—conceal his basic kinship with Dorothy. He, too, is an immigrant; indeed, as he will later reveal, he is a Kansas man himself. (In the novel, he came from Omaha.) These two immigrants have adopted opposite strategies of survival in a new and strange land. Dorothy has been unfailingly polite, careful, courteously “small and meek,” whereas the Wizard has been fire and smoke, bravado and bombast, and has hustled his way to the top—floated there, so to speak, on a cloud of his own hot air. But Dorothy learns that meekness isn’t enough, and the Wizard finds (as his balloon gets the better of him for a second time) that his command of hot air isn’t all it should be. (It is hard for a migrant like me not to see in these shifting destinies a parable of the migrant condition.)

The Wizard’s stipulation that he will grant no wishes until the four friends have brought him the Witch’s broomstick ushers in the penultimate, and least challenging (though most action-packed and “exciting”), movement of the film, which is in this phase at once a buddy movie, a straightforward adventure yarn, and, after Dorothy’s capture, a more or less conventional princess-rescue story. The film, having arrived at the great dramatic climax of the confrontation with the Wizard of Oz, sags for a while, and doesn’t really regain momentum until the equally climactic final struggle with the Wicked Witch, which ends with her melting, her “growing down” into nothingness.

Fast forward. The Witch is gone. The Wizard has been unmasked, and in the moment of his unveiling has succeeded in performing a spot of true magic, giving Dorothy’s companions the gifts they did not believe until that moment that they possessed. The Wizard is gone, too, and without Dorothy, their plans having been fouled up by (who else but) Toto. And here is Glinda, telling Dorothy she has to learn the meaning of the ruby slippers for herself.

TIN MAN: What have you learned, Dorothy?

DOROTHY: . . . If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard; because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with. Is that right?

GLINDA: That’s all it is. . . . Now those magic slippers will take you home in two seconds. . . . Close your eyes and tap your heels together three times . . . and think to yourself . . . there’s no place like . . .

Hold it.

How does it come about that at the close of this radical and enabling film—which teaches us in the least didactic way possible to build on what we have, to make the best of ourselves—we are given this conservative little homily? Are we to think that Dorothy has learned no more on her journey than that she didn’t need to make such a journey in the first place? Must we believe that she now accepts the limitations of her home life, and agrees that the things she doesn’t have there are no loss to her? “Is that right?” Well, excuse me, Glinda, but it is not.

Home again, in black-and-white, with Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and the rude mechanicals clustered around her bed, Dorothy begins her second revolt, fighting not only against the patronizing dismissals by her own folk but also against the scriptwriters and the sentimental moralizing of the entire Hollywood studio system. “It wasn’t a dream, it was a place!” she cries piteously. “A real, truly live place! . . . Doesn’t anyone believe me?”

Many, many people did believe her. Frank Baum’s readers believed her, and their belief in Oz led him to write thirteen further Oz books, admittedly of diminishing quality; the series was continued, even more feebly, by other hands after his death. Dorothy, ignoring the “lessons” of the ruby slippers, goes back to Oz, in spite of the efforts of Kansas folk, including Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, to have her dreams brainwashed out of her (see the terrifying electro-convulsive-therapy sequence in the recent Disney film “Return to Oz”); and, in the sixth book of the series, she sends for Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, and they all settle down in Oz, where Dorothy becomes a Princess.

So Oz finally becomes home. The imagined world becomes the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that, once we leave our childhood places and start to make up our lives, armed only with what we know and who we are, we come to understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that “there’s no place like home” but, rather, that there is no longer any such place ashome—except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz. Which is anywhere—and everywhere—except the place from which we began.

In the place from which I began, after all, I watched the film from the child’s—Dorothy’s—point of view. I experienced, with her, the frustration of being brushed aside by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, busy with their dull grownup counting. Like all adults, they couldn’t focus on what was really important: namely, the threat to Toto. I ran away with her and then ran back. Even the shock of discovering that the Wizard was a humbug was a shock I felt as a child, a shock to the child’s faith in adults. Perhaps, too, I felt something deeper, something I couldn’t then articulate; perhaps some half-formed suspicion about grownups was being confirmed.

Now, as I look at the movie again, I have become the fallible adult. Now I am a member of the tribe of imperfect parents who cannot listen to their children’s voices. I, who no longer have a father, have become a father instead. Now it is my fate to be unable to satisfy the longings of a child. And this is the last and most terrible lesson of the film: that there is one final, unexpected rite of passage. In the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic, exposed conjurers, with only our simple humanity to get us through.

We are the humbugs now. ♦

1 note · View note

whileiamdying · 2 years ago

Text

Out of Kansas: Revisiting “The Wizard of Oz.”

By Salman Rushdie May 4, 1992

But if “The Wizard of Oz” is a work of art it’s extremely difficult to say who the artist was. The birth of Oz itself has already passed into legend: the author, L. Frank Baum, named his magic world after the letters “O-Z” on the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. His original book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” published in 1900, contains many of the ingredients of the magic potion: just about all the major characters and events are there, and so are the most important locations—the Yellow Brick Road, the Deadly Poppy Field, the Emerald City. But the filming of “The Wizard of Oz” is a rare instance of a film improving on a good book. One of the changes is the expansion of the Kansas section, which in the novel takes up precisely two pages at the beginning, before the tornado arrives, and just nine lines at the end; and another is a certain simplification of the story line in the Oz section: all subplots were jettisoned, such as the visits to the Fighting Trees, the Dainty China Country, and the Country of the Quadlings, which come into the novel just after the dramatic high point of the Witch’s destruction and fritter away the book’s narrative drive. And there are two even more important alterations. Frank Baum’s Emerald City was green only because everyone in it had to wear emerald-tinted glasses, but in the movie it really is a futuristic chlorophyll green—except, that is, for the Horse of a Different Color You’ve Heard Tell About. The Horse of a Different Color changes color in each successive shot—a change that was brought about by covering six different horses with a variety of shades of powdered Jell-O. (For this and other anecdotes of the film’s production I’m indebted to Aljean Harmetz’s definitive book “The Making of The Wizard of Oz.”) Last, and most important of all, are the ruby slippers. Frank Baum did not invent the ruby slippers; he had silver shoes instead. Noel Langley, the first of the film’s three credited writers, originally followed Baum’s idea. But in his fourth script, the script of May 14, 1938, known as the do not make changes script, the clunky metallic and non-mythic silver footwear has been jettisoned, and the immortal jewel shoes are introduced. (In Shot 114, “the ruby shoes appear on Dorothy’s feet, glittering and sparkling in the sun.”)

And this is the home that “there’s no place like”? This is the lost Eden that we are asked to prefer (as Dorothy does) to Oz?

Back in Kansas, Auntie Em is delivering the scolding that is the prelude to one of the cinema’s immortal moments.

“You always get yourself into a fret over nothing. . . . Find yourself a place where you won’t get into any trouble!”

“Some place where there isn’t any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be.”

Ding, dong, the witch is dead! Whicholwitch? —The wicked witch!

This technique found much fuller expression in “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” becoming the real “hook” of the song:

We’re off to see the Wizard, The wonderful Wizzerdovoz We hear he is A Wizzovawizz, If ever a Wizztherwozz. If everoever a Wizztherwozz The Wizzerdovoz is one because . . .

And so on.

You’re off to see the Wizard, (s-skip) The wonderful Wizzerdovoz. (s-skip) You’ll find he is a Wizzovawizz If ever a Wizztherwozz. . . .

Tin Man (rusted solid): (Squawks) Dorothy: He said “Oil can”! Scarecrow: Oil can what?

What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the ape in apricot? What have they got that I ain’t got? Courage!

Dorothy (sings): Can you even dye my eyes to match my gown? Attendant: Uh-huh! Dorothy: Jolly old town!

Tin Man: What have you learned, Dorothy? Dorothy: ... If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard; because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with. Is that right? Glinda: That’s all it is. ... Now those magic slippers will take you home in two seconds. ... Close your eyes and tap your heels together three times ... and think to yourself ... there’s no place like ...

Hold it.

So Oz finally becomes home. The imagined world becomes the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that, once we leave our childhood places and start to make up our lives, armed only with what we know and who we are, we come to understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that “there’s no place like home” but, rather, that there is no longer any such place as home—except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz. Which is anywhere—and everywhere—except the place from which we began.

We are the humbugs now. ♦

Published in the print edition of the May 11, 1992, issue. Salman Rushdie has written fifteen novels, including “Victory City.”

#wizard of oz #salman rushdie #the new yorker

0 notes