At the conclusion of the movie “Wicked” (2024), audiences were thrilled to see the protagonist, Elphaba, rise triumphantly into the air, broomstick in hand, cloak billowing, and music swelling. After leaving audiences hanging for a year, “Wicked: For Good” is scheduled for release on November 21. The sequel, like its predecessor, will no doubt be a feast of sight and sound. But if fans will pause a moment to peek behind the curtain of the two movies’ winsome musical numbers and sumptuous costumes and settings, they may observe that something urgent is being concealed — albeit just out of sight. Not simply an elaborate reimagining of a classic tale, “Wicked” is actually a timely political allegory with a disturbingly pointed moral message.
The Yellow Brick Road that leads to the Emerald City has often been interpreted to be a path to the American dream, but in “Wicked” it leads to somewhere dreary and foreboding. The fairy tale’s familiar characters become unsettlingly political, mirrors for our own descent into autocracy. But to understand “Wicked” we must first turn to the original Oz story.
Oz was always political
L. Frank Baum’s children’s story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and all its iterations have delighted readers as well as film and theater audiences for 125 years. The height of its success came twenty years after Baum’s death with the MGM musical “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), starring the sixteen-year-old Judy Garland, whose moving rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” with an ache of longing in her voice, enjoyed an immediate resonance with audiences.
For those of us who grew up watching “The Wizard of Oz” on television every year, the reinterpretation of Baum’s beloved story as a political allegory might seem irreverent, but this would be mistaken. Children’s books often bear messages as a subtext that are invisible to their young readers, who may see only an adventure story with engaging characters.
Yet even adult readers may be forgiven for not seeing the political nature of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as Baum did not reveal the exact meaning of his metaphorical characters. In fact, he never even acknowledged that his story was allegorical in nature. As Rebecca Loncraine notes in The Real Wizard of Oz, Baum was not really sure of the origin of his tale and tended to make up stories about its provenance to satisfy inquiring reporters. In The Historian’s Wizard of Oz, Ranjit S. Dighe concludes that Baum’s “book works as a Populist allegory” whether or not this was his conscious intention. Perhaps, in Baum’s unplanned creative process, symbols and metaphors simply emerged unprompted from his subconscious as he wrote. The end result, however it came about, was an allegorical tour de force.
Given Baum’s misdirections about the origin and meaning of his story, it was not until 1964 that Henry M. Littlefield, a high school history teacher and wrestling coach with a PhD in history, memorably linked Baum’s story to the economic and political turmoil of populism in the 1890s in his article “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism.” Triggered by the devastating depression of 1893-97, Americans experienced a farmers’ revolt, strife between labor and capital, and a roiling of the political waters. Littlefield argues that Baum responded to the trauma of his time by inventing a tale that transported Americans to a magical land where good triumphs over evil. Naturally, Littlefield’s interpretation is controversial — and even he had doubts at times — but his is still the best and most internally consistent interpretation of the land of Oz, which a number of subsequent historians have adopted and refined.
The populist symbols along the Yellow Brick Road
According to Littlefield, the Yellow Brick Road and the silver slippers — not ruby red slippers as in the movie — are metaphors for the bimetal controversy of the 1890s, which centered on the issue of adding silver to the gold standard to inflate the currency and thereby raise crop prices to make it easier for farmers to pay their debts. Shod in silver footwear and journeying on a golden road to the Emerald City, Dorothy Gale, an “everyman” farmgirl from Kansas, is joined by three allegorical companions.
The Scarecrow represents the small farmers of the South and trans-Mississippi West. Baum depicts them as unintelligent as though they were men with heads full of straw, and he was not alone in this assessment. In 1896, William Allen White wrote an article entitled “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” denigrating farmers as ignorant and irrational. One of the ironies of Baum’s story is that the Scarecrow is the cleverest and shrewdest of Dorothy’s companions.
The Tin Woodman represents urban, dehumanized industrial laborers. Dorothy and the Scarecrow find the tin man rusting and immobilized in a wood, connoting the rampant unemployment of the period. When he rusts solid, the tin man incorrectly concludes that he has become insensitive to others because he lacks a heart. Again, Baum is giving us a sly wink as the tin man turns out to be the most sentimental one of the group.
The Cowardly Lion is an avatar for William Jennings Bryan, who won the Democratic Party’s nomination for president on the strength of a single masterpiece of oratory, the famous “Cross of Gold” speech. Nevertheless, it was not enough for him to win the presidential election of 1896, and two years later, Bryan likely sealed his political fate by opposing the Spanish-American War in keeping with his pacifist and anti-imperialist principles. Although Baum’s lion is at times equivocal, he saw Bryan as a one-time hero who had turned a coward.
The wizard, who refers to himself ostentatiously as “Oz, the Great and Terrible,” is central to the story. In Baum’s book, the people of Oz believe that he “can take on any form he wishes.” In other words, he is a cynical politician who, chameleon-like, adapts his persona to suit an audience. For Baum, he might represent any Gilded Age president since he saw them all as “humbugs.” Today, however, Baum would likely use sharper terms: charlatans, demagogues, conmen. Though claiming to be a wizard, Oz has no magical powers. He is a fraud, exploiting people for his own benefit, ruling by fear and intimidation, and making empty promises. He is also cruel, casually sending Dorothy and her three companions on a near-impossible task to kill the Wicked Witch of the West.
When, against all odds, the four succeed in their mission and seek to claim their rewards, they learn the bitter truth. The wizard confesses that he is a poseur. Having been egregiously deceived, the four might then have been expected to rage and storm at his perfidy, but instead, nonsensically, they persist in pleading for his help. The heroes of Baum’s story are lovable characters, but they are also morally flawed. Faced with a truth that doesn’t suit them, they embrace a lie.
After some protesting, the wizard naturally relents. After all, he is a con artist presented with pathetically eager dupes. Rather than granting their wishes, he them gives precisely what their willful blindness so richly merits: hollow tokens of their desires. In the movie version of the story, the Scarecrow receives a worthless diploma, the Cowardly Lion a faux medal for valor, and the Tin Woodman a cheap clock in a heart-shaped encasement. In the book, their gifts are even more absurd and useless.
Demagogues succeed not only because of their own audacity in making extravagant promises but also because their followers are complicit in the deception.
Baum’s point, as Littlefield argues, is that demagogues succeed not only because of their own audacity in making extravagant promises but also because their followers are complicit in the deception. They go along with the lies because it is easier to believe them than to have confidence in themselves, look clear-eyed at their problems, and seek real solutions.
From Baum to Maguire: Oz reimagined for a new era
While Baum’s Oz was shaped by the Populist anxieties of his age, Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked reimagines the story in ways that suggest modern preoccupations. Presented as a prequel to “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), the novel provides the backstory to the infamous Elphaba Thropp, otherwise known as the Wicked Witch of the West. It is a doleful story from beginning to end. Because Elphaba, played by Cynthia Erivo, is green-skinned, she is unloved and even at times feared as a child, and her life bends along a downward arc until her death at the unlikely hands of Dorothy.
The 2003 Broadway musical “Wicked” is lighter and more hopeful than the novel, which it only loosely follows. The movie “Wicked” (2024) generally conforms to the stage production, and so no doubt will its sequel. Still, these movies — whether by chance or design — seem honed to reflect the dark, uncertain moment at which we now find ourselves in the unfolding experiment of American democracy.
Behind the luminous artistry of the movie musicals lies a somber political tale of a society that is tumbling headlong into fascism.
Behind the luminous artistry of the movie musicals lies a somber political tale of a society that is tumbling headlong into fascism. The wizard, played by Jeff Goldblum, rules Oz as an autocrat, scapegoating talking animals to unify the land and deflect from his own misdeeds. The move’s autocratic themes recall the playbook of authoritarians around the world, including the one currently occupying the White House. To underscore the point, the intellectual leader of the animals is a talking goat who becomes quite literally a scapegoat.
The title Wicked ostensibly refers to Elphaba, a marginalized and misjudged woman who is nonetheless the heroine of the story. Her transformation into the Wicked Witch of the West will most likely be less a fall from grace than a triumph of propaganda. Aren’t stories often shaped by the powerful to cast dissenters as villains?
In other words, it’s time to oppose the seemingly irresistible forces of authoritarianism.
But for now, Elphaba has marvelously reinvented herself, emerging at the end of “Wicked” (2024) as the leader of the resistance through her show-stopping aria, “Defying Gravity.” While soaring high above the Wizard’s fortress on her witch’s broom, she sings, “I’m through with playing by the rules of someone else’s game…. It’s time to try defying gravity.” In other words, it’s time to oppose the seemingly irresistible forces of authoritarianism.
Who, in the end, is truly wicked?
In the coming weeks, go see “Wicked: For Good.” Enjoy the music, costumes, sets, plot twists, and allegorical subtleties. But, however diverting the spectacle, don’t miss the underlying message: this is a wakeup call for those committed to social justice and political freedom. Moreover, it is a plea for self-reflection. If Elphaba’s evocative words in the climatic song of “Wicked” are intended not only for her friend Glinda, played by Ariana Grande, but also for American movie-going audiences, we have all the more reason to ask ourselves a crucial question: To whom does the title “Wicked” really refer? There are many eligible candidates to consider, but if we return to what was arguably Baum’s original vision, we should start by looking in the mirror.
