Counter-Currents
1,480 words 
I’m sure that Dissident Right interest in the latest distaff-themed, PG-rated musical hitting the cinemas is fairly tepid. If there is interest at all, it may be in how Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: Part 1, which was adapted from the musical Wicked, ranks on Spencer J. Quinn’s famous cringe scale. Does this fabulous monstrosity achieve a skin-crawling, apocalyptic 10? Or a refreshingly banal goose egg?
I’d give it a 5, and can attest that young girls aged 7 to 14 could be exposed to a lot worse than two hours and 40 minutes of Chu’s Wizard of Oz revisionism. Yes, the experience will require some debriefing, but not as much as I was afraid there would be. Wicked aims to entertain and does not ruffle feathers that have not already been ruffled. By this standard, it is a winner, if its massive box office success hasn’t proved that already.
Having not seen the play, nor read Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel on which it was based—but having had read their Wikipedia synopses—I can say that the movie stays true to the play, which diverges somewhat in detail from the novel. The plot begins with the death of the Wicked Witch of the West at the end of The Wizard of Oz. Glinda the good witch (played by Ariana Grande) is forced to answer questions about the Wicked Witch’s origins and how a person can become so evil to begin with. While responding, she reveals that she had once been friends with her jaundiced arch-nemesis. We then flashback to the Wicked Witch’s backstory to discover the mind-blowing yet thoroughly predictable reveal that she was not so wicked after all.
Given that Wicked is pretty much wall-to-wall song and dance, the plot, such as it is, is a bit thin. But that’s okay. The Wicked Witch (played by the Cynthia Erivo, a woman with the face of an African ceremonial war mask) is the product of an illicit affair between her mulatto mother and . . . some mysterious stranger who sweeps her off her feet and then disappears. The film depicts their tryst tastefully enough so that only the most inquisitive children will ask questions. The girl comes out green as guacamole and bursting with destructive magical ability. Her horrified parents name her Elphaba (a portmanteau of Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum’s three initials) and demand their little She-Hulk play second fiddle to their favored second child, Nessarose, who happens to be a paraplegic.
After years of ridicule and ostracization, Elphaba accompanies Nessarose to Shiz University, where Madame Morrible (played by Michelle Yeoh) discovers her magical ability. Morrible enrolls her on the spot and rooms her with Galinda (later called Glinda), the rich, spoiled Barbie girl that the studious outcast Elphaba could never dream of being. As expected, Galinda legally-blondes it for a while with her sense of entitlement, and the girls endure a good deal of friction. If Wicked was going to head down the yellow brick road of anti-white infamy, here would have been a good place to start. It doesn’t, thank goodness. Instead, Galinda sprouts a conscience, even at the cost of losing some of her vacuous friends, and the two girls become BFFs. A man even enters the equation, one Fiyero Tigelaar (played by Jonathan Bailey), and even he cannot shake their friendship. Furthermore, this man, despite being a corrupting influence on the school’s student body, also has a conscience. He chooses Galinda at first, but finds himself drawn towards Elphaba by movie’s end.
Since audiences typically don’t go to Oz to discover the hypotenuse in a campus love triangle, the (((animal rights))) subplot was introduced. Here we have the first of several debriefing items one should present to children after the movie. Basically, pre-Dorothy Oz is like Nazi Germany for oppressed anthropomorphic animals. Elphaba and Galinda witness in horror as Professor Dillamand—who happens to be a goat—gets violently removed from his classroom by the police. Later, Elphaba and Fiyero uncage the Cowardly Lion as a cub and set him free. The gross injustice of animal oppression prompts Elphaba and Galinda to petition the Wizard of Oz (played expertly by a smarmy Jeff Goldblum) to do something about it.
While the target audience of Wicked probably could not endure a lecture on the lachrymose school of Jewish historiography, parents should probably impart to children that these animal scenes are a tad manipulative, serve as crude plot devices, and snub humans by ignoring possible reasons for animal oppression to begin with. (For example, I certainly would want all animals to lose tenure at high-end universities if one out of five of them is a left-wing ideologue sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Just sayin’.)
Another debriefing point should be just how gay this whole production is. Aside from the rock star Fiyero, it seems that every male student at Shiz University is a bit light in the loafers—and not just from the incessant dancing. When Fiyero saunters by, all the women swoon, but so do the men, especially an Asian fellow in Galinda’s snooty clique (who was female in the musical, by the way). It’s not overdone or anything, but children should probably be made aware that this sort of thing is a bit more common in the world of musical theater than in real life.
Yet another debriefing point deals with race. How can Elphaba’s mysterious father, who is not black, and her mother, a light-skinned black, produce offspring so fully negroid in appearance that even green makeup couldn’t keep her from evoking a National Geographic cover shoot? This just goes to show the dishonesty of the filmmakers. Cynthia Erivo was cast because she was inapt for the role. Yes, she can sing beautifully and act well enough, but the filmmakers clearly had an agenda to promote—that is, to subvert expectations by making the most sympathetic character in the story non-white. It didn’t have to be this way. Nothing in the book or musical indicates that Elphaba is black. None of the major actresses cast as Elphaba in the musical were black. So why the change? Why now?
Our final debriefing point deals with the silly subplot of the munchkin Boq Woodsman (played by Ethan Slater) and Nessarose (played by Marissa Bode). Basically, Boq has a stupid crush on Galinda, who diverts his attention to Nessarose to get him off her back. He then becomes enamored with Nessarose because, of course, being in a wheelchair in no way detracts from a woman’s sex appeal. One of the songs even describes her as beautiful, which, to anyone with a pair of eyes, is just not true. Children need to be told that they’re being lied to. It’s nice to imagine a world in which being a paraplegic isn’t much of a handicap on the dating scene. But we do not live in that world.
(And for readers who don’t know, munchkins in the Wicked franchise are not the squeaky-voice midgets from The Wizard of Oz movie, but simply shorter-than-average humans.)
As for the quality of the music, it’s fine. I’m not the best judge of showtune aesthetics, but nothing struck me as terribly out of place—although Elphaba’s solo piece “The Wizard and I” might overdo it on the corn. I was particularly taken by “Popular,” the bouncy, acrimonious duet between the two leads which takes place just after they move in together. And I must say, “Defying Gravity,” the showstopper which literally stops Wicked: Part 1 in the end, is magnificent. It’s up there with Frozen’s “Let it Go” in the hear-me-roar, coming-of-age, lady-song genre, which will have girls face planting into their beds pretending they can fly for the next 20 years.
Actually, the ending of Wicked: Part 1 is something else, the perfect confluence of pacing, score, action, and suspense—and a cliffhanger to boot. I’d say that without the last 20 minutes of this well-paced 160-minute movie, Wicked: Part 1 would have been about half as good. Basically, the girls figure out that Oz himself is responsible for oppressing the animals (for no good reason, natch) and that Madam Morrible is in on it. Elphaba is bent on stopping them, while Glinda (now with her named changed) tries to persuade her to fix the problem within the system. It’s a real conundrum, and the filmmakers handle it deftly, especially as Elphaba flies about Oz’s castle on her broom to escape his onrushing soldiers—a portent of things we all know will come. Meanwhile, Morrible announces to all of Oz the lie that Elphaba has indeed become “wicked.”
Sort of like what the mainstream media has done to Donald Trump for the past decade!
If your children plan on seeing Wicked: Part 1, insist they see The Wizard of Oz beforehand, and then make sure to have an important conversation with them about it afterwards. As you can see, there is a lot to discuss.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
17 comments
My negro fatigue is bottomless by now.
And yet their attempts to fatigue us are without bottom or top.
There doesn’t exist a child on the N American continent who can sit through a 160 minute movie. My kids are too old for this crap anyway, but there’s not a chance, in any hell, that I would’ve taken them to it. Homosexual men swooning over other men? Nope. Not a chance. There’s enough propaganda in the schools to deal with, not putting up with it in normal time. Of course, I never took my kids to a movie where the star was black anyway.
Indeed. There are plenty of good movies from the last millennium. No need to compromise on this stuff. I remember reading about some school or school district that removed all books published before 2008 from the libraries for being too white and insufficiently woke. Well, I have more or less the same policy, but in the other direction.
Still, it’s good to know what’s going on these days so I won’t be totally clueless when my daughter’s friends are asking her if she saw the latest propaganda piece.
“(((animal rights)))“
Excuse me?
He means lizard rights. Lizard people rights, I mean.
How many of today’s children and young people will immediately understand that these films are woke garbage? I have to compare it to when I was growing up in communist Czechoslovakia. Communist youth productions contained only a tiny amount of political propaganda and manipulation. Most of the content for kinds was actually normal entertainment. Educational programmes were just about the normal Western cultural canon, perhaps with some more emphasis on economic equality, socialist futurism and local ethno-nationalism. Today, on the other hand, everything aimed at young people is completely saturated with woke ideology, antiracism and aversion against Whites.
As much as I dislike communism, I think the post-Stalin leaders in the Eastern Bloc were much better people than the establishment in the west today. For all their faults, they actually tried to put at least some resources towards helping the people. Today’s western leaders openly disdain their own constituents.
Why Part 1? Is this like History of the World Part 1? Is there some kind of cliffhanger drawing in the future return? I guess so and I won’t ask due to spoiler alert. I’m disconnected from cable at home and I’ve been deluged with advertisements for donations from the ACLU, NAACP like I’ve never seen before. The one that got me was the author Judy Blume complaining about books being banned. Especially age inappropriate ones. I’d be curious if her open minded approach would include Greg Johnson or Spencer Quinn? Or Jared Taylor. Fortunately there’s this site to keep the fires burning towards real open communication. But the censorship remains strong. I’m glad I’ve got no reason to view this film.
Elviro, the green African with a face for radio, is the latest Magic negro trope. One of hollywood’s most beloved plot devices. Ni66er fatigue with a vengeance is about all I can add.
I find it hard to see the interest in Wicked (part any of it). As I said in an earlier essay, Wicked is essentially jewish propaganda showing the view of the “outsider” and how this outsider is morally and intellectually more capable than whites. Take the green skin and switch it to Jew, and there it is. The retelling of Oz is simply anti-white propaganda, here thinly disguised, as most 2000 plus shows and stories are. Recall my review of an updated Paint Your Wagon by, yes, a Jew.
I did see the show Wicked, and it has lots of razzmatazz, production values that skyrocket, and I suppose some acceptable songs, but the message is to force a guilt trip on Oz and anything connected with the story. In the original cast, Kristin Chenoweth played Glinda and put a lot of spirit into the part, but Glinda is still a blonde to be hated. The question I posed in my earlier comment on Wicked, which I repeat, is do the white audiences who flock to see Wicked have any understanding of this subversiveness against them? Or are they simply accepting so they can see a “show?” One that presumably has “values.”
Interesting that the fifties musicals had Jewish writing and messages in them, but it was more subtle than now, although very much there. South Pacific is a story praising race-mixing.
The most blatant thing about the film is that they put a black woman in for the Jewish type, since blacks copycat the Jewish theme of oppression and the need to let the outsider’s views and life be regnant over the majority. And that actress is freaking ugly. But since 2020, uglinesss is almost worshipped and is government policy.
You are absolutely correct in saying this film is jewish propoganda. There isn’t a script in all of Hollywood that gets approved without a crafted message for the unsuspecting audience.
Our brains have some evolutionary catching up to do. The subcontious has a hard time filtering out these subliminal messages distributed through video medium. This is why video is such an important distribution mechanism of ideas.
When I rarely watch a movie or television show, I try my damnest to keep my guard up. I never let the film maker take me on the experience they have crafted. Each time it gets easier to see how they attempt worm their way into your mind.
Great review of what I think looks like a very stupid movie. I know this movie is based on an earlier book and play, but there seems to be a trend in movies lately of showing the “origin story” of some famous, evil movie villain and explaining how they got that way and making them seem cool or sympathetic. And as part of the twist they’ll make the formerly virtuous and good characters sinister in some way in the new retelling. The new, sympathetic portrayals of the evil characters don’t line up at all with the original portrayals, and it comes off like cheap, feminist fan fiction. Think of the recent movies Maleficent or Cruella, for example.
I watched an interview with the two Wicked stars, Ariana Grande and the nightmarish-looking, bald black woman with the hideous bull nose ring, and the two couldn’t have been any more snotty and annoying. And in the clips I’ve seen of the film Grande acts robotic and aloof as the good witch character and seems unable to convey much emotion in the upper portion of her face, perhaps due to Botox. She doesn’t seem sweet at all. More like an artificial, bland, snooty bitch who’s full of herself. I think Grande might have just played herself in the movie.
Who on a supposedly pro-White site gives a shit about another Hollywood race-mixing flick? does it also promote queers? Perfect.
Spencer, how about reviewing The Order, released into theaters this month. It’s about Bob Mathews’ group by that name that declared war on the anti-White system, supposedly based on William Pierce’s 50-year-old novel, The Turner Diaries.
It’s a Jewish pack-0′-lies film on a real-life White resistance experience, but infinitely more interesting to a pro-White crowd than this garbage you’ve reviewed.
The Order 2024, part 3 | National Vanguard
The Order 2024, part 4 | National Vanguard
Listen to Bob Mathews’ speech, given to a gathering of fellow National Alliance members in real time in September of 1993, prior to his resigning his NA membership and declaring war against the anti-White System: William Pierce on Robert Mathews | National Vanguard.
The Order portrays Bob’s speech as being impromptu at a gathering at Pastor Richard Butler’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian and the audience “chanting” the final four words of Bob’s actual speech: “Defeat never, victory forever” Scary, huh? It never happened.
Hi Will,
Fair enough on your revulsion towards Wicked. I get it. But please consider that many of the people viewing this site are not committed white nationalists, but rather are merely curious about our ideas. Such folks may have daughters or sisters who would want to see this movie. I hope that my review will not only be useful in breaking the movie down but also in encouraging such people to keep reading Counter-Currents and eventually get more involved.
Casting a wide net here…
Spencer Quinn: December 24, 2024 Hi Will, Fair enough on your revulsion towards Wicked. I get it. But please consider that many of the people viewing this site are not committed white nationalists, but rather are merely curious about our ideas…
I will try to check out the Order when I have time. Thanks.
—
I hope you will review The Order. Hollywood cannot portray a real-life idealistic, heroic man like Bob Mathews as anything but evil. Perhaps some mainstream daughters and sisters may even find Mathews to be a sympathetic anti-System protagonist — like a Robin Hood character — if presented favorably rather than pure evil as Hollywood does.
I realize that many viewing C-C are simply curious about “our ideas” — ideas that are all over the board. Most are still caught in what’s described as the mainstream. I Included this clever snippet from Wolf Stoner in the November issue of the National Alliance Members BULLETIN. This first appeared here on C-C but was lost on curious mainstream hens:
The majority of mainstream people live like hens in a barn; they are fed and housed for free, but an owner can come any time and cut off head of any hen; simply because he needs it to make soup. The mainstream hens prefer not to think about this; they enjoy the quietude and predictability of measured lifestyle under the governmental protection but the axe-time always comes for any hen.
And I will try to check out the Order when I have time. Thanks.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.