Wicked

1,480 words ^[1]

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 ^[2] Wikipedia ^[3] synopses ^[4]—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.