Defying Gravity when the ground is Upside-Down
The righteous outlaw always looks wrong when the world doesn’t have eyes to see clearly
SPOILER WARNING: This post contains spoilers for both the “Wicked” film and stage play.
I absolutely loved the Wicked film. 1500/10. If ever we needed a cultural metaphor for going Right-Side-Up in an Upside-Down world, it’s the image of the green girl going West, refusing to court power and comfort at the expense of what’s right, choosing the wilderness of truth over a city built on lies.
“Wicked” is based on the premise that everything you think you know about The Wizard of Oz is wrong — the Wicked Witch isn’t actually wicked, the tornado that brought Dorothy to Oz may not have been an accident, and Glinda the Good has a ways to go before she can really call herself “good.” Rather, what you think you know is what’s presented to you, and you come to find out that the presenter has a perspective.
I’m not a fan of the “culture of inversion” that
has so astutely written about (the one that says “let’s turn everything on its head for the fun of it, nobody is really wicked, and perhaps nobody is really good”), but luckily, Wicked the stage play and film alike are not that. Instead, this story making a very real claim that there is objective good — and oftentimes, it flies in the face of what society and institutions tell us is good. Sometimes actually being good will mean that you don’t end up looking good to those around you. But it’s worth it to be good, to live with integrity, and to be willing to become an outlaw for the sake of what’s right and true. (Note: Here I’m discussing the film and stage play, which follow roughly the same plot. I am not discussing the novel by Gregory Maguire, which is much more a “culture of inversion” story.)And so here are three things I’ve been thinking about in this particular fairytale and what it can teach us:
The Righteous Outlaw
We come to learn that the green girl who will one day become the infamous Wicked Witch of the West is actually a sincere, well-meaning girl named Elphaba. She possesses inexplicable magic powers (which she’s had since birth), the discovery of which mark a turning point in the Cinderella-esque life she’s lived so far, in which she’s been hated by her own father for being green and ostracized by everyone around her. She’s kind and empathetic, and she has an eye for befriending people others would mock, including her professor Doctor Dillamond, who is bullied for his outsider status as a Talking Goat.
Her powers put her on the map of the powers-that-be, though, and her fortunes shift. At first, once university Headmistress Madame Morrible intimates that these powers may get her in with the Wizard of Oz, she’s ecstatic. It’s all she’s ever wanted. All she’s ever dreamed of. Every ounce of social ostracism she’s suffering from will be melted away (no pun intended), and she’ll be completely legitimized by all if she’s working with the Wizard.
Trouble is, the Wizard and Morrible have their own purposes, too. And they’re pretty ugly purposes.
Elphaba’s powers make her a coveted acquisition for The Wizard of Oz and Madame Morrible because she can do what they can’t. Just as in the 1939 Wizard of Oz film (and the original book by L. Frank Baum), the Wizard has no magic powers. He’s just a guy from our world, from Omaha, Nebraska who ended up in Oz, where everyone decided he was a hero and effectively made him king. This sounded good to him, and he ran with it, bringing all his know-how of Edwardian-era technology with him and passing it off to the eager Ozians as magic.
But in this new film, we come to learn that there’s a very good reason he’s pretending to have magic — the Ozians think he’s some sort of long-hoped-for Magical Messiah based on an ancient prophecy. The magical “wise ones” who were in Oz in earlier days wrote down all their magic in a special book and declared that the one who could read it one day was the Messiah. When the magician from Nebraska looks at the book and starts speaking gibberish words like “O-ma-ha” (the name of the city where he’s from), they decide he can read it. He’s the only one who can read it, they declare! Oz is saved, hurrah!
Except he can’t read it. He’s just convinced everybody that he can. But Elphaba actually can. She’s the real deal, the one who was actually prophesied. She can get him out of the predicament of lies he’s concocted for himself, if only she agrees to work for him so he can keep up the charade. And what’s more, he needs Elphaba’s powers and her magical-book-reading abilities to do things like turn his monkey guards into winged spies through a torturous transformation process and make the Talking Animals of Oz go mute. “Back where I come from, the best way to bring people together is to give them a real good enemy. There was discord and disorder when I got here,” he tells her. He’s identified the Animals as an easy, vulnerable target (a literal scapegoat) and turned the people against them in the name of “unity.”
Seeing what she’s seen now of the dark inner heart of the Ozian throne room, she doesn’t want it anymore, she doesn’t want any of it. She doesn’t want to become a puppet for a lying ruler or drive the Animals, for whom she has great sympathy, into silence and hiding. And she knows she’s been manipulated and offered everything she wants — public legitimacy, love, adoration, safety — in exchange for her using her powers for great harm. So she doesn’t take the deal. She does the only thing she can do and hangs onto her integrity and refuses the Faustian bargain. She leaves. She flies off. And it is for this that she is declared “wicked” and identified as a public threat.
Elphaba the so-called “wicked witch” follows in a long tradition of righteous outlaws in stories. These characters are always signaling to us that when the ways of the world are wrong, when the world is heading off a cliff, it’s best to turn and walk the other direction. The first Christian monk, Anthony the Great, said, “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.’” And so many people in stories, before Elphaba, have typified that for us. She’s in good company.
In Ancient Greek times, there was Antigone. In the play of that same name by Sophocles, she is a Greek girl in Thebes who defies the dictats of the unrighteous king to ensure that her brother Polyneices is given a proper burial, and she pays the price for it. In the New Testament of the Bible, St. John the Baptist wanders in the wilderness eating locusts and honey, condemning the ways of the unrighteous world and eventually losing his head for it. Christ Himself is hated for preaching righteousness and condemning corruption, driven out of the city, and killed (indeed, the song “No One Mourns the Wicked” has the ring to it of “Crucify him! Crucify him!”). And in later folklore, Robin Hood is forced into the status of outlaw for defying the wicked usurper Prince John and holding out for the rightful king. Much more on that here by the insightful-as-always Martin Shaw.
(Antigone)
What these tales have in common is the understanding that being Right-Side-Up in an Upside-Down world means that sometimes, people will think you are the Upside-Down one. And that’s okay. It’s the price you pay for integrity, for doing the right thing. Doing good sometimes necessitates being willing to forego looking good.
Which brings us to the other witch — Glinda.
The Faustian Princess
Galinda, as she is called at the beginning of the story, is about as close to a princess as Oz currently has (they have a real princess in hiding somewhere, in reality, but that’s a story for another day). She is beautiful, rich, fashionable, doted on by her parents, and adored by her fellow students, who are constantly telling her, “You are so good!”
Trouble is, she’s used to getting what she wants, and what she really wants is to become a sorceress. She wants magical ability. She wants, even though she doesn’t like the trappings it comes in, the power that comes so naturally and effortlessly to Elphaba. But she doesn’t want the green skin or the black-clad fashion or the “weirdness,” and when she’s forced to be roommates with the green girl, she hates her. She’s jealous of her for getting the one thing she’s ever wanted and not had. And of course, the whole student body takes her side.
Eventually, she gets to see the real Elphaba, the vulnerable, sensitive, genuine girl under the green skin, and after a bad start, she repents of her earlier Mean Girl behavior and becomes friends with Elphaba (or “Elphie,” as she’s nicknamed her “now that they’re best friends”). The turn might seem sudden, but it’s actually played quite heart-rendingly in the film. Elphaba responds to Galinda’s change of heart by petitioning Madame Morrible to admit her into sorcery lessons, so they can study together.
In becoming friends with Elphaba, Galinda is now slowly beginning to empathize with someone everyone deems outcast, and it changes her. She even changes her very name from “Galinda” to “Glinda,” in solidarity with Doctor Dillamond, who always mispronounced her name and was removed from his post for being a Talking Animal by the Wizard’s regime. But change is slow. And the Faustian Princess still dreams of being a Sorceress Queen. Changing her name is an easy and highly visible thing to do (for which one of her friends hilariously applauds her “braverism!”). Actually doing the right thing when it won’t win her any popularity points is much harder.
So when she has a chance to come with Elphaba to meet the Wizard, she starts to fantasize about what kind of life she could have, here in the Emerald City, in the seat of Ozian power and prestige. Galinda herself witnesses the same scene Elphaba does — the torture of the monkeys to give them wings, the admission by the Wizard that he is turning everyone against the Animals — but the lure of power and comfort is so great for her. It’s all she’s ever known. Elphaba and the Wizard are standing in that throne room debating right and wrong, and her mind is wandering to the apartments here in the city she’s just been told she can have, for being Elphaba’s friend, if only Elphaba stays. She can’t imagine throwing away the ultimate chance at status and popularity — working alongside the Wizard of Oz himself. Because fraud or no fraud, right or wrong, he is “popular.” And in her book, that’s what counts. That’s how you get things done.
Glinda is offered the chance to get on that broomstick and go with her best friend. They could “defy gravity together.” But she can’t bring herself to do it. She’s grown up all her life a golden child of comfort and prestige, and she can’t fly off and call the Wizard of Oz wrong, not when it threatens her physical well-being or her popularity.
So she stays. She allows herself to become a pawn of the Wizard and Morrible, a mouthpiece for the Wizard’s regime, a beloved public figure. By the end of the film, we see Glinda reluctantly hugging the headmistress who had just finished taking to a megaphone to warn all of Oz about the dangers of the “Wicked Witch,” her best friend. The Wizard crowns her with a tiara and gives her a sparkly wand and a mechanical bubble that will take her hither and thug her like a fairy, and ta-da! She is pronounced “Glinda the Good.” The Wizard and Morrible have set her up to be adored in order for Elphaba be hated all the more. Now they have a “Good Witch” in a fairy princess dress to serve as a foil to the “Wicked Witch.”
Glinda is a Faustian character. She is an image of a deal with the devil, the appearance of getting everything but really losing everything. Eventually (and here’s where we’ll need Part 2 of the film coming out next year, which corresponds to Act 2 of the play), the Faustian implications become much clearer. But for now, suffice it to say, she has made a Faustian bargain, taking outward beauty and popularity and adoring crowds in exchange for her integrity, her deep-down knowledge of what’s really true.
In this, she, like Elphaba, also follows a long tradition. We see this archetype of course in Faust, the play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in which the scholar Faust makes a deal with the devil — his soul in exchange for unlimited knowledge and worldly power. And we see it again in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a young man exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. There are even echoes of Glinda in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as Jekyll is so publicly beloved that the public cannot fathom that there would in reality be anything darker in his soul (though Glinda is hardly evil — her “Hyde” side here is closer to cowardice and pettiness). Oswald Spengler wrote in his great Decline of the West that the West itself is a “Faustian culture,” which has traded its soul for technological marvels and begun to pay the price.
Which brings us to the Wizard.
Technology in service of the Upside-Down world
When the Wizard, originally a Nebraskan state fair “magician” named Oscar Diggs, lands in Oz by hot-air balloon in the early 1900’s, Oz is in uproar. They’re suffering from a Great Drought. They’re hungry. They’re weary. There was once a Messiah prophesied in their ancient books, someone who could read the ancient spellbook, the Grimmerie. Someone who would know the ancient wisdom and restore Oz to prosperity. When the wizard looks at the book and starts saying strange words like “O-ma-ha,” they’re convinced he’s the one. He’s the Messiah, the one who has come to save them! They call him wonderful. And so, he becomes their Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
He doesn’t know a thing about magic, but he does know technology. Diggs uses whatever technology he brings over from our world to build the Emerald City, to concoct an impressive throne room with an enormous animatronic speaking Wizard head (as seen in The Wizard of Oz as well), to dream up city plans in front of Walt-Disney-esque dioramas for what will become the Yellow Brick Road.
But he also “gives them a good enemy.” He knows the value of a scapegoat. And so the Animals, and later Elphaba, become the scapegoats. He may be a charlatan stage-magician, but he’s very politically savvy. Diggs knows the public will determine which way the wind blows based on appearances.
I think it’s crucial to note that when he brings them technology, he is pretending it’s magic. He is pulling the wool over their eyes, and on some level, they want the wool pulled over their eyes. It’s too hard for them to accept that someone who looks like Elphaba could be the real Messiah (reminds me of another great tale in which a Messiah foretold did not look like what the people were expecting). It’s much easier to believe that it’s this parlor-trick wizard who’s giving them dog-and-pony shows. They literally wear green-tinted glasses in the Emerald City so that things can look greener. They’re in on the lie for the sake of the experience and have managed to convince themselves it’s not a lie at all.
It’s worth asking ourselves how often technology is presented to us in similar terms, as “magical solutions.” The stage-magician Wizard is everywhere, in Silicon Valley, in our nation’s capital, and even somewhere in our own hearts. Lies go down a lot easier when there’s popcorn and hoopla accompanying them. The Wizard has totally perfected the art of shock-and-awe, entertainment, shopping, interconnected roads that mean nobody can live outside his reach for long. Almost hard to notice or remember Talking Animals in cages when you’ve got all that. It’s funny how familiar it all sounded to me not just in 2004, when I first encountered this musical, but today.
Final thoughts: The cost of integrity
The Faustian bargain is constantly tempting to me and perhaps to us all. So is the lure of technology-as-magical-silver-bullet. But Elphaba is pure-hearted enough to see past that, and in that sense, she is the only one brave enough to take off the green-tinted glasses and see things as they really are. It would be so easy and so comfortable to live in a simulacrum, but she can’t. She chooses the hard road, the narrow way, if you will, of living with integrity.
There are always ways we can take off the green-tinted glasses day by day, always little ways in which we can “defy gravity.” It may not be a big leap out a window today. It might be a step up. But it’s a step. And any step toward a Right-Side-Up direction in an Upside-Down world is progress, is a little way in which we lend the world just a little bit more Right-Side-Up-ness. And it’s the only thing that keeps us whole, that we don’t become split into parts by the Faustian bargains we could make.
Because in this fairytale, it’s better to be whole and sane and hated than disintegrated and insane and beloved by all.