Everyman
Oh Oz, oh Oz, please make it stop.So much technicolour. Pastel cornfields. Rainbows. Banners dropping out of the sky. Menageries of talking animals. And endless, endless songs, written in a sort of aphoristic self-help book style: "So much of me is made from what I learned from you, you’ll be with me like a handprint on my heart; and now which ever way our stories end, I know you have rewritten mine by being my friend”. The orchestration is lush; Cynthia Erivo can definitely sing a bit. But every tune seems to be written in a sub-Sondheim register. They all sound like the expositionary passages in Les Miserables, building up to bangers which never arrive.
The construction makes Peter Jackson look like a model of restraint and subtlety. Return of the King had six or seven endings; Wicked 2 has sixteen or seventeen. I thought the story had ended adequately with the Great Big Reconciliation Scene between the nice witch, who is really naughty, and the naughty witch, who is really nice. “Like a stream that meets a boulder half way through a wood by knowing you I have been changed for good”. I have nothing against visual and emotional excess. The Wizard of Oz is so camp that “friend of Dorothy” became a by-word. Glinda and Elphaba on opposite sides of a closed door might have been an arresting image to end a movie on; but on and on it goes; until no point has not been hammered home and nothing implicit has not been made explicit. When the Wizard’s gestapo crucify Elphaba’s dopey boyfriend Fiyero, she casts a spell, at great length, saying that she is going to turn his flesh into something indestructible. Which is, if you insist that all characters must have Cinematic Universe Origin Stories vaguely amusing and quite clever. But it doesn’t become amusing-er or clever-er by actually showing us Fieyro-as-Scarecrow in the thirteenth or fourteenth closing scene. Particularly when he doesn't look much like the Scarecrow.
I forget at which point I actually chewed my own arm off: possibly it was the “twist” that the Wicked Witch had not in fact been dissolved by Dorothy, but had faked her own death. She goes off to a sort of Oz-limbo and lives happily ever after with the Scarecrow.
Please, please, just make it stop.
I was, you will recall, merely puzzled by Wicked Part One, which seemed to me to be a bog-standard American high-school musical lavishly translated into a CGI pastiche of a 1939 MGM epic. So I will say this for Part Two: I found it interesting. There is an ingenuity to it: as well as being a prequel to the Wizard of Oz and an origin story for some of the characters, it rolls merrily along in parallel with the story we know and love. Or, if I am being entirely honest, the story which I vaguely remember. Next time I ask “What would it be like to watch the Madalorian if you don’t already know who Ahsoka is?” you have my permission to reply “A bit like watching Wicked when you have entirely forgotten that the Wizard tells Dorothy to bring him the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West."
Nevertheless “What if they were real people?” is as valid a question to ask about archetypal characters as any other. Every comic book since 1986 has had to find strategies for pretending that superheroes are not basically a really, really stupid idea. But I don’t quite buy the solution offered here: that the apparent villain is consciously playing the role of the villain; initially because her good intentions keep leading to bad results; but also because the plebeians need the idea of evil in order for their to be an idea of good. The “munchkins” end up burning wicker-wicked-witches and Glinda is obliged to go along with the untruth. I am not sure that this makes much moral sense.
But perhaps that is because I myself am Wicked? Or, worse, because I am “Good”? The little boy pointing out that everyone can see the emperor's willy is from another point of view the miserable bastard who doesn’t believe in fairies and causes the death of Tinkerbell. I did enjoy the visuals, the camp, the excess and some of the dancing. I thought it was cute that the audience clapped the end credits and clapped some of the actual songs. I thought it was cute that the duty manager had to ask people to please not sing along in his opening spiel. If this is the kind of thing you enjoy you have already enjoyed it three times. And jolly good luck to you. There is no place like home.
Next year we have a Netflix reimagining of Narnia, in the present day, by the director of Barbie, to look forward to.
I was, you will recall, merely puzzled by Wicked Part One, which seemed to me to be a bog-standard American high-school musical lavishly translated into a CGI pastiche of a 1939 MGM epic. So I will say this for Part Two: I found it interesting. There is an ingenuity to it: as well as being a prequel to the Wizard of Oz and an origin story for some of the characters, it rolls merrily along in parallel with the story we know and love. Or, if I am being entirely honest, the story which I vaguely remember. Next time I ask “What would it be like to watch the Madalorian if you don’t already know who Ahsoka is?” you have my permission to reply “A bit like watching Wicked when you have entirely forgotten that the Wizard tells Dorothy to bring him the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West."
So I was more or less on board with the first four or five hours of the movie. I enjoyed the idea that the Witch was "really" trying to form a kind of rebel alliance against the Fascist Wizard, and that the "wicked" epithet is pure propaganda. But seven or eight hours in, Elphaba explains that "one question huts too much to mention, was I really seeking good or just seeking attention?" concludes that "that is all good deeds are when looked at with a stone cold eye" and decides to embrace her "evil" reputation. I take the point that if you keep accusing innocent people of being witches, some of them will decide that they have nothing to lose by signing up to the local coven. I agree that baddies in Victorian children’s books are sketched in, one-dimensional place-holders for moral evil. I concede that the whole idea of a Wicked Witch (and, indeed, of a bubble-dwelling prettified sanctimonious goodie) are patriarchal and misogynist constructions. But I also think that fairy tales are not real; that they deal in archetypes and symbols and that they are not meant to be taken literally. That is, incidentally, the answer to the question about Frodo and the Eagles. You can't retain the fairy tale aesthetic and simultaneously say that Satan might have a very good point. There are decanonized texts in which the Light Side and the Dark Side of the Force are both equally valid points of view: which might make for a good story, but rather seems to ruin Star Wars. Dr Freud would presumably have said that the Wicked Witch and the Good Witch -- and the little girl and the man without a heart -- represent different aspects of one character's unconscious mind, and that the yellow brick road represents the journey of psychoanalysis. Ursula Le Guin would doubtless have seen it in terms of yins and yangs. The original movie departs from Frank Baum by making it explicit that Oz only exists in Dorothy’s mind.
Nevertheless “What if they were real people?” is as valid a question to ask about archetypal characters as any other. Every comic book since 1986 has had to find strategies for pretending that superheroes are not basically a really, really stupid idea. But I don’t quite buy the solution offered here: that the apparent villain is consciously playing the role of the villain; initially because her good intentions keep leading to bad results; but also because the plebeians need the idea of evil in order for their to be an idea of good. The “munchkins” end up burning wicker-wicked-witches and Glinda is obliged to go along with the untruth. I am not sure that this makes much moral sense.
But perhaps that is because I myself am Wicked? Or, worse, because I am “Good”? The little boy pointing out that everyone can see the emperor's willy is from another point of view the miserable bastard who doesn’t believe in fairies and causes the death of Tinkerbell. I did enjoy the visuals, the camp, the excess and some of the dancing. I thought it was cute that the audience clapped the end credits and clapped some of the actual songs. I thought it was cute that the duty manager had to ask people to please not sing along in his opening spiel. If this is the kind of thing you enjoy you have already enjoyed it three times. And jolly good luck to you. There is no place like home.
Next year we have a Netflix reimagining of Narnia, in the present day, by the director of Barbie, to look forward to.
Please, please, make it stop.
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