Wicked

Wherein Shit Gets Weird

This is my very favorite Meme.

I love what’s going on here. I appreciate all the subtleties and implications. I like how they are wearing outfits with opposing color distribution. That we have Toto and the Cheshire Cat. It speaks to me.

I also love the book Wicked by Gregory Maguire. I will first just say, I have not seen either the Broadway adaptation and only just watched the first movie, but even a stray bit of chatter tells me it is NOT the same story.

I read the book well before it was adapted for anything, and found it incredibly moving. There is a harmony in the beauty and brutality of it. The earthy sensuousness and prim righteousness. Obviously we see this early in the contrast between Melena and Frexspar, but it is echoed in setting as well; Munchkinland is rustic and relatively unspoiled compared to the overtly cosmopolitan Shiz.

Elphaba’s appearance is the result of some twist of fate or rebounding curse that is never quite articulated. That she bites off the end of the ad-hoc midwife’s finger as her first sentient act cannot but support the suggestion that she was the spawn of a demon or the time dragon or some other ill-favored character.

She is contrary and opaque to everyone around her. She rejects all attempts at affection, though there is a notable lack of effort on the part of Melena to provide any.

Her upbringing is spare and marked by slowly unfolding calamity. Her sister is born deformed in a more comprehensible – though far more debilitating – way and the longed for son Melena always wanted ultimately kills her in childbirth. She is motherless and completely alienated by her father’s religious fanaticism as she arrives to commence her university education.

If she appears abrasive and shut down, it seems fairly understandable. Yet her compassion is never absent; in fact it has a certain… aggression that people cannot quite relate to. That she takes an interest in political matters while her more cosseted classmates remain oblivious, that too is a product of her background; both as the Eminent Thropp Third Descending and as a child raised in extreme poverty and want.

When she abdicates her title, it is meant as a resounding condemnation of a system that exerts wholesale exploitation upon the population. Her withdrawal is not meant as a refusal to make change, but an understanding that no meaningful change can arise from within a corrupt system. She recognizes that it is better to topple the regime from without than to try to rehabilitate it from within.

Her power – the only power she is willing to exert – comes from within. She uses it to heal the broken and protect the oppressed. Her methods are not soft or yielding, they are as direct as she herself is.

The threat she represents to the status quo – or indeed to the slowly evolving fascist regime – is what allows those with authority to cast her actions as “evil” She looks the part, refuses to soften or explain herself, and violently opposes the powers that be.

That she refuses to acknowledge her own child, that she refuses to engage with her broken heart – these are her most obvious wounds. That they are self-inflicted seems completely in character.

It turns out, the musical and movie address essentially none of these themes. They are to Wicked the book what Wicked the book is to The Wizard of Oz; a separate story loosely based on some of the same characters in the same setting.

To be fair, Wicked is a brutal read. So many harsh and heartbreaking things happen it can be hard to get through. And, I can understand from a creative point of view, being intrigued by the concept of telling the story of Oz from the perspective of the Wicked Witch and then taking it in a direction a little easier to capture for the stage.

From what I have been told, the movie is almost as different from the stage musical as the musical is from the book. So in a theatrical game of telephone, who is telling the story dramatically impacts what the story looks like.

I was QUITE upset when I started the film and saw how utterly different things were. The film bears almost no resemblance to the book. Many crucial plot points are literally the opposite or skewed to such a degree that the original implications are completely absent.

After letting it digest for a while, and some back and forth with fans on Threads, I have come to the notion that there’s nothing to be upset about. The movie is not the musical, which is not the book, which is not part of the Frank L Baum series on Oz. They are each in their way separate entities and should be evaluated as such.

It turns out I STILL didn’t like the movie – though the cast was objectively incredible. I am picky about musicals and this one did not capture my fancy. But it did give me pause to think about how stories change, evolve, and even warp beyond recognition depending on who is doing the telling.

An echoing truth, indeed.