evilThe movie musical, based on the beloved Broadway show of the same name, is one of the year’s biggest hits, opening the weekend at No. 1 in North America and already making some Early Oscar buzz. Audiences came ready to love evilIts famous power ballads and girl power core, but one aspect of the story seems to have surprised people: its somewhat clunky but remarkably sustained political allegory.
“I noticed that Elphaba looks like Kamala Harris and Wizard like Donald Trump,” A fan posted on Reddit. “A charismatic leader who enlightens a community that this woman is evil because she stands up for marginalized groups in society, how can that be? [political]?” Director John M. Chu joked.
For a silly, spectacular show about friendship and talking animals, evil In fact invites political interpretation. Its metaphor can both elicit eye-rolls and still feel brilliantly subtle more than 20 years after its stage debut.
evil The musical is based on a 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire of the same title, an anti-fascist treatise in which a wizard becomes a Hitler-like dictator. The musical didn’t go far when it debuted on Broadway in 2003, but it did reach several numbers. A blow to the George W. Bush administrationwhich ordered the invasion of Iraq only a few months earlier.
In evilThe Wizard of Oz is revealed to disenfranchise the creatures, on the grounds that to unite the rest of the country, he must give them a common enemy. Yet the sorcerer’s cruelty to animals – and later Elfabar – is rooted in a lie, just as Bush falsely claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before invading.
Some of the references are clearly obvious: when Dorothy’s house falls on the Wicked Witch of the East, Glinda echoes the Bush administration’s favorite Iraq War rhetoric by describing it as a.regime change” “Is one a crusader or a ruthless invader?” sings the wizard in reference Bush’s infamous description of the invasion of Iraq as a crusade. “It’s all in which the label can survive!”
Reaction from critics was mixed. “As an example of fascism and freedom, evil so overstretches his hand that it severely dilutes his ability to offend.” Ben Brantley declared in the New York Times in 2003adding that the show “wears its political heart like it’s a slogan button.”
Meanwhile, author Daniel Handler, though appalled by such a dark interpretation of a sunny and magical Oz, finds himself drawn to the idea. “It’s hard not to wonder that a difficult image transformed into a magical, difficult time, isn’t exactly what we need on stage,” Handler also wrote in the New York Times same year “And perhaps, the show suggests, ‘evil’ in George W. Bush is what the W stands for.”
Singing the same song today, Wizard suggests not Bush but Trump: a leader consolidating his power by scapegoating marginalized groups and slowly but surely denying them their rights. Meanwhile, the difference in tactics between the flamboyant progressive Elphaba and the conciliatory liberal Glinda could be particularly difficult for Democrats in their post-election grievances.
Both Elphaba and Glinda idolize the wizard and dream of working as his right hand. When Elphaba learns of the plight of the creatures of Oz, she heads straight to the Emerald City to help, certain that if she learns that the creatures are being targeted, she will rush to their aid. The wizard suggests that if Elphaba uses her magic as part of her administration, she can do so, but when she learns that the wizard was behind the attack, she turns him down, much to practical-minded Glinda’s dismay.
evil A metaphor for American politics was born. It couldn’t be anything else at all.
“I hope you’re glad you’ve hurt your cause forever,” Glinda sings. Elphaba, after all, is alienating a potentially powerful ally. “I hope you are proud, how you submit to your own ambitions,” replies Elphaba, who has decided that she will not work with anyone who uses her powers to hurt the talking animal citizens of Oz. You can read this moment as a metaphor How Democrats Should Approach Trans Issues? Sure, it sounds like a stretch, but it’s not as far-fetched as you might imagine.
In a way it is strange to think evilIts political messaging seems so subtle, as most evil Fans will agree that the political subplot is the weakest part of the musical. evil Lives and breathes by the fraught friendship between its two leads, not by dual visions of activism.
Yet, in another sense, evil A metaphor for American politics was born. It couldn’t be anything else at all. That’s what the story of Oz is for.
Most children’s fantasy classics in the Anglophone world are English: Peter Pan, Narnia, The Sword in the StoneAnd Harry Potter. They tend to think about what it means to be a good king, about wild magical beasts lurking in the forest, about being an island nation.
The Wizard of OzAlthough, an American fantasy. A map of OzShaped like a rectangle whose long side is horizontal, a simplified map of America, as if drawn by a child: imaginably vast, stretching from east to west the habitable entirety of a continent. (Oz is surrounded by a more toxic desert than the sea.) It is a country where farmers cultivate corn and wheat fields and apple orchards; Where industrialists build huge, glittering cities; Whereas the west is full of rugged and untamed land. And it is a country ruled by a scheming man who lies to the people he rules.
When L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz In 1900, he envisioned the Wizard of Oz as a man who was ineffectual and touchy-feely. “I’m a very good man – just a bad witch,” the wizard explains to Dorothy in the 1939 film. Still, the Wizard can serve as a remarkably cynical metaphor for all the broken promises of the American Dream. A magician is a person who will promise you everything but give you nothing, and then tell you that the answer lies within yourself.
It is this metaphor that gives WizReimagining the All-Black The Wizard of Oz From the 1970s, its surprisingly sharp bite. In WizDorothy and her friends are black people who have been promised certain basic rights by the government that they never plan to repay. (evil Casting black actress Cynthia Erivo as the racially other green-skinned Elphaba gestures to similar criticism.)
“Public office is the last refuge of the incompetent,” scoffs the Scarecrow WizAfter learning that the wizard is a hidden politician in Atlantic City. “Incompetent!” Wiz Crow “It’s me!”
evilMeanwhile, its reimagining is not The Wizard of Oz As much as it is a revisionist history. As such, it is fundamentally skeptical of authority figures—much more so than Baum, who ultimately replaces the sorceress with the virtuous and nearly innocent fairy queen Ozma.
The premise of any story that tells you that your childhood villains are misunderstood is that the storytellers lied to you. In evilThe wizard is not only a very bad wizard, but also a very bad man. He lies maliciously and with strategic intent.
The Wizard can serve as a remarkably cynical metaphor for all the broken promises of the American Dream.
Elphaba and Glinda, here, become two more dreamers who travel to the Emerald City, like Dorothy and her friends, because they want the Wizard to grant them their heart’s desire: protection for the talking creatures of Oz as they continue to be persecuted.
Yet the wizard they encounter is not only unable to grant them such a request, but actually plans to pervert it, exploiting their innocent will to inflict further violence. He plans to take Elphaba under his wing and have her perform magic on his behalf so that he can more thoroughly torture sentient beings as he plans to more efficiently spy on the rest of his citizens.
In the end, the wizard names Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch of the North because he can trust Glinda to maintain friendly relations with his administration, while Elphaba refuses. He is an America ruled not by a conspirator but by a strongman – an authoritarian dictator.
This is a metaphor that a revisionist history can give you, and part of why evil It seems so oddly urgent right now, in a subversion of the childhood classic, that no authority figure can be trusted — which is what makes these stories so interesting when people you don’t trust find their way into positions of power.
