in which i fly off the handle
i'm in a fight with…[checks notes]…john chu, stephen schwartz, winnie holzman, and gregory maguire
i housesat this past weekend, which means i had access to more streaming services than i do at home. so what did i do? catch up on netflix originals? finally start yellowjackets?
lol
oh no, i did nothing smart like that. i watched wicked. you know, the movie of the broadway show of the book that is a pseudo-prequel to my favorite book and movie of all time? yeah. I thought i could be objective about it, but either i was incorrect or this movie stinks. maybe both!
(if you’re on bluesky, you might have already seen my live-bleeting* of the movie. this is an expanded version of those thoughts.)
so here’s my history as it pertains to wicked:
i do not remember a time before i knew the l. frank baum oz books. i’ve read them dozens of times and consider myself one of the many historians of oz. this is the title baum gave himself, as he claimed to not be writing the stories but relaying them as told to him—a conceit that i love. i was four the first time i saw the 1939 musical, my first movie in a movie theater (back then home video was rare, so movies were shown on television and brought back to theaters sporadically).
fast forward to the release of wicked, the novel by gregory maguire, and then forward several more years until the early aughts, when it was being adapted for stage and i first heard of it. media about villains was entering the pop culture zeitgeist, and it was popular to consider heroes like dorothy the villains of their stories (or at least tell much more grownup stories about them, especially dorothy and—for some reason—alice in wonderland). there were a lot of very bad oz sequel comics and other media, and i hated every minute of it—not because i object to villains getting to tell their side, or even to presuming that a character will grow up, but because it always made the audience out to be a fool, a simp who believed the lies of the original story. it seems to me that if you can’t tell the other side without saying readers were stupid to believe the first version, maybe you shouldn’t be (re)telling stories.
anyway, i didn’t read it. my husband did, he told me the basics, and i felt confident that it was not for me. they made the musical, which i also did not pay any attention to, though over the years it was impossible not to become passingly familiar with two of the most beloved songs, “popular” and “defying gravity.” i have liked idina menzel since seeing her in rent (brag) and i adored kristen chenoweth in pushing daisies, but the musical was largely uninteresting to me.
so i may have gone in with a bias toward the (wonderful) wizard of oz, but it wasn’t because i hated the wicked book or the show—i was just certain they weren’t for me. that said, i thought the trailer for the wicked movie looked great and i adored the way ariana grande and cynthia erivo adored each other. plus, people kept saying elphaba and glinda were sapphic, and how can i resist that?
WELL.
i will say right now, i hated the movie. but working out what i disliked was a fascinating exercise, because i had to guess the source of almost every choice i didn’t agree with—was it from the book, the stage show, or the film?
before i go on, i’d like to talk a little about adaptations and sequels in more general terms. does a sequel (or prequel) have to acknowledge the original in tone? can it do its own thing entirely? what if there are multiple sources—how many of them, if any, does new media need to acknowledge? i’m going to give as an example the recent movie doctor sleep, written and directed by mike flanagan, based on the book by stephen king that is a sequel to his book the shining, which was famously adapted in 1980 by stanley kubrick. perhaps you’ve heard of some or all of those.
i’ve never read either book, but i have seen the shining, which i didn’t like, and doctor sleep, which i loved. and here’s something doctor sleep did better than i’ve seen in any other “legacy” media: it acknowledged both books and the first movie. the visuals of doctor sleep incorporated the aesthetic of the kubrick in a loving and stunning way. it has, to my utter surprise, become the gold standard to which i hold up other legacy media, alongside the 2021 slumber party massacre (which i can write about in the future maybe).
as an aside, there was a second adaptation of the shining, i believe made for television, which i haven’t seen. i don’t know if doctor sleep acknowledges it in any way, but i suspect not. there have also been many other adaptations of the baum book, which are not relevant here.
my hope was that the movie musical wicked would pay visual homage to the movie musical the wizard of oz. it absolutely did not do that. in and of itself, this is fine! movies can be there own thing! but it didn’t do anything new or interesting, either. it seems to me that it was so obsessed with spectacle that it ended up only being spectacle. such a shame. i hope they’re happy now.
(as an aside, i loved every single member of the cast. performances were uniformly outstanding. this is not about them at all!)
believe it or not, i went into the movie just hoping to enjoy it on its own merit. i enjoyed john chu’s in the heights, as well as crazy rich asians, and i was fully willing to see what he did with oz. unfortunately, he lost me in the opening number. It would have been so easy for that first scene, which takes place immediately after the witch is defeated and dorothy and the wizard leave oz, to pay homage to the 1939 musical. if they had done that, the rest of the movie could have been its own thing and i wouldn’t have cared! (well, i still might have objected to the fact that the opening song is weak, but that is clearly stephen schwartz’s fault.)
instead, the only acknowledgment of the 1939 is the spiral beginning of the yellow brick road in munchkinland. the munchkins are tall, which is fine—they aren’t little people in the books—but casting would have been an easy way to acknowledge what came before and they didn’t do it. no other scenes in the movie did either, and while much of it takes place in a school that doesn’t exist in the baum books or the 1939, they could have, like, i dunno, made the emerald city look at all like the one in the earlier movie? just as an example.
but okay, fine, no (further) homage whatsoever to the last oz movie musical**. in theory, i can’t complain about this non-hypocritically, since i adore return to oz, which pulls 100% from the books and 0% from the 1939 movie. but it’s also not a musical, which i think is an important differentiation.
and another thing! why is the wicked witch of the east suddenly a disabled wheelchair user who wants to escape from having everything done for her, but doesn’t actually get to have a character arc beyond, uh, getting asked to the prom? which, by the way, someone else does for her. i know her disability comes from the book, and i know, too, that this is the first time an actual wheelchair user has been cast as nessa. i am all for that part. but i find it abhorrent that maguire decided the way to make dorothy and/or the wizard the real villain is to make the two women she kills (1) disabled and (2) metaphorically a person of color, specifically black, although i cannot prove that maguire intended that. (i don’t think this is the first time a black performer has played elphaba but i am actually not sure!)
in the end, my primary complaint is that wicked is just mean girls of oz. for a story that is supposedly about the origins of the wicked witch of the west, this movie sure was about glinda the “good” and what a selfish, self-absorbed person she is. in short, glinda is a bitch (yay! i support women’s wrongs!) and elphaba has almost no character other than the way other people treat her (boo!). i have been told that the book is “darker” and “more political,” which, okay.
i’ve also been told that the book is gayer, which on the one hand i doubt but on the other hand it couldn’t possibly be any less gay than the movie. even bowen yang couldn’t keep the movie from being the straightest shit i’ve ever seen. when glinda finally seems to be on elphaba’s side, we have no reason to believe that it isn’t yet another action she is taking purely to make herself look good/stay popular, because that is literally all she has done for the entire runtime.
also, frankly, not enough happened to justify the runtime. time that could have been spent on developing characters and/or the world was simply…not. And before you try to tell me that this was only the first half of the story, i do not care. it’s a whole movie, it can tell a whole movie’s worth of story.
and instead, it was kinda boring.
*i prefer bleet to skeet, for the obvious reason that i love sheeps
**technically i am pretty sure the green skin is solely from the 1939, so no homage other than that tiny detail
if i haven’t lost you entirely at this point, perhaps you’d like to know that i am about to hit 17,000 words on a new book! yes, it’s the mmmbop one. i’ll write more about this process soon—it is, of course, different than any other book i’ve written. these jerk books always insist on being individuals.
xo
annika