Why is 'Wicked' (About Racism)?
I think I'll try defying the cultural consensus, kiss me goodbye, I'm defying the cultural consensus, and you won't bring me down
Everyone1 knows Wicked’s second act lives in the shadow of the first.
The first act takes place before The Wizard of Oz and dares to ask ‘what if Elphaba (The Wicked Witch of the West) and Glinda Good Witch went to boarding school together?’ Elphaba is an all-As student who’s good at magic; she’s a bit of a loser but has a heart of gold. Glinda is a popular girl; she also wants to be good at magic but is a mediocre talent with a ‘Ps get degrees’ attitude about studying.
At first they don’t get along. But then they have a rivals-to-friends-to-lovers arc over the course of one of the two good songs in the show—“Popular”—and from that point on they’re a sisterhood or whatever.
There’s a boy character; he’s hot and a prince so he dates Glinda, although secretly he harbours feelings for Elphaba. Nothing much comes of this in the first act because the girls get an opportunity to go to the Emerald City and meet the Wizard, who promises to grant them access to his power, which they can use to change the face of Oz. Except when they get there they find out he wants them to change things for the worse (gasp). Specifically, he’s interested in rounding up and genociding all the anthropomorphic animals that inhabit the land, the culmination of a years-long project of racially motivated, systematic ghettoisation.
Glinda—blonde, hot, ditzy—decides she can live with this status quo because it doesn’t impact her life. Elphaba, who’s experienced discrimination all her life because she’s green, says fuck it and sings “Defying Gravity”—the other good song in the show, duh—ending the first on a magnificent, triumphant note.
Now, you’ve read the title of this post, so you know what I’m zeroing in on here. Wicked came out in 2003, so it has Best Picture winner Crash-level understanding of racism, which is to say predicated on observable trends but executed in such a way that it feels completely detached from reality.
I’ll go into the specifics in a second, but first I need to lay out a key thematic element of the play. As the title suggests, Wicked is concerned with the nature of ‘wickedness.’ It is positioned as dichotomous with ‘goodness.’ The driving questions of the musical are whether wickedness is something that is inherent or learned? Whether goodness is an active or passive? And whether one can be wicked in the cultural eye but actually good in behaviour?
(In case you need it: spoiler warning for Wicked.)
Glinda, for example, is a good person in the eyes of others, but that’s because she is beautiful and doesn’t challenge the status quo. In “Popular” she tells Elphaba that she’s disliked because she ugly and because she doesn’t ‘grin and bear it’ in the face of discrimination. Sure, she slowly comes to acknowledge how corrupt the government of Oz is, banishing Oz and imprisoning his second-in-command by the end of the narrative, but she does not dismantle the governmental systems themselves.
Elphaba, meanwhile, is perceived as wicked despite having a pronounced moral compass, because she flies in the face of corruption, but also—more importantly—because she’s green. You see, being green means you’re ugly, and if you’re ugly on the outside then you’re ugly on the inside, and if you’re ugly on the inside then that means you’re inherently evil—or at least more likely to commit evil acts.
If you’re worried that a lot of the internal morality of Wicked is boiling down to physical traits you should be. This is a musical that believes that discrimination just sort of happens because of appearance, and socio-political trends just sort of follow on.
Let’s talk about that genocide plot I mentioned earlier. Anthropomorphic animals, such as the cowardly lion, are one of the many sentient species to inhabit Oz. The only one we really get to know throughout the play is Elphaba and Glinda’s high-school history teacher, who is a goat-man. He continually tries to teach the students about Oz’s history of racism and—in one of the more telling, and rare incisive narrative beats—Glinda takes an active disinterest in learning this history: her goodness is that of useless apoliticality. Anyway, all the anthropomorphic animals are rounded up and put in cages, and this somehow leads to a kind of mental regression where they forget how to talk and become regular animals. Why is this happening? Well, The Wizard is trying to ‘clean up’ Oz and says that the people need a common enemy.
Why target the anthropomorphic animals and not, like, the munchkins or whatever? Well, metatextually, it’s because the munchkins are clearly not the victims of racial discrimination at the start of The Wizard of Oz, so it can’t be them. But textually, it’s never explained.
The best guess I can hazard is that it’s a Zootopia situation where the anthropomorphic animals are perceived as more dangerous because they are animals. But then, like Zootopia, we run into the issue of animals being a bad metaphor for racism. Some animals are legitimately dangerous, and therefore exercising a certain level of control over them makes sense. This isn’t quite as bad as Zootopia—which is an anti-racism movie that does a pretty good job of outlining which segregation kind of makes sense—after all, the anthropomorphic animals in Wicked are shown to be non-violent. The lion is cowardly, for goodness sake! But animals are physiologically different from people, and so making them the subject of your racism metaphor makes for a bad analogy, because racism in real life is not predicated on any meaningful physiological differences. Racism is just about appearance! And the moment you move away from that core truth you end up making arguments that—hopefully—you don’t intend to make. (But wait, I hear you say, what about Elphaba having green skin? Don’t worry, I’m getting there)
This plot about racially motivated ethnic genocide is not the only form of discrimination we encounter. There’s also ableism! Elphaba’s sister—who eventually becomes the Wicked Witch of the East (more on that in a second)—is wheel-chair bound because of premature birth. This happened because her father was afraid she would turn out like Elphaba (green) so he made their mother eat lots of daisy leaves2, and this made her die3. At school, Elphaba’s sister (I’m not looking up her name, sorry) feels like no one will love her because of her disability. It’s not clear if this is actually the case. No one says anything ableist at any point, and she’s treated as just another member of the class. This leaves two possibly conclusions:
There is no ableism in Oz, and whatever inadequacy she’s feeling is just a product of her insecurity and neuroses or,
Early 2000s politics: it’s was assumed that no-one will love her because she’s disabled, because this was attitude of the time, and therefore it’s never said expressly.
(One of these feels far more likely than the other.)
Then, through a series of events so contrived it almost strains belief, Glinda tricks a Munchkin who’s trying to pressure her into a relationship into Elphaba’s sister instead. Why—I don’t know! Anyway, he gets in too deep, then tries to bow out of the relationship, but she—Elphaba’s sisters—has decided he’s her one true love, so when she ends up the governess of Munchkinland (she ends up the governess of Munchkinland, btw) she pulls an Emperor Palpetine and disbands the government, and assumes totalitarian rule.
But then, Elphaba cures her sister’s disability with magic. But then, the no-longer-wheel-chair-bound sister decides she wants to continue ruling over Munchkinland anyway (because if she doesn’t then who will Dorothy’s house land on when she gets sucked into the twister?) and the musical justifies this by saying that, well, ableism has made her wicked in nature. So that's that on that.
Finally, we have Elphaba. As established, she’s green. (Why’s she green? Well let me tell you. Her mum cheated on her dad with the Wizard. While they were sleeping together, he gave her a green potion. Why? Idk. Then he got her knocked up—so Elphaba is actually the Wizard’s child—and when Elphaba popped out she was green because of the spiked-drink-STI-mixed-metaphor potion.) People assume she is wicked because she is green. But then, at high school, she demonstrates an aptitude for magic, so her teachers take an interest in her. Oh my god: could we be zeroing in on an interesting point about society’s level of tolerance of ethnic minorities directly correlates to said minorities’ perceived level of social utility? Yes! The musical successfully draws this point out. Elphaba’s talent allows her social mobility, and by the end of the first act she’s invited to meet—and even work with—the wizard.
At this meeting Elphaba learns about the Wizard’s genocide plan—and she is not living for it! She recognises that her life experiences are closer to the oppressed than the oppressors. She rebels against him. But, because she is green, this rebellion is easily framed as a wicked act. By the end of the first act we have answered the original driving questions pretty concretely: wickedness is learned, and socially reinforced through bad faith cultural programs; goodness is active not passive, and specifically it is empathetic, and therefore reactive; one can be wicked in the cultural eye but good in action. But this leaves us with a new driving question entering into the second act: is it possible to change cultural narratives surrounding race and discrimination, or work for a more inclusive society? Or, put more simply, can Elphaba reform her image?
Well, we know how The Wizard of Oz ends. The Wicked Witch of the West is evil is to end. So the answer is, uh, no. You can’t reform your image. If people think you’re wicked, they’re gonna think you’re wicked forever. Grim, lol.
‘Well what about the anthropomorphic animals?’ I hear you say. How does the musical address them—and by extension address the broader questions they represent.
Reader, none of it is addressed.
Wicked makes a second-act pivot into romantic melodrama. That love triangle that was hinted at in the first act—where Glinda is dating the generic prince guy, but he’s interested in Elphaba—that becomes the central narrative thread. In the background, Elphaba continues her campaign of terrorism against the government of Oz, but that is less because they are doing a genocide, and more because they are harbouring Dorothy, who she hates because she killed her sister with a house.
The socio-political dimension of the musical goes unanswered: we don’t know what becomes of the anthropomorphic animals, When Glinda takes over the government of Oz she doesn’t make any mention of them.
Meanwhile, Elphana’s racism subplot is just sort of… solved with love? The romantic interest guy thinks she beautiful, and if he can see her inherent goodness, despite her wicked exterior then that is enough for her apparently.
By the time the musical wraps up, the only line of discrimination that has been teased out to a meaningful end is the ableism one—which is completely insane because it essentially argues that disability makes people evil.
Now, I’m not trying to make a broader point about discrimination as it appears in Wicked other than to say ‘thing bad’—thing is bad!—and I’m certainly not going to try to prescribe solutions. I’m not even sure what ‘solving’ racism as it appears in Wicked would entail. I’m just a [checks notes] able-bodied white guy with a keyboard and an English Literature degree.
But, for the purposes of my broader argument here, I think it’s necessary to outline the wild narrative swings the first act takes, if only to underline what a retreat into nothingness the second act is. Because—hot take—I think that a piece of media, if it brings up a concept as loaded as systematic cultural genocide, it is obligated to see it through to a meaningful conclusion.
Most stage musicals tend to avoid complex themes. Why? Because frothy song-and-dance numbers don’t lend themselves well to discussions of ideas like racial violence. Sure, Color Purple, but would anyone say that musical works, exactly? Throughout the first act Wicked just about finds a way to balance form and content, even if it has no idea what it’s trying to say. It does the Cabaret thing—the musical numbers are inherently frothy, they’re meant to distract from the heavy stuff, that way the audience is experiencing the blindness to reality as the characters. The problem is that at some point the evil becomes too big to ignore; at some point the musical numbers have to start being about the thing the musical is about. And at that moment Wicked becomes a romantic melodrama. It cops out.
The issue is built into the concept. Writing a story that takes place in the margins of another story is an exercise in limitations. You have to deepen the original work, you also can’t make any narrative moves that directly contradict the preexisting text. The Wizard of Oz has pretty spacious margins. There's a lot of world and it’s not that explored. But one thing a 1940s pastel fantasia isn’t really built to support is a story about, well, racism.
But wait, there’s more! Not only are the creators (I’m not looking their names up either—sorry!) trying to squeeze racism into a story that wasn’t really built to be about racism but, because of copyright, they can’t incorporate any scenes from the movie. Every scene in Wicked’s second act happens right before or right after a scene from the movie. In other words: they are crafting a story from the stuff that normally gets cut out of narratives: the boring stuff, the filler, the things that just don’t matter.
You can’t help but think about this while you’re watching all the stuff about racism and ableism get set-up in act one: if all this was going on, and it mattered so much, then why does the movie not show it? Of course, we know the answer is because the movie was made in 1940, and this wasn’t on the filmmaker’s mind. But that doesn’t make the narratives swerves in act two any less dissatisfying; actually, it makes it worse. The only way we, as an audience, can rationalise the completely limp storytelling decisions is by taking ourselves out of the experience, by reminding ourselves that there’s a movie, by reminding ourselves that narrative contortions aren’t happening because that’s the best way to tell this story, but because it’s the only way this story could be told without everyone involved getting sued.
This leaves the question: why make a musical about The Wizard of Oz at all? It’s not like there’s a great track record of adaptations outside of the 1939 film: The Wiz? I love her but she’s a mess. Return of Oz? IYKYK. Oz the Great and Powerful? Grow up. The first act of the musical has so little to do with the text it’s adapting that if it weren’t for the character’s names, you wouldn’t know it was an adaptation at all. It resembles RWBY more than anything else. Why paint in the negative space of another—incredibly popular—story if you don’t have to? Wicked is two-and-a-half hours long and you feel every minute, because whenever they’re singing another boring song, or explaining more incomprehensible lore, you’re just thinking about how good the movie is, and how much you’d rather be watching that.
There are brief moments of delight. I’ve already mentioned the two good songs—and it’s worth saying again what a triumph “Defying Gravity” is. It’s such a powerful moment that it’s kept this musical alive in the popular culture for twenty-one years. But so much else feels dated or staid: the effects move slowly, the jokes feel of-its-time in a big way, and—frankly—the stuff about racism was out of date back in 2003.
The success of the musical then comes down to the performers. They have to carry a lot, and if they slip for even a second you feel it. I saw the version currently touring Australia, and outside of Glinda—who was magnetic, and executed some great physical comedy—there really wasn’t a lot to write home about. No one had chemistry: you didn’t believe the friendships, and you really didn’t believe the romances—and in the second-act, when all the songs are weak, and the narrative is unravelling before your eyes, and all you have to go off is emotions the actors are giving, and this cast can’t even do that, what exactly do you have?
Wicked is frustrating because it is about so much but says so little. Why promise a statement on racism if that’s not the story you want to tell? Most Broadway musicals stay fixedly in the lane of the interpersonal for a reason. Even my beloved Phantom of the Opera, which is vaguely about discrimination, is still about a lone, subjective experience. Let’s put this in gay terminology for a second: Wicked puts a lot on the table, but it doesn’t eat.
Wicked isn’t about discrimination, it isn’t about racism, or inequality, or ableism, it isn’t even really about itself: it’s about nothing at all.
Random Stuff
I wrote a review of Àma Gloria for Rough Cut. You can read it here.
My friend Max recently wrote a series of travel essay’s about his research trip through Wiradjuri land. They are thoughtful, incisive, and often quite kind. A lot of stuff about the cultural tourism/condescension of metropolitan creatives, who use rural communities as a kind of shorthand for simplicity but also retrograde beliefs and views, which is a reductive and hypocritical viewpoint. Go read them! Now!
Relatedly, just finished re-reading (well, re-listening) to John Marsden’s Tomorrow When the Way Began series. Was surprised to find that all the one’s that I didn’t like as a teen were now my favourites as an adult, and vice versa (except book one, which was great then, and still great now).
Been listening to The Tortured Poets Department. I have a lot of thoughts, but don’t know if I have anything coherent enough to post about.
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Recently succumbed and got Serialzd (AKA, Letterboxd for TV). You can follow me here, but mostly I’m just rewatching Haikyuu!! in anticipation of the new movie, so do so at your own peril.
Challengers early contender for film of the year.
Well not ‘everyone’ everyone, but you know what I mean.
Don’t fact check this.
Stupid.