Why is Wicked: For Good?

Who can say if I've been changed for the better? But because I saw this movie, you I have been changed for good

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On Wicked, the movie

My loathing for Wicked, the stage musical, is well-documented. Nevertheless I have seen the 2024 film adaptation seven times. Five in cinemas. Twice at home.

Please don’t mistake these viewing numbers for uncritical endorsement. Please don’t. I wail and gnash my teeth at Jon M. Chu’s incompetence at directing musicals. A lot of hay was made about how thoroughly he bungled “Defying Gravity”, constantly interrupting the song’s build with needless dialogue breaks and weird slow motion, but other numbers suffer a worse fate. “No One Mourns the Wicked” climaxes on a sweeping aerial shot that deflates the emotional intensity. “Dancing Through Life” is dragged out until it’s over ten movie minutes long, with no clear emotional arc, and mostly kinda exhausting. And Chu constantly—constantly!—shoots characters who are singing from behind, which is—and there’s no other way to say this—wrong. Like just objectively the wrong way to shoot a musical number. You want to see people’s faces when they’re singing! You just do.

Nevertheless, as I watched and rewatched Wicked, I grew a begrudging appreciation for it.

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande—Elphaba and Glinda, respectively—both received Oscar nominations for their performances; these were well-earned; everything that works about the film works because of them. Grande especially, who has to thread slapstick comedy and tragedy together, sometimes within the same scene. Even when the movie doesn’t make much sense—which is most of the time—they are both totally locked-in; their chemistry pulsates from the screen; their emotional conviction carries you through the illogic.

I also think that, despite how bad Chu is at directing, film is a much better medium for the story of Wicked than the stage. Narrative ideas which have to be communicated entirely through exposition and song, and therefore get kind of muddled or feel thinly sketched, can be supported with production design and all manner of filmmaking tricks. “The Wizard and I”—Elphaba’s ‘I want’ song—doesn’t really land on stage because the circumstances of her life feel so abstract; we’ve seen her suffer discrimination, but only in isolation, and at the hands of a select few characters. In the movie, meanwhile, we have a flashback and worldbuilding, which makes the discrimination she faces tangible, everyday, ingrained. The Wizard, who is a nebulous figure throughout the first act, referred to but not seen until over an hour into the story, is made manifest through a statue and plaques at Shiz University; he is literally looming over everything, and thus Elphaba’s belief in him, the dream she’s attached to him, feels far more real.

“The Wizard and I” isn’t the only improvement. I famously said that Wicked only has two good songs: I was wrong. Wicked has two great songs, and plenty of goodish songs which are easily undercut but an untalented cast¹ and poor staging.

“What is this Feeling?”, abrupt and aimless in its original conception, is reworked as a high-school movie montage, which better establishes the tone and setting of Shiz. Sure, Chu’s camerawork is coked out, and the editing nauseating, but there’s there there now. “Dancing Through Life”: chopped and rearranged and totally mangled in its transfer to film, yes, but a much better introductory number for Fiyero because we get close-ups, which Jonathan Bailey sells the shit out of—performing Fiyero as a himbo snake-oil salesman, but a himbo snake-oil salesman whose bought into his own lies, a tension which plays way better than the kinda doofy jock we get on stage.

All this is to say that while I didn’t like Wicked, the movie, the first time I saw it, or the second or third, I did go to see it five times in cinemas. Sure, this was because I had friends who wanted to see it, who wanted to participate in the Cultural Moment that was occurring, and knowing that I like movies, knowing that I like musicals especially, and knowing that I’ll go see absolute dogshit multiple times over if it means hanging out with my buddies, tapped me on the shoulder, batted their eyelids and said ‘Pwease?’

But the fact of the matter is that, despite all my knocking of this pretty incompetently directed film, I understood their desire to see the movie, just as I could not deny my own desire to see it again. Even if I didn’t think the movie worked—it worked. There was something so undeniable about a movie that ends on a note like “Defying Gravity”—a marginalised character rebelling against the powers-that-be with this absolute barn-burner of a song. For how badly Chu and co. mangled that number the bit where she goes ‘nobody in all of Oz, not Wizard that there is or was, is ever gonna bring me doooooown’ owns bones. I’m not out here trying to argue that Wicked (2024) is The Battle of Algiers or whatever. But—in that cultural moment—the biggest film of the year being this total embrace of, for want of a better word, ‘wokeness’ and the kindness and understanding that idea is predicated upon, that felt good.

So, yes, I was excited for more. A big Cultural Moment that is for the girls, gays and theys, that centres on movies, and a genre of movies that I love at that—yes I was excited for more.

On act two

From the moment that Universal announced it was splitting Wicked into two movies, each an adaptation of one of the musical’s acts, the general consensus was this was genius and stupid. Genius, because movie one can end with “Defying Gravity”, a kind of emotional rush that’s almost impossible to turn down; stupid, because act two is a dumpster fire—berefet of good songs, weirdly paced and borderline incoherent—and adapting it into a film, without even the relative strengths of act one to buttress it, felt like a fool’s errand.

If I had to try and distill the issues with Wicked’s second act down to a list—say, a Substack friendly numbered list—I would probably lay the root of the blame at these three places:

1. The five year time jump between acts one and two.

When it comes to narrative set-up, musicals already have a uniquely difficult task in that the world only extends to the edges of the stage, which means anything outside that spotlit rectangle has to be communicated via telly exposition.

Everything—characters: their wants, relationships, turning-point decisions; the world: its rules, the power dynamics; the plot: its developments, twists, reversals—gets on average one song’s worth of set-up: during that three-to-five minute window things have to be clearly explained and sold to the audience.

Wicked exacerbates these limitations by having a fantastical setting. A fantastical setting means new words, new concepts—nouns, nouns, nouns!—which have to be introduced and then clearly explained. This makes the threshold to basic audience buy-in higher, and the threshold for emotional buy-in higher still; if they don’t fully understand the world then they won’t care about the characters who inhabit it.

But then Wicked has a five year time jump between acts. The characters do so much growing and changing between the acts that they more or less have to be reintroduced; the world of Oz, which changes so much as the Wizard’s fascist reign grows in power, has to be contextualised then re-contextualised. That buy-in is squandered; the audience has to be bought-in all over.

2. The Wizard’s fascist reign

It’s a big sell! In the span of two-ish songs—“No One Mourns the Wicked (Reprise) / Thank Goodness”² and “March of the Witch Hunters”—the following facts have to be communicated:

• The Wizard’s already tyrannical grip on Oz has tightened: the populace are inundated with propaganda framing the Unimals and Elphaba are dangerous entities, with legislation introduced to ghettoise and then ethnically genocide the former, and soldiers on the hunt for the latter; the Yellow Brick Road has become a lightning rod for political discourse in the vien of, say, Trump’s Wall³.

• Elphaba, opposed to fascism and genocide, has begun conducting a one-woman, magically-fuelled gurellia campaign against the Wizard and his forces.

• Naturally, this campaign feeds very easily into the Wizard’s propaganda machine: Elphaba is framed as ‘The Wicked Witch’.

• Glinda has been ushered into the upper echelons of the Wizard’s government and turned into a figurehead: she is ‘Glinda the Good’, a representation of what magic and witches can be, everything that Elphaba is not. That Glinda can’t do magic isn’t a problem either—the Wizard, along with his trusty aid Madame Morrible⁴, deploy every parlor trick at their disposal to manufacture the illusion of magic.

• And, perhaps because her status is unearned, and her powers falsehoods, Glinda feels a growing sense of unease at her place in everything. The only person she feels she can confide in is Fiyero…

• …who has become captain of the guard, and is leading the hunt for Elphaba. Ostensibly it is to capture her; in reality, it’s because he has feelings for her, but he’s quiet about this because he’s still dating Glinda and—surprise!—they are soon to be married, a grand public wedding, the symbolic unification of state and military. How wonderfully totalitarian!

So, that’s a lot. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that all of these are addendums to The Wizard of Oz, so we are having to reconcile all this information with our pre-existing understanding of that film, that world. Therefore, act two isn’t tripling down on problems of narrative exposition but quadrupling: not only are we operating in a fantasy world, which requires more exposition to be understood by the audience, not only are we time-jumping between acts, meaning characters and stakes effectively have to be introduced, but we are also retrofitting all this onto a preexisting property—a preexisting property whose tone is diametrically opposed to the tone of the musical—meaning all this has to then be cognitively reconciled, is a big hurdle, and it’s only made bigger because…

3. Act Two takes place in the margins of The Wizard of Oz

Pretty much what it says on the tin(man)—and, as I explained in my other post, this is one of the many reasons the grand political aspirations of the musical collapse under their own weight. Trying to bend the narrative so that it fits into the negative space of The Wizard of Oz leads to all sorts of narrative contorting. Character arcs are twisted into odd, emotionally unnatural shapes; the semiotics, and the themes underpinning them, are skewed. Elphaba’s campaign to free the unimals is a prime example: she liberates the flying monkeys—who then immediately vow to serve her, just as they did the Wizard. Obviously, it’s because they serve the Wicked Witch of the West The Wizard of Oz, so that’s what they have to do here too, but it doesn’t make any sense for Elphaba, as she’s been established in Wicked, to accept their service because she:

1. is famously bad at accepting help, it’s like her defining character trait and

2. has literally made it her life’s work to free the Unimals!!!

But even worse is the resolution of Elphaba’s arc. After a whole story’s worth of raging against the injustice of a world that would judge people based on their appearance, she… tells Glinda that the Wizard was right, Oz does need a natural enemy, someone to unite around, but that enemy shouldn’t be the Unimals, it should be her: the Wicked Witch of the West. Glinda, rightly, tries to rebuke this but Elphaba won’t be deterred: Glinda is the face that can lead Oz towards a more utopian future because she has a beautiful exterior, something that she, Elphaba, doesn’t and can never have. ‘Glinda,’ she says, ‘I’m limited.’

There’s so much about this narrative turn that’s despairing, but for my money the worst part has to be the musical’s quiet affirmation of discrimination. For the Unimals to be ‘accepted’, Elphaba has to be villainised—Elphaba, whose green skin has consistently made her an other, and otherness which has been explicitly and repeatedly paralleled with the otherness experienced by the Unimals. Hegemony requires an interloper in need of excising, says Wicked, because that interloper reaffirms everyone else as ‘in’—nevermind that this is the exact same line of thought that underpins ‘movements’ like the LGB without the T, and TERFs. Groups who buy into the bad-faith narratives set out by conservative politicians: ‘You have to deny the rights of the trans community,’ they say, ‘because it will entrench those same rights for everyone else.’ Nevermind that this is all bullshit. Conservatives not just wanting trans rights eliminated, but the rights of the whole queer community, and women, and immigrants, and indigenous peoples, and the disabled, and every other minority too. Nevermind that Wicked—in its resolution, which it’s bound to because the Wicked Witch of the West has to die—pedals and promotes that exact line of thought.

I mean, even Glinda being anointed the ‘best’ mascot for progress in Oz is a slap in the face. Glinda, whose appearance and beliefs are white, WASP-ish, politically centrist. Glinda, embodies the exact kind of weak liberalism that gets so easily moved about by bad faith groups and inevitably loses to conservatives—just like the Democrats in America, and Labour in the UK, and soon Labour in Australia too⁵. We even see the beginning of this process at the end of the musical! After Dorothy ‘kills’⁶ Elphaba, Glinda turns around and banishes the Wizard and imprisons Madame Morrible; she has not deconstructed the political machine that led to oppression, she has simply given it a makeover, and is continuing to use those same systems of oppression to her end.

This is the problem with Wicked’s second act: issues are brought on by the high narrative buy-in, compounded by poor and politically charged worldbuilding, and ultimately collapse under their own weight because the margins of The Wizard of Oz simply do not allow enough space for anything to be expressed properly, to fucking breathe. That’s how a narrative with soft but undeniably anti-bigoted ideals ends up advocating for the exact system that facilitates bigoted behaviour.

On Wicked: For Good

The question, then: how does Wicked: For Good shape up? Relative to the first film, does it improve its craft, or worsen? Does Jon M. Chu allow his lesser demons to shout down his better angels, or does he remember how to bottle the style and panache that made Now You See Me 2 and Crazy Rich Asians lowkey soar. And as an adaptation of the stage musical: does it circumvent the issues of act two? Or does it make them worse?

The film opens not with a song but with an action sequence. Five years on, the construction of the Yellow Brick Road nears completion. Oxen Unimals pull a great paving machine. The Wizard’s stooges whip them along. But then, there in the sky—Elphaba! She swoops down on her broom and commences an attack run, breaking the shackles that bind the Ox, and defeating the stooges with quick blows. The whole thing is a kind of ‘you go girl’, MCU action sequence.

From there we pivot into the first musical number “Every Day More Wicked”. We glide from around Oz. To the Emerald City, where the citizens’ eyes turn from their propaganda filled newspapers towards banners depicting The Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good. To Elphaba’s hideout, in a forest, where she consults the Gimmerie, a tome of magic, for spells to defeat the Wizard. To the Wizard’s inner sanctum, where Madame Morrible broadcasts more propaganda over the radio, and Glinda occupies a symbolic, but highly publicized, role in the institution. And as we move about two things become clear:

1. The worldbuilding, so opaque and confusing on stage, is coming through crystal clear; the same way that Chu quickly established the Shiz, the Wizard’s and the socio-political dynamics of Oz throughout “The Wizard and I” in the first film, he now establishes the complex politics of totalitarian Oz.

2. For all that Chu’s worldbuilding has held, if not sharpened, his instincts as a director of musicals has only deteriorated: the camera is in looney tunes mode, the sound mixing is really bad and several cast members straight-up cannot sing (Michelle Yeoh, who plays Madame Morrible, is done very very dirty).

Still, for a moment, for a blistering moment, it seems as if Wicked: For Good might pull off the same magic trick as the first film: a fairly mixed experience that through its charming leads and sheer emotional gusto somehow justifies itself.

But, as the film progresses, it becomes clear that this is not going to be the case. For the most part, Chu and co. refuse to make meaningful adaptational changes. Certain aspects of the text get underlined, so some narrative beats come through a little differently. For instance, the love triangle between Elphaba, Glinda and Fiyero is more central—thus making Elphaba and Glinda’s differences seem petty and interpersonal, and less the products of, like, genuine political friction. But mostly these changes are cosmetic: a pointless song here, a cameo from a character there. The only real improvements are in adding Glinda to the musical number “Wonderful”, which lends some kind of emotional legibility to that song vis-à-vis Elphaba’s momentary willingness to join the Wizard, and in the framing of the Tinman, which is unintentionally comical on stage, but actually quite scary in the film. But unfortunately, both these plotlines are narrative dead-ends, so these changes, while improvements, don’t actually mean a lot in the grand scheme of things.

Then there’s the biggest creative swing is the decision. Actually showing Dorothy. On the stage she is only referred to—someone who has ‘just left’ or is ‘right over there.’ In the film, while we never see her face, we see her dress, we see her pigtails, we see Toto. On the one hand, I understand showing her; it would be distracting if she was perpetually just-off-stage like she is in the musical. But on the other hand this choice only reinforces that what happens in Wicked: For Good is happening in and around The Wizard of Oz. The level of buy-in required from the audience is pushed even higher than on stage—too high. Can you believe, Wicked: For Good asks, that the quest the Wizard assigns Dorothy, that she kill the Wicked Witch and bring back her broom, wasn’t just a random task actually just him using her as a political expedient to ensure the elimination of an ideological enemy? No! I can’t believe that, actually. That’s fucking stupid.

The other big creative change is the addition of two new songs. One for Elphaba, “No Place Like Home”, which is an absolute turd and warrants no further discussion. And one for Glinda, “The Girl in the Bubble”, which is also a turd—the most lifeless number in a movie full of lifeless numbers—but also kind of thematically interesting. Glinda, realising that she’s the pawn in a political enterprise she can no longer endorse, decides that it’s time for her bubble to ‘pop’. She must face reality. When this number began I hoped, for a split second, that Wicked: For Good might make one change, one beautiful change, and right the greatest wrong of the stage musical. That Glinda, in realising she was the product of a corrupt political machine, might try harder to see that machine changed, and therefore disagree with Elphaba’s plan.

So none of that happened, Elphaba still ‘dies’, and the cooked political message of the stage show goes unchallenged, if not outright reinforced, by the movie

Watching Wicked: For Good is to, paraphrase Katya, like watching a Little League softball game where watermelons are getting thrown down the baseline yet every swing is a miss. Chu is like a player with no arms......or legs.....it’s sad.

Afterwards, I felt frustration with myself—for having believed that this movie, adapting a narrative that I think is pretty bad, and being adapted by a director who I think is fairly incompetent, could be anything other than poor.

But frustration, too, that the Wicked Cultural Experience has caught on as much as it has. Because, although I can safely say that splitting the stage musical into two films has proven creatively cataclysmic, as an act of marketing it’s ingenious. People who never go to the movies have told me time and again that they were excited for this one. There’s a not small chance that this is the most impactful—if not successful—movie of the year. And that bums me out.

It bums me out that this is the best we can do. There have been a slew of great musicals over the last few years. Kiss of the Spider Woman, Stephen Spielberg’s West Side Story, Annette, Elvis, hell, even Matilda kinda. But it’s Wicked and Wicked: For Good that get to crossover. This? In a world of MCU and MCU-adjacent slop for straight boys, the best the girls and the gays can hope for is MCU-slop with a green and pink paintjob?

But even more than that bums me out that this a story that is so about the issues plaguing the current political moment, and engages with those issues head on, even if it’s in it’s own fantastical and baby-brained kind of way; and it bums me out that the conclusion it reaches is that we have to accept one form of discrimination to prevent another. Isn’t that the same rationale that the illegitimate state of Israel is using the justify their genocide of Palestine right now? What a bummer that biggest film of the year should be one that directly engages with the idea of genocide, features a protagonist leading a gurellia war against the genociding state, only for her to walk back her ideals, literally sacrificing herself at the alter of an ideology as categorically unsuccessful as liberalism.

Wicked: For Good is a waste. Of time. Talent. Money. Goodwill. The waste of an opportunity to make meaningful improvements on flawed source material. The waste of an opportunity to make something that straight-up rocks.

But even more than that, to release Wicked: For Good at this current political moment, without the courage to make changes or engage in everything that is pernicious or retrograde about the text, is just plain reckless.

1. I have been informed by Wicked die-hards that the production I saw in Melbourne 2023 was… not good.

2. Which becomes two songs in the film version: “Every Day More Wicked” and “Thank Goodness/I Couldn’t Be Happier”.

3. I know Wicked predates Trump by a decade-and-a-half but the analogy works.

4. MM, turn it around… Wicked Witch!

5. Because what conservative votes for the watered down, liberal ‘compromise conservatism’ when they can vote for actual, full-blooded conservatism instead? Liberals embrace conservatism in the hope of engendering conservative voters, but all they do is alienate the political middle, which loses them elections.

6. I’m already so far past my self-imposed word-count; if you want to find out what actually happens Google it.