GALINDAFIED OR ELPHABATIZED: THE CONFUSIFYING WORLDBUILDING OF WICKED
L. Frank Baum's novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was an instant sensation when it appeared in 1900 “…[w]ith its intricate and marvelous parallel reality which is not rationalized as the protagonist's dream or madness [Baum’s novel] marked the beginning of American fantasy.”1
The worldbuilding of Oz was never consistent in the Tolkien traditional, defined by what scholar Marah Gubar calls "a patchwork aesthetic” (in honor of the Patchwork Girl of Oz). Basically over the course of 14 books, Baum threw in whatever he needed to keep the Emerald City glowing, a creative version of just-in-time-production, and yet no matter what Baum added (and he added quite a lot) he always sustained the magic and whimsy of Oz, never broke the wand you might say, and as a consequence the wonderful world of Oz with its repertoire of witches, magic slippers, talking animals and one-of-kind demi-humans never lost its charm over the imagination of readers.
Easy enough to draw up a list of the features that make Oz classically Oz — as I’ve already begun to do so above — but to truly understand why this strange world continues to draw generation after generation of Dorothies down the Brick Road, we have to push beyond the masks and other surface appurtenances to Oz’s true magic: its worldbuilding, whose organizing principles I would summarize thusly:
First and foremost, an exhilarating abundance of faerie tale magic.
An equally delirious diversity of humans and non-humans — the magic of Oz made flesh or straw or tin.
And (in the first book at least) the centrality of the Wizard both in terms of power and spatiality.
This is the real power behind the curtain, Oz’s deepest magic.
Very few of the Ozian writers who followed in Baum’s footsteps understood this as well as Gregory Maguire, and by torquing / subverting Oz’s worldbuilding prime directives as far as they could go without breaking them, Maguire was able to create a storyworld that was both eminently Oz and eminently something else altogether.
Maguire’s novel avails itself of many Ozian standards. There is magic, witches, talking animals — and of course the mysterious Wizard ensconced in the far-off Emerald City.
Maguire famously, significantly, ages ups his Oz — introducing all manner of adult content (from adultery to “naughty drawings of women undressing”). He also dials up the storyworld’s consequentiality to Game of Thrones levels — all to disturbing effect. But really that’s just surface stuff — important surfaces, yes, but surface stuff nevertheless. The real innovation of Wicked is in how cunningly Maguire honors the pillars of Ozian worldbuilding by re-imagining them through a contemporary sensibility.
In Maguire’s novel the old Ozian diversity is no longer a source of delightful estrangement but a site of profound conflict. Oz’s talking Animals, one of the most faerie tale aspects of the world, no longer live side by side with humans without comment — Animals are now being targeted by the Wizard’s eliminationist policies. In fact, Ozian society is rife with bias and racism, especially against the southern-coded Quadlings.
Magic continues to be a dominant factor, organizing Oz’s world system, whether it’s the domestic magic that can turn water into orange juice or the stronger magic of the Grimmerie, but when the world’s top magic user is a genocidal psychopath who uses his powers (and an oppressive secret police) to smother all opposition, you know we ain’t in Kansas anymore.
Like Dorothy, Elphaba has to contend with Ozian diversity and Ozian magic, but in ways that would have probably turned Dorothy inside out.
But like its source musical, the film Wicked jettisons most of what made Maguire’s novel grown-up: the adult sexy time, the Dune-style realpolitiks, the enslavements, the cold-blooded murders. Which is understandable, in a way. Ultimately the R-rating is not what makes Wicked unforgettable. The real problem for me is that the film fumbles the worldbuilding bag, drastically undermining the novel’s genius as a consequence.
Magic and diversity are still organizing concerns in the Wicked film, but in about the lamest most half-hearted way imaginable. Whereas magic in the original Maguire novel was abundant and routine, magic in Wicked the film is scarce and special. So we are told and so we are shown. In fact, only Elphaba appears to wield real magic. Which truly sucks. What was awesome about Elphaba in the novel was that despite her green skin she wasn’t truly sui generis. She and her sister and Glinda formed a community of (eventual) magic users. The way each of these friends / sisters used magic, the choices they made vis-a-vis magic (aka power) helped illuminate and define their characters. Magic in the Wicked novel dramatized choices and their consequences. What made Elphaba in the novel Elphaba was not her magic powers, but her choices.
On the other hand, the Wicked film’s decision to make only Elphaba have real magic power might make Elphaba exceptional — but it don’t make her interesting. That would have required writing her better, giving her (for example) revealing relationships (like with her sister) to build her character. But Hollywood got to Hollywood, and so Elphaba is made improbably unique via magical powers no one else seems to have, and with that wave of the narrative wand the film’s world (and our protagonist) instantly becomes less clear, less convincing, less Oz.
The Oz of the Wicked film is a low-level magic Oz, which might have been interesting if they’d actually thought the damn thing out. If you are going to have a low-magic Oz with a high-magic protagonist you need the world to react believably to this disparity. Film Elphaba is for all intents and purposes Oz’s Doctor Manhattan, but unlike the world of Watchmen, no one in the film seems to react sensibly to Elphaba’s super-powered-ness. The other characters are like You can alter the world in ways no one else can? Ok, cool. Which is nonsense given how alert and hostile to difference the average Ozian is shown to be. The film repeatedly depicts how everyone is shocked silly by Elphaba’s green-skin but these same folks are for whatever reason untroubled by Elphaba’s frightening telekinesis and non-consensual knock-out dust that could easily end them.
I’m not opposed to an Oz where Elphaba alone has real magical power or a world that imagines itself as more magical than it actually is (see Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun), but if that’s the case the world must sell this in a coherent consistent way — otherwise what’s the point?
As for the diversity question: one of Maguire’s novel’s strengths is how well it maps (and estranges) the real world’s racialized conflicts onto Oz. The film clearly doesn’t have the same amount of room as the novel but that limitation alone doesn’t excuse how the film seems to misunderstand one of its franchise's best ideas.
In the Maguire novel, Elphaba’s othering takes place in a continuum of bigotry, and is therefore made more believable. Elphaba might be ostracized for being green, but she ain’t alone on the shit list — Quadlings are “ranked about as low on the social ladder as it was possible to get and still be human” and the best college at Shiz University is "still closed to female students.”
A tentpole Disney film will never go as deep as Maguire but it could have done a lot by playing it smart. But rather than play it smart — and deposit Ozian prejudices across a broad swathe of characters, including Elphaba — Wicked the film decides to play it Scarecrow dumb, using the first reel to hit us repeatedly with Elphaba’s despised green-ness. No other racial discrimination is hinted at until the Shiz University sequences when apropos nothing the film abruptly introduces the Animal apartheid subplot. No connections — subtle or otherwise — are made between Animal disenfranchisement and Elphaba’s own despised status — the incidents remain isolated and not systemic. How more effective the film would have been had it practiced some narrative intersectionality. Imagine if in the early bullying scenes Elphaba had been accused of being part Animal. Imagine if in the early scenes viewers were introduced to another child — less privileged than Elphaba — a child bullied mercilessly for having “Animal features,” a child Elphaba bullies for the same reason. (As they say, no one is more oppressive than the oppressed.)
Something along these lines would have gone a long way in selling the world’s all-too-familiar racial logics which in turn would have laid the groundwork for Elphaba's climactic revolt against the Wizard’s racist bullshit. McGuire’s novel is a disturbing meditation on how racial categories are produced and sustained and, how seamlessly these racial categories shade into moral categories and what such symbolic violence does to those interpellated by it.
Wicked the film, on the other hand, has only the most superficial interest in racial politics — strange for an adaptation whose source novel framed its character and conflicts through ethno-racial strife. What we’re left with is a film that mobilizes its race plot only when it needs to move the story along or signal our hero’s (and its own) virtuousness, but otherwise expresses absolutely no interest in race whatsoever, thereby rendering such evils anomalous instead of systemic. A film that believes it's Elphabatized — but is, in fact, Galindafied.
Lesson: if your storyworld wishes to dramatize racial conflicts these should be imbedded not only in the Character and their Conflicts but in the World.
Read Part I: THE DISRESPECTATIOUS STORYTELLING OF WICKED
Fantasy Literature and Christianity: A Study of the Mistborn, Coldfire, Fionavar Tapestry and Chronicles of Thomas Covenant Series By Weronika Łaszkiewicz