Can anybody talk about Wicked?

Our version of cultural criticism doesn't have the range.

Light spoilers for Wicked ensue. Holding space for that. Finding power in that.

I came into Wicked surprisingly cold, considering just how massive a cultural item it has been in all its iterations. I knew that Kristen Chenoweth and Idina Menzel originated the two main roles; I did not know their characters’ names. I knew that Wicked was largely to blame for the steady stream of revisionist takes on (mostly Disney) villain origin stories, with taglines like “the legend you know. the story you don’t.” I did not know that it was about the rise of authoritarianism in Oz. Honestly, my strongest association even with the OG Wizard of Oz is that I asked my mother to rent it from Blockbuster after she told me that Michael Jackson played the Scarecrow, and then spent half the movie trying to reconcile the middle-aged white man before me with what I knew to be the limits of prosthetic technology. When I finally questioned my mother, she revealed that she had been talking about The Wiz. Thirty years later, I still have not given the white version another chance.

And this is how fine I am with that.

I say all this to say, I was in the enviable position of learning everything about Wicked’s first act in real time. I got to be surprised by the heavy-handed animal plot line. I got to be surprised at how often everyone says “Shiz” with a straight face. I got to be surprised at Galinda’s hilarious characterization, and Ariana Grande’s equally hilarious performance. (And really, attention must be paid: I thought Ariana and Kristen were queerbaiting the people when they both said that Galinda might be closeted. But Wicked, I owe you an apology. I was not familiar with your game. I wasn’t expecting a split-screen homage to the enemies-to-lovers trope called “What Is This Feeling?” at ALL.)

Look how almost bisexual the lighting is!

All told, the most thuddingly un-surprising thing about Wicked has been the discourse.

Clara

and I have been texting furiously all week about all the bizarrely reductive takes (bizarrely because, respectfully, this is a blockbuster adaptation of one of the biggest broadway musicals of the century. It was already pretty reduced!) It’s all very much giving “this shot is brilliant and should be shown in any film study class.”

There’s this roundtable, which manages to both misunderstand and overstate Galinda and Elphaba’s extremely basic characterizations (Elphaba is an unusually and exceedingly peculiar/ and altogether quite impossible to describe symbol of the other! Galinda is…blonde).¹ This roundtable also serves as crucial evidence that film criticism is a skill, and an undervalued one, because some very smart people and Maureen Dowd are all floundering here.

There’s this essay, which argues that making the animals cute makes their plot line more emotionally accessible, because I guess a fairy tale about antisemitism isn’t accessible enough? But the essay also goes on to argue that the cuteness of the animals makes Glinda’s² insistence that Elphaba side against them with the wizard is “very strange. By the time the film reaches the climactic moment of ‘Defying Gravity,’ Glinda’s urging Elphaba to just calm down, go along with and apologize to the wizard equates to her saying, ‘Elfie, listen to me, just be racist!’” And like…yeah, I guess “strange” is one word for Nazi collaborators, a known category of people.

But my favourite reaction to the movie has to be this:

“Wicked’s Fiyero star spoiled huge Part 2 storyline with obvious Easter egg.” Putting aside the convoluted nature of that sentence, the spoiler/obvious Easter egg in question is Jonathan Bailey as Prince Fiyero, posing with his arms stretched out as though he were a straw man hoisted aloft in, say, a cornfield, to frighten away birds. And since this movie is part 1 of a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, we can draw some conclusions. So, apparently this needs to be said: when something is written into a script, performed, filmed, and released! It is not a spoiler. It is a new-fangled storytelling device called “foreshadowing.” It’s very subtle.

And, look. Wicked is not a straightforward text—it has a lot going on, though probably not enough to justify nearly 6 hours of movie time—but it is a simple one. The fact that so many people are crumbling under the weight of analyzing it troubles me quite a bit. Especially when they are getting paid to write about it! Do your jobs! We need you! This country just voted for a ramshackle bunch of anti-intellectual fascists to control the government. We need people who can talk about what’s happening—in politics, in art, in our lives—in a meaningful way, not a glib and simplistic one. Glib and simplistic helped us get here in the first place. I’m pretty sure that’s, like, 60% of the message of Wicked.

I’m joking. Or, I’m being glib. Whatever, it’s called satire.

1. More from Clara on this here!

2. “It’s Glinda now! Stupid! I don’t even know what made me say it.” is just one of Ariana’s exceptional line deliveries.