Making an Activist of the Witch of the West in “Wicked for Good”
by Rachel MacNair
This movie is the second part of the story; I reviewed the first part in Making a Real Person of the Witch of the West. The point that excited me most was reflected in that title.
The famous 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz is a clear literary illustration of how war hysteria works. The audience sympathizes with Dorothy even though she kills two women, because both those women were witches in a good-and-evil fantasyland – the kind of mindset that descends with wars. No such sympathy could arise if Dorothy had killed Miss Gulch. Nasty as Miss Gulch was, she was seen as a real human being.
This kill-the-wicked mindset is also portrayed here – a loud mob and government-ordered assassination. The song celebrating the witch’s demise is more vicious than the 1939 version, where “Ding Dong, the wicked witch is dead” celebrated being liberated. “No one mourns the wicked” is gleefully directed at the witch’s fate.
Elphaba as Activist
The desire of violent systems to paint their opponents as being the ones who are actually atrocious is a well-known tactic. I remember us consistent lifers joking back in the 1980s about how we were communists on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but fascists on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, taking Sundays off. We were being hit by both “sides” that way.
In the early 1980s, when CLN’s precursor group – Prolifers for Survival – tried to join an anti-nuclear weapons coalition, the Boston chapter excoriated all pro-lifers as “racist, classist, misogynist anti-choice reactionaries.” We coped with that by seeing it as funny – putting that phrase on t-shirts and singing it in Conga lines. That’s why I can still remember it decades later.
But notice I said “we.” We were a group. If we were battened down with such intense insults, at least we had each other. Elphaba was pretty much alone.
Even the talking animals she was trying to protect, who had more sympathy for her, still decided to flee rather than try to hold their ground. In a moving twist, Elphaba’s rendition of “there’s no place like home” became a social-justice plea for resistance.
But Elphaba had no training in how to do nonviolent revolutions. While we have history and can draw insights from past experience, there’s no sign the fantasy land of Oz had any such thing.
So she took an action that was violent – knocking over guards – and therefore easily portrayed as criminal by those who wanted the public to understand her that way. She did skywriting in a beautiful twist on the 1939 movie – an attempt at an educational message rather than a threat. But it was easily manipulated to say the opposite of what she wrote. Her sense of strategy wasn’t the best, and she didn’t have other people to strategize with, so all the ins and outs of different ideas could be considered.
As I look on with my years of experience, within the rules of this fantasy, I strategize: though she wasn’t getting any help from the press (I presume – it never shows her trying to), that’s what pamphlets are for. She could have done up a series with stories from her own experience, written to get sympathy for her causes. She could have flown in darkness and posted them where other paper postings were, or air-dropped a set of them. This might have gotten a sympathizer or two, and then there’s a base from which to write and distribute more pamphlets, and have conversations, allowing organizing to build. It had the potential to explain more than a bumper sticker in the sky. It would, at the very least, get people the other side of the story.
She had moral courage. She took a stand and, because of it, gave up riches and adoration that were offered to her. She was admirably stubborn about doing what she thought was the right thing.
But one person alone needs a group to work with, and she didn’t seem to have a good understanding of how to build one up. At least, no attempts at doing so were shown.
Burnout
Her situation was just begging for burnout to develop. There are three components of burnout: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a feeling of reduced personal accomplishment. She sings:
No good deed goes unpunished
No act of charity goes unresented
The audience understands her frustration – not only do so many of her attempts fail, but many were deliberately misinterpreted to make them seem bad instead.
But mere frustration can be dealt with by sitting down and calculating with problem-solving. Emotionally, she couldn’t take much more. She says she’ll stop doing good deeds, which shows that depersonalization has set in. And the problem with personal accomplishment is the whole point.
Being in the System
When we first meet Glinda and Prince Fiyero at the college in the first movie, they’re both rich, self-centered, feel entitled, and are spoiled rotten.
At one point, Glinda says, “Something is very wrong – I didn’t get my way! I need to lie down.”
When Elphaba starts a sentence to Fiyero about his pretending to be shallow and self-absorbed, he interrupts and says, “Excuse me – there’s no pretense here. I happen to be genuinely self-absorbed and deeply shallow.” To which she responds: “Oh, please. No you’re not. Otherwise you wouldn’t be so unhappy.”
Glinda’s song, “The Girl in the Bubble,” shows how getting all the riches and attention and status she wanted didn’t turn out to be as satisfying as she had expected.
Elphaba, though a governor’s daughter and therefore not lacking in material affluence, has spent all her life being scorned and mocked for her green skin. This not only gives her sympathy for others being put down, but also a talking bear was her nanny, who treated her with warmth as she was growing up. That gives her sympathy for those specifically being mistreated.
So Elphaba had a sensitivity to others being put down as she was. Glinda and Fiyero were raised in such a way that they didn’t have a clue. This made Elphaba a good influence on both of them, as they both became more sensitive and more caring through the course of the story.
They were also both good influences on her, since she was otherwise altogether too alone and discouraged.
Street vs. Straight
In my post, Instead of Division, Schools of Thought, I explained the idea that all large nonviolent movements have people with opposing opinions about how the movement should be run. Instead of picking a side, we could see how they’re both right – and not only that, they’re both necessary. The disadvantages of one can be addressed by the advantages of the other.
For this story, the interacting ideas are what I alliteratively call the street vs. straight. The “street” people make a ruckus because the issue is urgent, requires direct action, and requires it right now. The “straight” people want respectability, and are mortified that the street people don’t understand how important it is to work within the system.
We see this conflict during and immediately after the “Wonderful” song. While the wizard is trying to persuade Elphaba to become more respectable and thereby gain acclaim, that’s because he wants to manipulate her for his own ends. Glinda is also trying to make that case, but she sincerely believes it. She thinks she really is doing Elphaba and her cause of helping the marginalized a favor, that this really is the best route – “think of what we could do together.”
Elphaba comes close to going along with it, since it gets the flying monkeys freed, but then the chief of them points her to a room with many animals in cages – including the goat-professor she was so fond of, who could no longer speak. That does it. She frees them all and goes back to the street.
In the end, a burned-out Elphaba couldn’t directly get the changes she was seeking. But she did get them indirectly through her influence on Glinda (and the flying monkeys), and Glinda was able to get those changes because she was in the system.
But Glinda would never have thought of doing that on her own. It was Elphaba’s influence on her conscience, on her maturity, on her anguish, that moved her to action.
When I first wrote the piece about schools of thought, I was thinking only of both schools having people who were already convinced about the cause and simply had different ideas on how to achieve it. But this story adds a point: not merely that the street people give the needed sense of urgency, but they also may persuade people within the system to become advocates for the cause in the first place.
The final song that Elphaba and Glinda sing together makes this point: they both understand that their friendship has changed them both “for good.”
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See more of our movie reviews on magical activism:
The Movie “Wicked”: Making a Real Person of the Witch of the West
Jasmine, Aladdin, and the Power of Nonviolence
Our blog’s movies reviews are listed on our list of all blog posts under “Movie, Television, and Documentary Reviews”
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