The famous 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz<\/em> is a clear literary illustration of how war hysteria works<\/a>. The audience sympathizes with Dorothy even though she kills two women, because both those women were witches in a good-and-evil fantasyland \u2013 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.<\/p>\n This kill-the-wicked mindset is also portrayed here \u2013 a loud mob and government-ordered assassination. The song celebrating the witch\u2019s demise is more vicious than the 1939 version, where \u201cDing Dong, the wicked witch is dead\u201d celebrated being liberated. \u201cNo one mourns the wicked\u201d is gleefully directed at the witch\u2019s fate.<\/p>\n 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 \u201csides\u201d that way.<\/p>\n In the early 1980s, when CLN\u2019s precursor group \u2013 Prolifers for Survival \u2013 tried to join an anti-nuclear weapons coalition, the Boston chapter excoriated all pro-lifers as \u201cracist, classist, misogynist anti-choice reactionaries.\u201d We coped with that by seeing it as funny \u2013 putting that phrase on t-shirts and singing it in Conga lines. That\u2019s why I can still remember it decades later.<\/p>\n But notice I said \u201cwe.\u201d We were a group. If we were battened down with such intense insults, at least we had each other. Elphaba was pretty much alone.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s rendition of \u201cthere\u2019s no place like home\u201d became a social-justice plea for resistance.<\/p>\n But Elphaba had no training in how to do nonviolent revolutions. While we have history and can draw insights from past experience, there\u2019s no sign the fantasy land of Oz had any such thing.<\/p>\n So she took an action that was violent \u2013 knocking over guards \u2013 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 \u2013 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\u2019t the best, and she didn\u2019t have other people to strategize with, so all the ins and outs of different ideas could be considered.<\/p>\n As I look on with my years of experience, within the rules of this fantasy, I strategize:<\/strong> though she wasn\u2019t getting any help from the press (I presume \u2013 it never shows her trying to), that\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But one person alone needs a group to work with, and she didn\u2019t seem to have a good understanding of how to build one up. At least, no attempts at doing so were shown.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n No good deed goes unpunished The audience understands her frustration \u2013 not only do so many of her attempts fail, but many were deliberately misinterpreted to make them seem bad instead.<\/p>\n But mere frustration can be dealt with by sitting down and calculating with problem-solving. Emotionally, she couldn\u2019t take much more. She says she\u2019ll stop doing good deeds, which shows that depersonalization has set in. And the problem with personal accomplishment is the whole point.<\/p>\n At one point, Glinda says, \u201cSomething is very wrong \u2013 I didn\u2019t get my way! I need to lie down.\u201d<\/p>\n When Elphaba starts a sentence to Fiyero about his pretending to be shallow and self-absorbed, he interrupts and says, \u201cExcuse me \u2013 there\u2019s no pretense here. I happen to be genuinely self-absorbed and deeply shallow.\u201d To which she responds: \u201cOh, please. No you\u2019re not. Otherwise you wouldn\u2019t be so unhappy.\u201d<\/p>\n Glinda\u2019s song, \u201cThe Girl in the Bubble,\u201d shows how getting all the riches and attention and status she wanted didn\u2019t turn out to be as satisfying as she had expected.<\/p>\n Elphaba, though a governor\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n They were also both good influences on her, since she was otherwise altogether too alone and discouraged.<\/p>\n In my post, Instead of Division, Schools of Thought<\/a>, 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\u2019re both right \u2013 and not only that, they\u2019re both necessary. The disadvantages of one can be addressed by the advantages of the other.<\/p>\n For this story, the interacting ideas are what I alliteratively call the street vs. straight. The \u201cstreet\u201d people make a ruckus because the issue is urgent, requires direct action, and requires it right now. The \u201cstraight\u201d people want respectability, and are mortified that the street people don\u2019t understand how important it is to work within the system.<\/p>\n We see this conflict during and immediately after the \u201cWonderful\u201d song. While the wizard is trying to persuade Elphaba to become more respectable and thereby gain acclaim, that\u2019s 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 \u2013 \u201cthink of what we could do together<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n In the end, a burned-out Elphaba couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n But Glinda would never have thought of doing that on her own. It was Elphaba\u2019s influence on her conscience, on her maturity, on her anguish, that moved her to action.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The final song that Elphaba and Glinda sing together makes this point: they both understand that their friendship has changed them both \u201cfor good.\u201d<\/p>\n =====================<\/p>\n See more of our movie reviews on magical activism:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The Movie \u201cWicked\u201d: Making a Real Person of the Witch of the West<\/a><\/p>\n Jasmine, Aladdin, and the Power of Nonviolence<\/a><\/p>\n Our blog’s movies reviews are listed on our list of all blog posts<\/a> under “Movie, Television, and Documentary Reviews”<\/strong><\/p>\nElphaba as Activist<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nBurnout<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\nNo act of charity goes unresented<\/p>\nBeing in the System<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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<\/a>When we first meet Glinda and Prince Fiyero at the college in the first movie, they\u2019re both rich, self-centered, feel entitled, and are spoiled rotten.<\/p>\nStreet vs. Straight<\/strong><\/h3>\n