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'Wicked' Has a Strained Relationship With Its Politics

By Chris Revelle | Film | December 6, 2024 |

Wicked Cynthia Erivo Ariana Grande Elphaba Glinda.jpg
Header Image Source: Universal Pictures

I mostly liked the novel Wicked by Gregory Maguire in all its darkness and overt political points, but I felt so-so about the stage musical adaptation that felt comparatively toothless, so when the movie adaptation came out, I felt ambivalent. The musical has its bangers, like “Popular,” “What Is This Feeling?” and “Defying Gravity,” and it blessedly omits Maguire’s uncomfortable fascinations with piss and bestiality, but the second act is a slog and overall the stage show seems terrified of engaging with the politics of the story. The recent film Wicked Part 1 does an admirable job of splitting the difference. Casting Cynthia Erivo was a brilliant way to drive home the racism allegories, and the movie also takes the political aspects seriously enough to acknowledge that Wicked is a story about fascism at its heart. While all art is political because it expresses a worldview, some art is more overtly political than others and I appreciated the movie went further than the stage show was willing to go. Unfortunately, Wicked doesn’t go quite far enough and winds up planting itself in a strained middle ground.


Much like my beloved Dune, Wicked’s metaphors are very simple, straightforward, and easy to parse. Elphaba experiences inequity and scorn due to the color of her skin, and the Animals (uppercase for the ones that can talk) represent just about any marginalized community that’s thrashed by oppressive forces to create an enemy scapegoat for the masses to hate. In case there needed to be a finer point on it, the primary Animal we see this oppression happen to is an actual goat, Dr. Dillamond.

In the film, when Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard sheepishly admits that the Animals are being rounded up to pin the people’s troubles on, I realized that it’s not remotely clear what those troubles are. The audience may be meant to see the senselessness of this kind of fascism and how there really isn’t much logic to it. It happens every day with how enough people are apparently happy to grind trans people into the ground while voting for the party that is all too happy to take their healthcare away. However, it feels instead like important context is missing. Why does the Wizard even feel the need to present a scapegoat in the first place? If you squint, you might see a potential thread that it’s all a feint to consolidate power while a ruckus draws the people’s attention, but I am not a fan of doing that work for a film that should be clearer about it.

As it is, I think Wicked is attempting to tell a story about the evils of fascism in a vacuum where no specific politics exist. Maybe there’s some other reason for that, but I suspect that’s the business side of movies reaching in. To make the most money, Wicked needs to be palatable to the largest number of people possible, so engaging with any specific political struggle risks alienating a potential audience. So Animals are rounded up and stripped of their rights and dignity, echoing many different fascist pogroms throughout history without putting that in any kind of context. The movie carries the stage show’s disinterest in foregrounding these elements while also wanting to tell a story about fascism. It almost puts it on the same level as something like Animal Farm as a sort of baby’s-first-fascism-allegory story and while there’s nothing wrong with that in theory, there are some snags that come with that choice.

Glinda is a complicated character. Ariana Grande does a fantastic job of playing Glinda’s shallowness and vapidity as well as her budding emotional depth. Through her friendship with Elphaba, Glinda comes quite close to realizing a more progressive and genuinely caring self, but the movie offers enough clues that indicate she’ll eventually fall short of this breakthrough. Ultimately though, when this white woman born to wealth and privilege is confronted with how the power structure of Oz treats a woman of color (who’s also her best friend), she takes that power structure’s side. She saw all the same things Elphaba did: the hollow powerlessness of the Wizard, the intentional scapegoating and oppression of the Animals, and the Oz government’s willingness to brand Elphaba a traitor to silence her, but none of those were enough to break Glinda away from the Wizard and his fascists. The movie makes it clear that Glinda is devastated and conflicted by this, but at the end of the day, she still chooses to remain at the table with fascists instead of leaving with her best friend.

The question of whether Glinda is a fascist is somewhat immaterial because as a willing collaborator with fascists, it doesn’t matter. A saying comes to mind: “If there’s a Nazi at the table and ten other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis.” It doesn’t make Glinda any less genuine in her pain or her love for Elphaba, but it’s undeniable that Glinda pulled up her seat at the Wizard’s table. Power and ascendancy meant more to her in the end. This feels clearer in the novel, but the stage show seems far too in love with Glinda as a character to let that be so. The movie leaves space to interpret things in either direction, but it carries the lack of context from the stage show which makes it confusing what they intend for audiences to feel. I doubt we’re supposed to hate Glinda, but that chafes against her fascist turn. I think we’re meant to challenge our concepts of good and evil and interrogate them as social constructs. The “wicked” witch is a social activist who’s strong in her convictions while the “good” witch turned down her chance to flee to take a seat of power at a fascist table. That’s an interesting reading, but I question how this point is being made. How powerful can a story about fascism be if it can’t connect it to something real or recognizable? What are we really getting if we dilute that message for a mass-market commercial product? Why does a story that doesn’t want to get “too political” want to be about fascism anyway? Perhaps I’ll eat my hat and Part 2 will answer all this and then some, but till then, the politics of Wicked’s story feel awfully strained.