What’s up in Oz? A mythological perspective on the Wizard of Oz and the lastest musical ‘Wicked‘
by Ton van der Kroon
EASE ON DOWN THE ROAD
One of my childhood guilty pleasures was the fact that I liked musicals, in a time when boys were not supposed to like dressing up, dance or sing along. But I did: I preferred theatre over football, and the beauty of ballet over the competition of sports. When I was small I savoured the original version of the Wizard of Oz, with Judy Garland as Dorothy, and later – in my puberty years, I loved the all-black version of The Wiz, with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson as the leading characters. I listened endlessly to its magical songs, which resonated with my own search through puberty to a place called ‘home.’ Somewhere over the rainbow, A brand New Day, Ease on down the road, He’s the wizard… They are all ingrained in my memory.
THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD
Later on in life, when I left university and travelled on a personal quest to the United States, I found myself lost in New York one day. It was New Years eve of 1988 and I wondered what madness had captured me to quit university and leap ‘into the unknown’. When I was leaving a broadway theater cafe with my two elder brothers, who were both living at that time in the States, a cap stopped. Not one of the square modern taxis, but an old, round yellow cap. Exactly the same as the yellow cap from the Wiz. From that moment I knew: I am on my own Yellow Brick Road, hopefully leading me to the Emerald City – and in the end – leading me home…
And indeed: nine months of travelling through the States, meeting people just as strange as Tin Man, Sacrecrow, or the cowardly lion, I returned home, richer and different than before. And what’s more: I had found my mission in life. (men’s work)
WICKED IS GOOD
I always kept dear memories of the United States but never returned. I followed their politics, their culture and – of course – their musicals, like Into the Woods, Chicago, Barbie and so many more. When a new version of the Wizard of Oz was out I was immediately enthusiastic, even more so when I learned the name of the musical is ‘Wicked’. It seemed there was much more to the story of the Wicked Witch of the West. Maybe she wasn’t so evil after all…
We had seen this reversed character exploration of the villains earlier in the movie Maleficent, the thirteenth fairy that wasn’t invited to the party of Sleeping Beauty. Suddenly we understood that her maliciousness came from trauma, and we learned about the untold story. It seemed to become a current theme in movies, earlier touched upon in Star Wars. One of my all time favourite movie scenes is when Luke Skywalker frees and redeems his dying father and all time villain Darth Vader, who had turned to the ‘dark side’.
DELUSION
I was looking forward to another beautiful and mythological visit of the land of Oz, but from the moment ‘Wicked’ started I felt a deep discomfort and uneasiness, which turned soon into dread and nausea. The new musical movie turned out to be a delusional disappointment, possibly due to my sweet childhood memories and high expectations. But it also intrigued me: what had gone wrong? What is the message here? What does it say about the world we live in – a question I regularly ask myself as a mythologist – and especially: what does it say about America? There seems to be something wicked with ’Wicked’.
To start out with something positive: many of the decors were not CGI- created but real made decors in a studio. A plus in a time when more and more movies rely on artificial intelligence and the difference between reality and fantasy and between truth and fakenews is difficult to make. But it couldn’t save the Way Too Long, Oversized, Sugarcoated, Emulated and Phantasmagorical nature of Wicked. It seemed as if they had put a mixture of Barbie and Maleficent, the Hobbit and Harry Potter and Shrek and Grease into a blender, shaked really well and the result was… Wicked. Archetypes are diluted into mere stereotypes and the whole musical turns into a Bollywood Multiverse. This mixture of everything, in which we don’t have a clue anymore who is good and who is bad, and what’s the point and what’s the plot, is something deeply symbolic to the times we are living in.
FANTASIA
What was once a powerful, metaphorical story about life and growing up, about good and evil, had become a sort of sordid sorority singalong about jealousy and sisterhood, pink and green, talking animals and flying broomsticks, girls in wheelchairs and charming princes and so much more. Whatever. For everyone something of their taste. Munchkinland has became a sort of eternal Disneyland, without real dwarves though – which was probably regarded as too problematic. Instead they have turned Munchkinland into some sort of over-the-top wokecountry, with endless rainbowcolors. The blue monkeys seem to have escaped from Planet of the Apes. The Shiz University is almost the same as Hogwarts, with a talking goat from Narnia as a teacher. And Michelle Yeoh, the mistress of the Wizard, just can’t sing.
One critic wrote: ‘With every lung-busting empowerment anthem, Wicked seems to be declaring that it’s a significant work of art. But this ‘drawn-out’ and ‘self-important’ film proves the musical didn’t need to be split into two parts.’ Just the way Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’ was stretched out into a trilogy on the big screen and thus ruined the beautiful simplicity of the story, Wicked seemed to drift far off into Fantasia and loose the origins of the charm of Oz.
ORIGIN
So let’s go back to the origins of Frank Baum’s children story and pinpoint a few of the elements that made it such an all-time success. He had woven many psychological and spiritual themes into his children’s story. There are a few I would like to mention:
- The Otherworld. Many stories talk about a world of fantasy, magic and imagination that helps us understand the real world. In Celtic mythology this is called the ‘otherworld’, and it is hardly seen as something unreal. Instead it is another dimension, to which one can travel on a spiritual quest or souljourney. Alice arrives in Wonderland by following a talking rabbit into the rabbithole. Peter Pan brings Wendy and the children to Neverland. The children in Narnia find the entrance to the otherworld through a cupboard. In The Never-Ending Story it is the young Sebastian who enters a magical world by reading a book. Each time a doorway opens between the real world and the magical world. But the world of fantasy seems to be much more real, in all of its strangeness, than reality. It provides challenges and lessons to become more wise and whole as a human being. As Diana Ross sings in The Wiz: “Living here, in this brand-new world, might be a fantasy. But it taught me to love, so it’s real, real to me.” This is exactly the reason why ‘Wicked’ is missing the point: it is all phantasy, without reality. The door is missing; the connection between the worlds. Now this might actually reflect the state of the world we live in: everything is possible, every fantasy might become reality, there is no limit, fakenews and alternative facts are everywhere, social media can cook up any story and present it as truth. Our society, the US in the lead, is quickly turning into the same phantasmagorical wicked madness in which the boundaries between reality and fiction, good and bad, up and down, are completely blurred. We are lost in Fantasia.
- The psychological element. Dorothy is meeting her brothers, her father and mother and other persona from her real life in another form in the fantasy world. Here she learns to love them, to conquer her own fears and to grow up and find her role in life. It resembles the initiation rites of indigenous people, when young men and women have to enter the woods to find their true calling. With the help of initiation rituals they come in contact with the world of the soul. Here they find the answers to their questions, before they return to the ‘normal’ world. This is the same in ‘The Wizard of Oz’: Dorothy learns to appreciate her mind (scarecrow), her heart (Tin man), and her courage, (the Lion) and to distinguish between good (Glinda) and bad (The Wicked Witch). Psychologically these two witches seem to be two sides of the feminine. By dealing with both sides, she becomes an adult and transfroms from a young girl into a adult woman. The whole story is meant as a metaphor of growing up and becoming an adult, just like the ancient initiation rituals.
- The spiritual element. There is an aspect to the story that isn’t so well known, but might be a crucial element to the success to this all-time classic. The Wizard of Oz follows the spiritual path of the seven chakra’s through the body. The Ruby Red Slippers refer to the lowest chakra, color Red. The Orange Poppyfield is connected to the second chakra, under the navel, color orange. The Yellow Brick Road symbolizes the third chakra, color yellow. The Emerald City is a metaphor for the heart, color green. The Blue Monkeys are a symbol for the throat chakra, color turkoois or light blue. The Wizard is the archetype connected to the third eye, color aquamarine blue. Glinda, the Good Witch of the South is connected to the crown chakra, color purple. Together they form all the seven chakras, or energycenters of the body. All the colors together form the symbol of the rainbow, so beautifully woven into the story by the famous and classic song ‘Over the rainbow’. When Glinda arrives in her bubble at the end of the journey, she tells Dorothy how she can go back home by clicking the heels of her Ruby Red Slippers three times. Thus by reaching the seventh chakra, and thus completing her journey through the otherworld, she can finally return to her normal, daily life.
THE REAL WORLD
This spiritual element of the journey seems to be overlooked by many interpreters and directors, as well as the general (American) public. It might just have been a major reason why the classic story touched the soul of a whole nation, but is unfortunately forgotten and misunderstood. When we loose the spiritual aspect of life, we get entangled in the material, mental and superficial side of life. To escape this we create a world of AI and fantasy, a world of consumerism and social media, basically to fill the inner gap, the emptiness we experience in the ‘real’ world. When we would invite the spirit and the heart back in, we wouldn’t be lost in the mind. The whole internet seems to be no more than an elongation of our own mind.
People like Elon Musk are the Wizards that pull the strings, not hindered by any conscience. President Trump is turning the world into his own fantasyworld. Just like a wicked Jester he mixes truths and lies so no one can see the difference anymore. His wet dream about a Riviera in the Middle East shows he has lost all sense of reality, and humanity, for that matter. Still many people see him as a saviour and the people have overwhelmingly voted for him. But in reality the jester is on the throne and their society has lost the heart, the true king. A Turkish proverb says: ‘When a clown enters a palace, he doens’t become a king. The palace turns into a circus’.
The one question is: How do we escape from this world of illusion, or Maya, as the buddhists call it, and return home? Because as long as we stay focused on making money, matter and materialism, we will stay hooked on the merry-go-round of the ego-mind. And the more our world will become chaotic, messy, evil and wicked.
MEGA- INITIATION
In addition to the loss of the true masculine – the good king – , we have lost the wise feminine, represented by Glinda. She symbolizes the great goddess, the high priestess, the connection to the universe and to the earth, or – in fairytale terms: Mother Goose, The Queen of Hearts, the one who can show us the way home. She has directed Dorothy’s journey all along. She knows we must first learn our lessons and face our demons, before we can return form Neverland. Possibly we are all, worldwide, in a mega-initiation of enormous size and scope, and only if we have learned our lessons Mother Earth will accept us again. Till that time she will haunt us with floods and fires, earthquakes and viruses till we have found our Yellow Brick Road to the heart.
- to be continued –
Ton van der Kroon
Author of 11 books on spirituality, men’s work, relationships and healing
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