‘Wicked: Part I’ Shows Us How Fascism Is Already On Its Way
Image; Universal Pictures[
After I left the theater for the midnight showing of Wicked, dressed in green and wearing a floppy pink hat, the first thing I did upon getting home was cry. I cried so much because, like Cabaret and other musicals before it, its on-the-nose themes made me think about my own country and where we might be going.
Based on the 1995 Gregory Maguire title of the same name, Wicked is about the life of the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, referred to in this text as Elphaba. The book chronicles her life as she struggles against the authoritarian Wizard of Oz, a fascistic figure who scapegoats entire classes of people to stay in power, including, eventually, Elphaba herself.
It’s ultimately a tragic tale about how the winners of history can turn fighters for justice into villains.
The musical never abandoned this theme, but it does become less prominent, with the emotional core switching to Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship and the rise of Ozian authoritarianism becoming more of a B-plot. While Maguire’s original retelling had some flashy, risque elements, it’s undoubtedly more substantive than the musical. A large part of the book is about Elphaba’s activism — something the musical only briefly touches upon.
The movie is a hybrid of these two visions. It follows the structure of the musical but uses visuals to heighten the authoritarian (arguably fascist) aesthetic that first came from the book. We are aware of Ozian’s discriminatory nature throughout the film in a way that feels much more consequential than a simple B-plot.
In the wake of the 2024 election, where a right-wing authoritarian government has secured power, one can look at Wicked and almost see the edges of what a possible fascist future could look like, and it makes me incredibly sad.
The Fear of the Other
Again, Wicked, whether we are talking about the book, musical, or movie, has always been explicitly focused on fascism — i.e., a project of ultranationalist state-building that relies on myth-making to try to return the nation to a hyper-idealized, unrealized time.
In the film, our fascist leader is the Wizard of Oz, a fraud from the “real world” who took advantage of local myth to build himself up as a savior figure. When our leads — Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande-Butera), respectively — enter his capital, the Emerald City, we see this propaganda firsthand via the song One Short Day, where citizens praise him for allegedly saving Oz from misfortune. Most people view him as a reverential figure, even Elphaba, who initially aims to become his magical advisor (see The Wizard and I).
The Wizard, though, is a fraud who cannot cast the very magic he claims to have mastered. He instead uses cheap tricks and misdirections to maintain his power.
Yet, like any fascist, his project of ultranationalism doesn’t start and end with being charismatic. He has actively scapegoated the talking Animal population, using the public’s distrust of them following the Great Famine as a way to maintain order. As one professor lectures:
“There have been great changes throughout Oz with the rejection of animal culture. However, there was a time before you were born when life in Oz was different. When one could walk these halls and see a snow leopard solving an equation or an antelope explicating a sonnet. So when and why did this change?…[The Great Drought]. Food grew scarce and when people are hungry and angry, well, then they look for [someone to blame].”
From the film’s early moments, the viewer is shown the fallout from Oz’s backlash to animal culture. Sometimes, it is subtle. When Elphaba is born, all those in servant positions — from the maid bear Dulcibear (Sharon D. Clarke) to the Wolf Doctor (Jenna Boyd), who helps with the delivery — are animals. By the time we get to Elphaba’s young adulthood at Shiz University, her history teacher Dr. Dillamond (Peter Dinklage), a talking goat, has his chalkboard vandalized with the graffiti: Animals Should Be Seen Not Heard.
This fear of the “other” is a pervasive element of fascism. Scholar Umberto Eco, in his essay, Ur-Fascism, talked about how Fear of difference was a defining element of fascist governance, calling it an “appeal against the intruders” and “racist by definition.”
Eventually, Dr. Dillamond is sacked from the school, as animals are no longer permitted to teach. A new teacher enters the classroom and gives a demonstration of the “future,” where animals will be caged from such an early age that they never learn how to speak.
This fear of difference is not limited to a single minority group either but is more generalized. One of the reasons Elphaba becomes such a perfect scapegoat in the story is her green skin. People are disgusted by it. Whenever she enters a room, Elphaba is so used to people being reviled by the very sight of it that she defaults to explaining to strangers that she is not ill.
It was easy for the people of Oz to grow to hate her because they had already been trained to hate differences of any sort.
The subtext for this animosity is not subtle, especially since a Black actress plays Elphaba. We are supposed to link this hatred of a green-skinned person to our society’s systemic discrimination of Black and Brown people. Talking animals may be fictional, but our world has no shortage of scapegoated groups, and this reading opens the door to view animals as a stand-in for many different marginalized groups in US society, such as migrants, the unhoused, and, in my case, the transgender community.
Seeing Ozian society strip an entire group of people’s rights away, for me personally, makes it very hard not to think about trans people. From name changes to bathroom access to the right to gender-affirming care, various states are currently banning all sorts of gender expression, and that will most likely continue on the federal level this year.
We are headed to a very dark place. And if the road to hell is paved by good intentions, this film makes the case that the road to fascism is paved by people who look a lot like Glinda.
Fascism’s proponents
Elphaba’s relationship with Glinda or Galinda (she changed her name in faux solidarity with Dr. Dillamond) is the emotional core of this story, and it’s not a happy one. It’s not even shocking; in fact, it’s that lack of surprise that makes it so horrifying.
If I were to summarize Glinda’s arc, it would be a straight line, where she ends precisely where she started.
Glinda starts at Shiz University, powerful and privileged. There is a funny punchline where it's revealed that being denied the right to learn magic by the Dean of Sorcery, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), is the first time Glinda has not gotten her way. She doesn’t want to think too deeply about things. While love interest Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) is lying to himself when he sings the lyric, “Nothing matters, but knowing nothing matters” in the song Dancing Through Life, Glinda seems to believe it because her circumstances have never had her need to question the status quo.
Everything in her life has been fine, and she doesn’t understand (or, more like, doesn’t want to understand) why that approach doesn’t work for everyone. The advice she gives to Elphaba in the fan-favorite song Popular reflects this outlook. The song essentially encourages assimilationism. She tells Elphaba to learn to dress in the right way and say the right things, and she, too, will be popular—as if marginalized people can smile and nod at their oppressors into solidarity.
Glinda never admits it directly, but she resents Elphaba. It frustrates her that Elphaba has lucked into the one thing she wants but cannot have, and Glinda bullies Elphaba for a large portion of the film. To the point where Elphaba’s only real friend for much of it is Dr. Dillamond.
In the film, Glinda and Elphaba’s relationship only begins to develop because Elphaba gives Glinda the thing she wants. She convinces the Dean of Sorcery, Madame Morrible, to teach Glinda magic, and that kindness makes Glinda feel guilty enough to intervene in a humiliating situation on Elphaba’s behalf.
It’s not clear she would have still done this if Elphaba had not first convinced Madame Morrible to teach Glinda magic.
While the two become friends — replete with a makeover and everything — this dynamic does not change. Glinda is never willing to put aside her own self-interest to help others. When Elphaba asks her classmates if they will do anything after Dr. Dillamond is forcibly removed from class, Glinda remains in her seat. When both Elphaba and Glinda learn that the Wizard is a fraud imposing cultural genocide on talking animals, she spends her time trying to convince Elphaba not to defect.
Glinda’s arc in this first film is that she has the potential to change — to be something else, something better — and she chooses not to.
The truth is that fascism doesn’t hurt everyone. Umberto Eco described it as relying on a “selective populism” where “the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
The animals don’t benefit from Ozian fascism, but people like Glinda do.
It’s unsurprising that she decides not to help Elphaba in the struggle against Ozian fascism as she benefits from staying in line, but it’s still heartbreaking. One of the things that caused me to cry after leaving the theater was realizing how many Glindas there will be in my life over the next few years—people who care about me, people who even say they love me but aren’t willing to make that leap and do something about it.
Instead, they will not only step aside but, like Glinda, enforce the very things that hurt me.
I am seeing a lot of self-professed liberals and leftists looking at the 2024 election and concluding that the thing that caused them to lose was being too supportive of trans rights. Commentators and politicians are currently writing op-eds and giving interviews about how we should distance ourselves from the trans community — from people like me.
And this distancing — this abandoning of a small population to appeal to a far-right government — scares me because such a move tends to go poorly for the group being scapegoated.
And sadly, it’s as American as apple pie.
An American conclusion
It needs to be highlighted that within the film, Ozian fascism did not come from Oz but was directly imported from America. The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) flew here to Oz on a balloon, and he tells Elphaba how he is merely copying what his leaders do back home:
“When I first got here, there was discord. There was discontent. And back where I come from [i.e. America], everybody knows that the best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy.”
There is something very peculiar about one of the biggest films in the world right now pointing to the ingrained problem of American fascism, and yet our country is still heading in that direction anyway. Our society recognizes the problem intellectually, but the moment things become about reality (and not merely just fiction), support for fighting fascism appears to wane.
It seems that my fellow Americans will accept one set of morals in the theater and another in real life, that we have more empathy for fictional talking animals on the Silver Screen than marginalized citizens like trans people in the United States.
So you see, this movie made me cry because something bad isn’t just happening in Oz.