On Wicked

It starts as a fairytale. Tall gates rise up, melting into a strange cage where monkeys roam, before we see the grounds of Xanadu, shrouded in mist, and the great house looming overhead with its sinister gothic windows; a mysteriously ominous music plays. These are the opening scenes of Citizen Kane before we see the protagonist, a dying man, utter his last word: "Rosebud." And with this, the tyrant mogul Charles Foster Kane sends us scurrying back into his hinterland, in a story told almost entirely in flashbacks, to work out how he ever became the "Citizen" Kane of the film's title. The movie's last reel gives us - and only us, in an act of blackest irony - something of an answer, but not before we have been warned by a character, giving up on ever finding the meaning of 'Rosebud', that no one thing could ever explain how somebody became as they are. 

Citizen Kane (1941) may offer up a template for the origin story with which we now find ourselves inundated, piecing through the life of somebody - preferably a villain, but not only - to work out in what ways they may have developed as they did. Characters subjected to this method in recent times include Han Solo, Cruella de Vil, Willie Wonka and Donald Trump, but the form has also expanded to include brands such as Nike or Cheetos. Of course Kane, though modelled on William Randolph Hearst, is a self-contained character within his own movie; the search for clues as to his psychology is what actually constructs the character that we come to know through the film. Citizen Kane, made in forbidding black and white, came two years after The Wizard of Oz (1939) drenched filmgoers in its astonishing Technicolor to tell the story of a little girl's adventures in a fantastical land. The Wizard of Oz was not an original story, as we know, but based on L. Frank Baum's book from 1900 - but it was able to bring some extraordinarily filmic touches to the story, which made the film supersede the book: one is the use of actors to portray characters in both worlds - an uncle becomes a lion, a horrible old woman turns into a witch; and another is the inspired transition from black and white to colour, in order to explicate the move from dreary Kansas to the wonderful world of Oz. It's fair to say that The Wizard of Oz, the film, is the definitive film version of The Wizard of Oz, rather than the book. 

By contrast there is no such definitive film version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), meaning that Lewis Carroll's book still reigns supreme: of course, Disney had a stab at it, in 1951, as the corporation did with every fairytale and children's book going - but that film is not considered one of the Disney classics. There have been dozens of other versions, including a wonderful Jan Svankmajer stop-motion version (1988), or the Tim Burton live-actioner, again for Disney (2010). Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was surely an inspiration for The Wizard of Oz, so obvious are the similarities between the two: a young girl, caught in a reverie, imagines herself transported to a different land, where she is forced to contend with various creatures and finally returns home. The differences, I think, are instructive. 

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the various animals that Alice encounters are predominantly hostile towards her, or ignore her completely; she has left her pet cat, Dinah, behind. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy - accompanied by her dog, Toto, befriends the first three creatures she meets and they proceed together, as a team; their course is mapped for them, along a yellow brick road, which they must follow all the way to a city, whereas Alice has no such clear direction, but instead goes through a number of doors and keyholes, is trapped in houses and wanders after various people that catch her eye. This is because Alice is caught in a far more ambiguous realm, and is the victim of an unnerving kind of logical perversity: things change or are not what they seem, and the child is often in tears, at a loss. Carroll seems to be pointing towards something disquietingly erotic, in these adult-voiced figures that disdain the little girl, treat each other with cruelty and violence, smirk, and disappear or transmogrify. Alice is confronted with the loss of her innocence. Dorothy by contrast is on a hero's adventure, and finds herself in a world of allyships and enmities, goodies and villains; there is even a moral of sorts, along the lines that you always have the strength within you to bla bla bla, and that there's no place like home. Alice seems to learn nothing, she merely suffers the chaos and indignities of an unreasonable adult world, finally deciding to revolt against it. 

Alice travels downwards, down the rabbit hole; Dorothy up. Perhaps this is due to the single biggest, most obvious difference between the two - Englishness and Americanness. Alice travels back down towards the roots of the old country, in a middle-class English dream of queens and kings, pets, nursery rhymes; Dorothy yearns for something else, and is lifted out of the normal, towards a land of enchantment, witches and wonder. The film of the book understands this, and Over the Rainbow builds on the idea. The song expresses a desire for liberty, emancipation, a land unbound by trials and tribulations. Simon Schama explores the song in his series The History of the Jews, and how it came into being through the Great Depression, but also through a particularly Jewish longing for freedom and peace, a land (America, or Zion) that could welcome and protect its people. The song is a wondering, a beautiful expression of hope; Defying Gravity, from Wicked (another song about flying) has none of that poetry, but instead is an expression of defiantly personal struggle, a tediously chest-beating neo-con I Will Survive. What is Elphaba flying from? She already lives over the rainbow! It's a terrible irony that where The Wizard of Oz travels upwards, Wicked insists on jumping back down to earth with a thump, explaining every bit of dream, rationalising all the magic and wonder, wrestling down the folly of the original. 

Wicked, the stage show, was based on a book from 1995 and premiered in 2003 - but it's astonishing how snugly it fits into the cinema landscape of 2024, with its cursed obsession for rationalising and humanising everything. This is the model favoured by Greta Gerwig with last year's Barbie, which starts off in a luridly colourful fictional world - Barbieland - before returning its protagonist, and spectators, to a mundane reality. The very last scene of the film finds Barbie turning into a real woman in Los Angeles. God help us. Are you sure you wouldn't you prefer a life of beach, babe? So it is with Wicked, which - like all the origin stories currently in the business of explaining fantasies with thin "irl" "psychology" - asks us to seek to understand how the wicked witch of the west became so horrible. 

She was rejected from birth because of her 'difference', you see; she had magic within her and wanted to use it for good, but fell into the wrong hands. Yadda yadda yadda. The film would have you know that this is how she got her broom; this is how she got her hat; she was born with her green face because of some sort of aberration. Rosebud! Here we are at the death of Charles Foster Kane, solemnly shaking our heads: "He became a monstrous egotist, you see, because he could never return to his childhood and the freedom of sledging on his favourite sled. That's why he was bad." That would already be a very thin and lamentable interpretation, were it earnestly foisted on us in Citizen Kane in the patronising way that Wicked proceeds - but at least Kane is a resolutely earthbound creation, who ran newspapers, had a wife, lived in a recognisable world. We don't need explanations for how the witch got kitted out in her apparel: that's just what a witch is like! Wicked wants us to know how Glinda got her name, and why the yellow brick road is yellow. Well. It's only fair for spectators/victims of this nonsense to turn Wicked's rationalising instincts against it, and say: "those things are as they are because they were imagined as such by a young girl in a fever dream." The fact that all of this was dreamed explains everything. There can be no psychological mapping of a character within an apparition! The only plausible act of psychoanalysis you could perform would be of the originating person, Dorothy - and The Wizard of Oz already does a good job of telling us why she conceives this world as she does, out of longing and displacement of her real life. 

Indeed, The Wizard of Oz already does a certain amount of explaining in its coda, after Dorothy has returned to Earth. But who cares about Kansas, and where home is? The dream element, the wonder, is the Emerald City, the flying monkeys, the witch withering and dying in a screaming pool of cloaks. The elements of magic don't need to be deconstructed for us. We know what a fairy and a witch are, what courage and spells and flying mean, how fantasy feeds our spirits. 

Sometimes when I have read my children fairytales I have had to fight an instinct to guide their interpretations of these stories - to amend the misogyny of Hansel and Gretel, for instance, with its wicked stepmother and evil old crone. Many retellings already do this, or they soften the tales, making them more palatable, stopping short - for instance - of having the big bad wolf eat Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother. This desire to explain and contextualise the stories - sorry guys, but did you know that pirates were actually murderers and rapists? - is understandable, because in some form these stories have contributed to creating the world we live in, an unequal society that stigmatises women, prizes youth, etc etc. But children are able to learn and understand these things in tandem with drinking in wonder and magic, the sense of unreality that helps them fantasise and parse the world, which feeds their imagination and spirit; they don't need to be constantly reminded they're earthbound and mortal, have ostensibly no more meaning in this world than a rat. To quote Laura Linney's character in You Can Count on Me: "he doesn't need you to rub his face in shit because you think it's good for him! He's gonna find out that the world is a horrible place and that people suck soon enough and without any help from you!"

Of course, this desire to explicate tales, to turn them inside out and implant in them a reasoning, for god's sake, can't be separated from a commercial imperative at the moment, which sees executives turning to "known IP" in order to "expand universes". This means that all the classics of yore are ripe for retelling. But it doesn't follow that when we seize these stories, we should have to drain them of their particularity and zest, that we should clobber the life out of them. Dodie Smith was a perfectly intelligent writer, and when she made Cruella De Vil an evil killer of dogs, she did that on purpose; it isn't a failing of the book and subsequent cartoon that we don't know what motivated her other than red hot evil. If we have to go back into these stories and find new ways of approaching them (by the way: we don't) then why not make up new magic within them, new characters that abide by the original properties of these tales, which can continue to inspire, terrorise and bewitch us?