Sunday Pages: "The Wizard of Oz"

A film by Victor Fleming

Dear Reader,

Sitting around the television Thanksgiving night, looking for something other than football to watch, we landed almost immediately on The Wizard of Oz. This is a movie I’d seen dozens of times, but only once or twice in adulthood, and not for many years.

There is still something magical—something wizardly, even—about being able to stream that film, in particular, at the push of a button. “Time was,” we told our Gen Z kids, “this movie came on TV once a year, and if you missed it, you had no way of watching it again until the following November.” This was met with the same patronizing looks that Hunk, Hickory, and Zeke give Dorothy at the end of the picture, when she’s relating what’d happened to her in Oz. “Sure, sure. Whatever you say.” (TikTok Nation can never really understand what things were like back in the Before Times, when we had to rely on rented videocassettes and dial-up modems.)

All the Americans over the age of 50 who have not seen at least some of The Wizard of Oz can comfortably fit in the backseat of a Honda Civic; the myriad horror stories about the making of the movie are explored in painstaking detail elsewhere. So I don’t have much to add to extant criticism, other than to say that it’s refreshing to see a fantasy film this lush that hasn’t been CGI’d to death. Sure, two cast members almost died during shooting, and a stuntwoman seriously injured her leg in a mishap involving a witch’s broom, but man that Technicolor pops.

(Also: my wife, who has seen the movie as often as I have but not recently, was positively guffawing at everything the Cowardly Lion did on screen. This wasn’t just the Thanksgiving wine talking. With his wonderfully expressive face and unmistakable New York accent, Bert Lahr is a laugh riot—still. Small wonder that Judy Garland kept cracking up during his scenes.)

What interested me is what I might take away from the film on viewing it now, at age 52, in the dying days of 2024, as we await the second behind-the-curtain installation of our own resident fraud. I was also curious how The Wizard of Oz differed from L. Frank Baum’s children’s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, on which the movie is based. So on Friday, over a plate of leftover turkey, I read what seemed to me like a blatant ripoff of Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in Kansas—which is not far from what Baum intended it to be. (The “wonderful” title kind of gives it away.)

Let’s start with the source material. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in May of 1900, six months before William McKinley’s re-election: the apogee of overt American Empire, and the era before federal regulations, civil rights, women’s suffrage, and income taxes that MAGA wants to return to. Baum—an imaginative, theatrical guy who was heavily influenced by his mother-in-law, the great abolitionist and voting rights activist Matilda Jocelyn Gage—died in May 1919, six months after Armistice Day, 18 months before the first national election in which women could vote, and three years before Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota—a small Midwestern city where, unlike in The Wizard of Oz, the snow is not made of asbestos.

I remember hearing that the book was some sort of allegory of 19th century America, in which the Scarecrow represented farmers, the Tin Woodman factory laborers, and the Cowardly Lion William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic Party presidential nominee who lost to McKinley in 1896 and 1900. I love stuff like that! So I tracked it down. Turns out that the author of this inventive theory was a high school English teacher named Henry M. Littlefield, whose essay, “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism”—which would have made a nice “Sunday Pages” back in the day—ran in American Quarterly in 1964. He writes:

Dorothy’s house has come down on the Wicked Witch of the East, killing her. Nature, by sheer accident, can provide benefits, for indirectly the cyclone has disposed of one of the two truly bad influences in the land of Oz. Notice that evil ruled in both the East and the West; after Dorothy’s coming it rules only in the West.

The Wicked Witch of the East had kept the little Munchkin people “in bondage for many years, making them slave for her night and day.” (pp. 22-23). Just what this slavery entailed is not immediately clear, but Baum later gives us a specific example. The Tin Woodman, whom Dorothy meets on her way to the Emerald City, had been put under a spell by the Witch of the East. Once an independent and hard working human being, the Woodman found that each time he swung his axe it chopped off a different part of his body. Knowing no other trade he “worked harder than ever,” for luckily in Oz tinsmiths can repair such things. Soon the Woodman was all tin (p. 59). In this way Eastern witchcraft dehumanized a simple laborer so that the faster and better he worked the more quickly he became a kind of machine. Here is a Populist view of evil Eastern influences on honest labor which could hardly be more pointed.

In the book, there are not magical ruby slippers but charmed silver shoes. Littlefield attaches enormous significance to this choice. Nowadays, William Jennings Bryan is known, insofar as he’s known at all, for his “Cross of Gold” speech, in which he railed against the gold standard that he believed was helping rich Eastern industrialists and hurting the yeomen of the Middle West. He was for “free silver,” or “bimetallism,” an expansionary monetary system that would have almost certainly caused a huge spike in the inflation rate and made the Panic of 1896 into a years-long Great Disorder of the kind that roiled the German economy in the 1920s. But I digress.

Silver, Littlefield argues, “represents a real force in a land of illusion, and neither the Cowardly Lion nor Bryan truly needs or understands its use.” The gold standard is represented in the book by what Baum, who was evidently unfamiliar with the Elton John song, annoyingly refers to as “the road of yellow brick.”

The ragtag crew making its way to the Emerald City Littlefield compares to “Coxey’s Army of tramps and indigents, marching to ask President Cleveland for work in 1894, [who appear] no more naively innocent than this group of four characters going to see a humbug Wizard, to request favors that only the little girl among them deserves.” I’m not sure anyone remembered Coxey’s Army even in 1900, and that incident was long forgotten by the time the motion picture came out.

Something that happens in the book but not the movie: all visitors to the Emerald City are issued emerald glasses, which are also worn by all the inhabitants of the Oz capital. That’s what makes the Emerald City green. This, I think, is the most compelling piece of Littlefield’s argument:

Dorothy later discovers that the greenness of dresses and ribbons disappears on leaving, and everything becomes a bland white. Perhaps the magic of any city is thus self-imposed. But the Wizard dwells here and so the Emerald City represents the national Capitol. The Wizard, a little bumbling old man, hiding behind a façade of papier-mâché and noise, might be any president from Grant to McKinley. He comes straight from the fairgrounds of Omaha, Nebraska, and he symbolizes the American criterion for leadership—he is able to be everything to everybody.

Thus, in 1964, does Littlefield equate the Great Oz with the Chief Executive, a fraud who is, in reality, a bumbling old man. He is able to be everything to everybody.

Baum was not an overtly political guy, and certainly no kind of activist. Whether he intended The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to be a veiled commentary of the turn-of-the-century United States—whether he was himself the political pundit behind the curtain—is anybody’s guess. Even so, Littlefield’s theory is compelling. The geopolitics of Oz support his argument. The North and the South are presided over by “good” witches; the West and the East, by “wicked” ones. Consider: an American writer who was born in Union territory four years before the Civil War would probably be more inclined to install a wicked witch in the South, not the East.

By the time the movie came out, all of that gold standard stuff was ancient history. The winds of change were blowing hard enough to uproot Dorothy’s house and hurl it over the rainbow. The U.S. was suffering through the tenth(!) year of a crippling depression that seemed endless. In Europe, fascism was on the march: in Italy, in Spain, in Germany. The Wizard of Oz was released nationwide on August 25, 1939—exactly one week before Adolf Hitler’s Nazis rolled into Poland, kicking off the Second World War.

And so, as the world teetered on the brink of fascist hegemony, Hollywood was concocting, and moviegoers were thirsty for, fantastical landscapes populated by Flying Monkeys, members in good standing of the Lollipop Guild, angry apple trees, and lions who talk like Edward G. Robinson. Not that I blame them. Who among us wouldn’t want to vanish over the rainbow sometime between now and January 20th?

Here are some observations from Thursday’s viewing:

First, this is a movie dominated by strong women. In Oz, the patriarchy has been smashed! With the exception of the eponymous wizard—who turns out to be a total grifter—all of the power is concentrated in the hands of women. The men of the movie, meanwhile, are cowards and frauds. Dorothy is the unquestioned leader of her group of misfits; the Wicked Witch of the West is the formidable villain; Glinda, the “good” witch, who is actually kind of an asshole, ultimately reveals the secret to getting back to Kansas. And back in Kansas, Auntie Em oversees the farmhands with an iron fist; she takes on the malevolent Miss Gulch, while Uncle Henry grins idiotically, and perhaps drunkenly, in his well-worn chair.

And then there is the MacGuffin, the conflict that initiates the film’s action. The aforementioned Almira Gulch—who, we’re told, owns half the county—shows up on her bicycle with an order from the sheriff: Toto, Dorothy’s beloved dog, who has growled and snapped at the mean old lady, is to be seized by Gulch and taken to be “destroyed.” Em gives her a piece of her mind, sort of, but ultimately yields. “We can’t go against the law,” she explains to Dorothy. Gulch takes Toto and puts him in a picnic basket, from which the clever pooch promptly escapes. He returns home, whereupon Dorothy decides to run away, for Toto’s protection.

None of that is in the book. Almira Gulch is exclusively a cinematic invention.

And while that scene is textbook Hollywood emotional manipulation—What child watching The Wizard of Oz wants to see Toto euthanized? Who blames Dorothy for getting the hell out of there?—it does not seem far-fetched to suggest that a sequence from a 1939 movie involving a heartless agent of the state coming to collect the most vulnerable member of a household, with the full backing of the law, and for the express purpose of extermination, was, consciously or otherwise, written with Nazis in mind. Art imitates life.

But the most ominous takeaway from watching The Wizard of Oz in 2024 is this: even as THE END appears on the sepia screen, the initial conflict remains unresolved. At the denouement, Dorothy is back in her bed, surrounded by all of her loved ones: Auntie Em and Uncle Henry; Zeke, Hickory, and Hunk. Even Professor Marvel takes a break from advising the Crowned Heads of Europe to check in on her. At some point, we should learn that Almira Gulch died in the cyclone—that a house really did fall on her—but no! Dorothy is so relieved to be home, so happy to be back with her dour aunt and useless uncle, that the grim reality of her situation seems to have eluded her: Toto’s escape is temporary, and no amount of water will deter the oligarchical Miss Gulch from returning to claim the dog.

“There’s no place like home,” while an objectively true statement, is, on its face, neither positive nor negative. Home could be good; home could be bad; we don’t know. The movie asks us to think of “home” as a magical place, even as Dorothy spends most of her screen-time exploring a place that is literally magical. Even as a child, I wondered why she would want to return to bleak, lonely Kansas, and to her unpleasant aunt and doddering uncle, when she could stay in Oz with her colorful new friends.

Once landed over the rainbow, Dorothy goes to great lengths to make it back home, only to find that home is just as unsafe as it had been when she decided to leave it. Home is where “ding dong” means that the witch is not dead but at the door, basket at the ready, eager to go full Kristi Noem on Toto. We are back where we started. Nothing has changed.

The ending of The Wizard of Oz, then, is ambiguous. The lost child is returned, and the thankful adults are gathered round her bed, in a formation of protection—swell. But what will the grown-ups do when the Nazi returns? Will they capitulate, like Auntie Em did the first time? Or, given a second chance, will they fight back? We are not told.

Fifty days from today, our own Almira Gulch/humbug Oz/overgrown orange Munchkin will return to power. Fifty days from today, Donald Trump (his name even sounds like something Frank Baum cooked up!) will retake the White House—which, even with the increase in cyclones due to climate change, is unlikely to rise into the D.C. air and fall on top of the Wicked Witch of Fifth Avenue.

The danger is real, is imminent. Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road; hello, red MAGA hat.

Given a second chance, what will we do?

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Photo credit: My TV, as seen from my couch.