I’m a bit late to seeing part 2 of Wicked’s movie adaptation, but I finally got around to it and have a few brief thoughts. I’m no life-long fan, coming to the movie with little memory of seeing the musical once long ago. There have been plenty of critics having their say, but I’ve not read them and my thoughts here are my own, though I know some on the left have been critical of the politics of part 2 particularly. I’ll set aside here all that could be said on the controversies of the publicity tour and press coverage and just stick to the content itself.

First, both parts were impressive and enjoyable musical performances from the director, composer, main actresses, and chorus. The music sticks with you and the movies are a fun watch, but we’ll take one step past that here.

Part 1 offered a chance for reflection on marginalized experience, the propaganda machine of authoritarianism, and differing approaches to combating injustice - sacrificing ideals for power within the system out of an optimistic vision of its potential, or stubborn sticking to ideals in a hard break with a system compromised by authoritarianism, even with a bleak outlook for the possibility for change when exiled from the center of power. Elphaba’s experience felt primary to the story in part one, particularly as we saw her childhood and experienced the bulk of the story following her point of view. However, I said at the time that I felt the target audience of the film was the crowd that would more easily identify with Glinda - comfortable, educated, socially exalted, mostly white, women with a tendency to performative moves like Glinda’s pointless renaming of herself in honor of Dr. Dillamond - inviting them to take a step beyond performative charity and open their eyes to injustice amid rising authoritarianism. This was the character arc and choice facing Glinda, and to me it seemed the primary message to comfortable suburban female audiences in an age of Trump - goodness isn’t just about performing respectability, open your eyes to what lies beneath the surface.

Part 2 confirmed that instinct was correct and took it in a troubling direction. Captive to its duty to follow the musical and it’s challenging task of being a Wizard of Oz tie-in, the plot careens through Dorothy sightings, major unearned shifts in the world and characters, and past plot holes, indecision about how powerful the villains actually are, and character decisionmaking that doesn’t quite add up.

Amid all of that, it dabbles in tropes of grand myth and fairy tale, trying to say something about the concepts of goodness and evil. In my eyes, Glinda is the stand-in for the target audience even more strongly here and clearly became the center of the story and its aims in the cultural moment.

The childhood we see this time is Glinda’s, putting her character arc firmly at the center of the story. The newly added song “The Girl in the Bubble” centers her story and highlight's the movie’s aim that she and those she represents in the audience need to be activated to step out of their bubble and fight. Elphaba's journey is frustrated at every turn and sometimes incoherent, but it is used to set the stage for the fundamental conflict in front of Glinda.

The newly added song for Elphaba, “No Place Like Home”, sums up much of what the movie is doing. She sings about the land of Oz as a thinly-veiled analogy to Trump’s America, never loving she who is on the margins. She's still lovingly singing of Oz anyway as “a promise, an idea”, a land with so much meaning. She sings to the crowd (and to the Glindas of the world) of Oz/America as a home to fight for, with Hamilton-like idealization of America coming out of the mouth of the actor of color, while glossing over the enslavement and injustice that is foundational to the narrative and directly visible on the stage/screen.

Elphaba, stand-in for the marginalized, the activist, and the more radical leftist, tries to organize without meaningful effect, demonstrating the inability for the marginalized to successfully act for themselves or create significant change, in the eyes of the storyteller.

The movie's world ends with no place in it for Elphaba and all those like her who don't fit cultural norms. Her story, her struggles, and her suffering are instrumentalized as a mere object lesson passed on like the grimoire into the hands of Glinda, so that she (wealthy, educated, powerful, comfortable, elite, conventionally attractive, performatively good, without stubbornly held ideals) can be the one take power and make change. A story seemingly aiming to be encouraging to those who feel unseen ends with their exclusion and serving as merely a plot device to the growth and agency of the real star who is able to be a hero - she who experiences society's privilege.

Glinda receives easy unearned forgiveness from Elphaba based on the good vibes of their school friendship. Justice is envisioned as turning violence and incarceration back onto the Trump stand-ins and replacing the person at the top of the societal hierarchy with a gentler elite (Glinda) still palatable to the wealthy of Oz, not shaking things up too much but being a bit nicer to the animals. This story’s version of a good ending is all the comfortable educated ladies (and men too but mostly ladies in the target audience) who love singing “Defying Gravity” coming out to vote so that Kamala Harris-Glinda (or someone like her) can get into office, lock up Trump, and make America a little nicer. State power is not rethought critically at all, but is the instrument (via winged monkey force) towards needed change, as long as a different character is swapped into the top of the state. Incarceration is not rethought at all after animals in cages are the powerful visual of injustice, but it is maintained and a different character is swapped into the cages. Elphaba and “inconvenient” people like her have no place in the new society, and there is no reexamination of what led to her marginalization or the hierarchic structures that elevate Glindas and suppress Elphabas. In fact, she actively chooses her own deeper symbolic marginalization as a “wicked” foil that would prop up Glinda's regime, and make Glinda's reforms seem safe, acceptable, and moderate by comparison. There's some historical parallel to moderately liberal reform elements that don't touch the major foundational issues gaining success from the fears of the conservative or comfortable about more serious left-wing movements actually trying to meaningfully restructure the status quo but talked up as great threats to be feared by enemies and media (Malcolm X and the Black Panthers being one example that comes to mind).

Some might think I’m expecting too much out of a musical, but I think this musical sees itself as having something meaningful to say in the midst of Trump's reign and growing authoritarianism. I think it sees itself as political, inspirational, and activating people towards action, but it fails significantly.

There were other options here that still could have fit with tying in to The Wizard of Oz and done something at least a bit different. In an anarchist telling, Elphaba and the animals could have survived in secret at Kiamo Ko, cultivating an alternative egalitarian society of mutual care and goodness. That would have given them agency in the story to actually make change for themselves. We would have seen those on the margins actively creating a good life separate from state power, interdependent and redemptive, an alternative vision to the hierarchic industrial grandeur of Oz. Alternatively for a more militant angle, Elphaba could have come back after Dorothy was gone to have a revolution. This story cannot imagine that Oz needs significant change to its basic structures. To the storyteller, Oz only needs the Wizard voted out and Kamala/Glinda in the White/Emerald House of power.

Any effort by marginalized characters themselves ends up powerless and bankrupt. All real agency is literally placed into the hands of Glinda/educated comfortable girl-bosses by Elphaba, and the best she can do is hope they’ve learned from having a marginalized friend how to use the power that is theirs by right (of course, who else could possibly have it?). Elphaba can only hope that Glinda can bring the animals back into the great Oz Dream, so they too can walk the roads built by their slave labor which mar their homeland, and thrust them into economic dependence upon the elites of Oz. Don’t worry, Glinda's good now, still lifting everyone’s spirits, and the promise of Oz will surely work out well for everyone. (She’ll send the flying monkeys to prosecute you if not.)