Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Things I have done recently:

1. Read Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. It’s an epic, adult, all too human re-imagining of the world of Oz from the Wicked Witch’s perspective. If you love fantasy but find Tolkein overwrought, this is a great one to pick up. Also notable for the back cover quote from Wally Lamb, who, like Maguire, is a man best known for writing a book from the perspective of a woman. I’m just saying.
2. Listened to and/or viewed the musical adaption of Wicked. Massively different from the book in both tone and content, it was downright jarring to see Maguire’s sprawling Oz boiled down to Saved by the Broom: The College Years. A Wicked musical should by all rights feel like Les Miserables, and instead you get Hairspray. Still, it’s got a couple of catchy songs.
3. Watched the beloved 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz and noticed a few things that I’d simply never noticed before.

Premiere magazine recently put together a list of the 20 most overrated movies of all time, and The Wizard of Oz deservedly makes the list. That’s right, I said deservedly. Before you shout me right off the internet, keep in mind that there’s a big difference between the beloved and the good (just look at what we’ve done to Ronald Reagan). I hadn’t seen The Wizard of Oz all the way through since I was about eleven years old, and frankly it’s just not that good of a movie. This probably has more to do with the fact that Hollywood had little to no idea what it was doing in 1939, and the Golden Age wouldn’t really get going for another decade or more.

The Wizard of Oz is a lot shorter than you remember it, at about 100 minutes. There’s also a lot less happening in the movie than I (mis)remembered. Dorothy lands in Oz, gets sent down the Yellow Brick Road, picks up her three friends in rapid succession, goes to Oz, gets booted over to the Witch’s castle, melts the Witch, goes back to Oz, end of movie. I could have sworn there was more stuff, you know? In between these bullet points, the movie tries desperately to be a musical, but never really gets there. The exception, of course, is Judy Garland’s legendary rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The song is so beautiful, and Garland’s tone such a perfect mix of hope and melancholy, that you’ve got to wonder how it even got in to a movie where the next best thing is “If I Only Had a Brain”.

The movie survives in our memories solely because of Judy Garland. She’s one of only two truly good things in the entire film. She’s got an undeniable appeal, even surrounded by ridiculously proto-Hollywood acid trip set pieces and what I now feel is a truly uncomfortable amount of midgets. There’s something genuine and magnetic about her performance, maybe because she was seventeen when she made Wizard, or maybe because Judy Garland is a lot like Dorothy. Before she went over the rainbow to Hollywood, she was Ethel Gumm of Minnesota, and playing a somewhat out of place farm girl from Kansas might not have been too much of a stretch.

Dorothy speaks, as Maguire wrote, with “a throaty vehemence, like someone arguing through the threat of impending tears.” As I’ve heard it, that was always “the problem” with Judy Garland–she was a little girl who sang, incongruously, like a much more mature woman, and while her talent was undeniable, studios had no idea what to do with her. Simon Cowell had the same problem with Paris Bennett whenever she tried to sing something more “adult”. The Garland dilemma is made all the clearer whenever Glinda is on screen (surprisingly, only about ten minutes throughout the whole movie, another thing that caught me off guard). Judy Garland is a seventeen year-old who sings like a fully grown woman, while Billie Burke, who was playing Glinda at the age of 54, takes great pains to lilt her voice into an insufferably childish squeak. Don’t even get me started on Glinda’s dress. Or that crown.

So Judy Garland is one of the two good things in The Wizard of Oz. The other good thing is The Wicked Witch of the West. Bright green and possessed of a howling, classically vaudevillian kind of evil, she’s truly interesting to behold whenever she’s on screen, which again is not nearly as much as I had remembered. In fact, it feels as though they cut out some of the Witch’s dialogue in the shot just before her infamous melting. Given the Wicked Witch’s screen presence and squeaky Glinda batting her eyelashes and tossing out lines like, “Only bad witches are ugly,” it’s easy to see why Maguire felt the urge to write Wicked. I couldn’t help but root for the Witch, especially in regards to the Cowardly Lion. God almighty, how I wanted that lion to die.

One more thing. One of my favorite insults of all time comes from the scene in which Dorothy tries to pick an apple off of a talking tree. The tree angrily admonishes Dorothy with the line, “How would you like it if somebody picked your apples!” I always liked that line, because it’s a really bizarre sentence that still manages to be vaguely dirty. I was shocked, SHOCKED, to find upon second viewing that the tree never says it. I could have sworn he did. What he actually says is, “How would you like to have someone come along and pick something off of you?” Not nearly as snappy, and really just kind of medical and gross sounding out of context.

PS — this entry brought to you by my italics button.