Oz The Great and Powerful

On Friday night, I decided to make up with Joe The phone-breaking Plumber. I invited him to a movie: Disney's "Oz The Great and Powerful".

People seem to be in two camps. Some love "Oz The Great and Powerful": some hate it. Some, like Kyle, are in both camps simultaneously.

I liked the movie a lot. So did Joe.

My criteria were:

1. Does the movie mesh well with the plot of the original movie?; and,
2. Does its allegorical historic interpretation mesh well with the school of scholarship first established by Littlefield (1964)?

I was first introduced to the Littlefield interpretation by Dr. Ferenc Szasz in his remarkable and unique lectures on American cultural and religious history at the University of New Mexico in 1979-80. Since then, others have tried to debunk the interpretation, but it still stands, as far as I'm concerned. Here is a good essay regarding the scholarship. Wikipedia summarizes:

Littlefield and other historians have suggested that Baum modeled the Cowardly Lion after politician William Jennings Bryan, or politicians in general. Republicans mocked Bryan as indecisive, or a coward, which became the basis of the character.

Historian Quentin Taylor sees additional metaphors, including:

• The Scarecrow as a representation of American farmers and their troubles in the late 19th century.

• The Tin Man representing the American steel industry's failures to combat increased international competition at the time

• The Cowardly Lion as a metaphor for the American military's performance in the Spanish-American War.

Taylor also claimed a sort of iconography for the cyclone: it was used in the 1890s as a metaphor for a political revolution that would transform the drab country into a land of color and unlimited prosperity. It was also used by editorial cartoonists of the 1890s to represent political upheaval.

Other putative allegorical devices of the book include the Wicked Witch of the West as a figure for the actual American West; if this is true, then the monkeys could represent another western danger: Native Americans.

...Apart from intentional symbolism, scholars have speculated on the sources of Baum's ideas and imagery. The "man behind the curtain" could be a reference to automated store window displays of the sort famous at Christmas season in big city department stores; many people watching the fancy clockwork motions of animals and mannequins thought there must be an operator behind the curtain pulling the levers to make them move (Baum was the editor of the trade magazine read by window dressers).

The allegorical interpretation of the new movie is different from, but analogous, to the original. I notice color scheme of the two witches are hot red (Witch of the West, symbolizing an impetuous and naive yearning for war, symbolic of American history since 9/11) and cool green (Witch of the East, symbolizing, once again in Baum's way, the power of money). Money dominates all. The defense of Oz depends on the newly-installed charlatan, the Wizard of Oz, who relies on artifice and misdirection to confound and confuse his enemies. So, what does he represent? He represents Hollywood! America's only defense against the machinations of J.P. Morgan and its control over the Pentagon are the smoke and mirrors of the movies! Wow!

The movie has weaknesses too, but whose weaknesses are those, precisely? Everyone falls over themselves in the movie to offer immediate, slavish loyalty to the Wizard. This abasement is very un-American - we used to be a proud Republic, after all, and eschewed all that European nonsense - but that is PRECISELY who we've become since 9/11! What jokes we are! Baum himself would have been sadly disappointed to see what we made of ourselves in the intervening century.

The love story between Glinda and the Wizard is absurd, but it is de rigeur in Disney movies these days. Kind-of clunky.

So, a few clunky things, but mostly an excellent show!

[UPDATE: I went and saw the movie a second time. Some critics have complained the story is too familiar - even, too simple. They have a point. I figured Disney prefers the familiar to the ground-breaking anyway. References are made several times to the metaphorical figure of the 'Absent Father': whether Oscar Digg's father, or Diggs himself, or the murdered King of Oz. Dorothy Gale's father is missing in the original Wizard of Oz too. So many missing fathers! Steven Spielberg and his movies are to blame for much of the current fascination, however:

Beyond E.T. alone, Stahl notes that the "workaholic absent father is a recurring character in Spielberg's movies." Many of Spielberg's other films, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Hook, exemplify strained father-son relationships, or absent fathers altogether.

...As such, a shift in the father-figure character in many of the director's later movies is evident: Catch Me If You Can, War of the Worlds, and even his upcoming film Lincoln deliver dad characters that rise to roles of heroism.

And so too, does Oscar Diggs!

It's important to remember that the preoccupation with the missing father was high during the 1930's (due to the extremely-disruptive effects of the Depression), receded in the 1950's, and returned with a vengeance in the divorce-crazy 1970's. So, the preoccupation with the missing father marks this movie particularly strongly, and may prove a problematic historic residue in the decades ahead for future Oz movies.]