Wicked: For Good--First Thoughts (Unmetabolized, Unfiltered): Pt. I

• How to Kill All Revolutionary Momentum in Under 150 Minutes

• Gravity Returns, With a Vengeance: All Except “Glinda the Good” Sucked Into its Vortex (HOW ODD)

• The Incompossible in the Title Gives The Game Away

• The Story of Feminine Friendship—or Feminine PARASITISM?

(I LOVED IT, as you can already tell!)

What follows can be called “Diannatations” (!), meaning: fragmentary, partial, in-process, random, hybrid insights/annotations/rants/open tabs. I’ll see how far I get in this one post (writing in one sitting); if it starts getting long, then I may stop at the midway point and resume tomorrow with Part II. 

1. Madame Morrible’s opening voiceover: “She will be eliminated" (something like that) SAYS IT ALL. Yes, she WILL be, contrary to the FAKE ending. And, what's more, all revolutionary momentum, all fugitivity, will be as well. All Hail Glinda the Good.

2. The Yellow Brick Road is not merely “the Wizard’s gilded vanity project,” as one prominent review suggested. It is the construction, through forced slave labor (of the Animals), of a road system linking all Ozians to the Wizard, and instantiating a flow of goods, bodies, and raw materials extracted from ever more territories. The yellow hue of the Road, I learned (only from listening to several interviews with the cinematographers), comes from yellow tulips grown in Munchkinland. Apparently they’re now forced to grow more yellow tulips to supply the dye for the bricks paving the road, so the rainbow fields of tulips from the first film are more mono-colored in this iteration. Frankly, I still haven’t found a single shot of yellow tulip fields in the film, but I’ll keep searching. Must be somewhere. 

3. In her indelible entrance, Elphaba violently and effectively disrupts the construction of the Yellow Brick Road, breaking the chains of the Animals forced to complete the slave labor, knocking some guards over, spilling yellow paint everywhere, and clearly halting the operation for the afternoon. It’s a glorious scene (see clip below?) that almost makes one think the rest of the film will ESCALATE the glory, showing Elphaba in more and more spectacular fugitive operations, resisting the Wizard’s Oztocracy at every turn. Alas. NOT SO. I’ve reproduced this moment, almost in full, so you can feast your eyes on it, over and over again. Because this is the ONLY successful operation run by Elphaba from this point forward. It’s ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE. Replay if you wish. (I certainly will). 

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/819e32_15ba8ed81b8f4f159cf9c0c2624aa26d/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

4. “EVERY DAY MORE WICKED”: Checking in with all our favorite Oz characters to see what they’ve been up to since “Defying Gravity.” In the Emerald City, the propaganda machine has been hard at work: literally, we see the printing press spewing out thousands of new propaganda fliers warning of the dangers of The Wicked Witch of the West; “Beware the Wicked Witch” merchandise on-screen (which, truth be told, reader, I must admit that I have purchased off-screen, gleefully, and used it to decorate my office!); creepy little figurines; ever more posters; newspaper articles about Elphaba’s every misdeed, especially imagined. “Glinda the Good” banners abound, only, of course, when juxtaposed with “Wicked Witch” banners immediately adjacent. “Where will she strike next?” the gullible Emerald City denizens chant… now we travel to Elphaba’s treehouse lair, an exquisitely designed terrarium/apothecary/library/FBI office/witchy nest that Cynthia Erivo CLEARLY had a major hand in envisioning (same with the cardigan, but we’ll get to that). As if they weren’t beyond obvious, Elphaba names her goals in this little “Wizard and I” reprise verse, then the camera lingers on a yellowing map where she’s written in red sharpie “EXPOSE THE WIZARD AND SAVE THE ANIMALS — sigh. But, at least now I know. 

5. “THANK GOODNESS”: Ah, the rise of Glinda the Grasping, Glinda the Extractive, Glinda the Insidious. “Good” my ass! The biggest gaslight in this entire film, on a structural level, is to provide so much alibi for Glinda, so much aesthetic, narrative, structural COVER, as she ascends to power over the literal bodies of pretty much everyone she ever knew. A dangerous creature indeed. I’ve been warning about her as a tool of authoritarianism—albeit with a pleasant face—sounding the alarm, since my first “Wicked” article. In this number, Glinda “the Good” publicly announces her engagement to Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), who’s been appointed the #1 Witch-Hunter for the Regime. (No wonder Elphaba isn’t thrilled). The engagement comes as a surprise to Fiyero, who exits; Glinda promptly lies about it to the assembled crowd. Elphaba attempts a counter-atmospheric gesture that disrupts the fireworks at the end of the song; she writes “THE WIZARD LIES” in the sky, which Morrible turns into “OZ DIES.” See what I mean about how her resistance tactics go on a sharp downward slope from the Yellow Brick Road escapade? 

6. Observation in this song that’s more broadly applicable to this entire film: The Technology/Apparatus Behind the Propaganda Spectacle is clearly visualized, often named and explained— how the illusion works. There’s a certain pride, a flamboyance, if you will, to the film’s “transparency” about the propaganda spectacle. Perhaps this is what allows the coercive framing around Glinda “the Good” and her rise to power as “a good/happy ending” “authorized by her “friend” Elphaba (who’s alive)”... to slide under the radar. 

7. “THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME”: Oh joy, it’s one of two numbers that Elphaba sings on her own in the entire fucking film, and she’s singing it to CGI animals—her most common scene partners in this new film, by the way, we’ll get to that too. Erivo performs this number beautifully, to her entirely digitized and mostly non-speaking, non-reacting “audience” of non-humans: she’s convincing them NOT to leave Oz and to continue fighting for their country with her. It’s an oddly optimistic, slightly naive, and more than a little nostalgic number that swells and builds in the Underground Railroad-Yellow Brick Road forest setting, becoming more and more persuasive, reaching the lovely vocal peak at the ending—then it’s interrupted by the Cowardly Lion, the film’s Black Conservative, basically, who’s aggrieved with Elphaba because… she set him free from a cage when he was “just a cub.” He cuts her off before the last note of her song, which already had him BLACKLISTED in my book!, and then, to add salt to the wound, his so-called complaint ends up being this incoherent take about how it was somehow bad that she freed him from captivity and that’s why he’s now a coward. All jokes aside, the structure of this moment perfectly encapsulates that of the entire film: it aggressively forecloses the building of any fugitive momentum from Elphaba and cuts it off before it can become a motile force. Even in the absence of a human audience, at this point, she is not allowed to reach the conclusion of her central political argument, her resistance rallying cry stifled before it can pick up any steam. There you have it, crystallized.

MORE SOON! I want to make sure that I also get to the New Years Eve reflection tonight; so I’ll leave it here for now. This absolutely will continue— probably one or two more posts of thoughts/early takes.