A Central Text of American Pop Culture

Rating: 10/10 (1 October 2006)

As one of America's most often viewed and beloved films, The Wizard of Oz (1939) is a central text of popular culture. Its images and dialog represent a fund of common reference often drawn upon and responded to even by those who have not seen the film (a group of beings that excludes earthlings). One measure of Oz's impact is the vast quantity of borrowings from, re-makings of, and homages to the film found in every popular American artistic medium. As just a small sampling, one might cite Star Wars (1977), The Wiz (1978), The Muppet Movie (1979), A Christmas Story (1983), After Hours (1985), Return to Oz (1985), Wild at Heart (1990), Twister (1996), The Simpsons (multiple allusions), the rock group America's song "Tin Man" (1974), Oz (TV prison drama, premier 7/1/97), and Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz (the current hit Broadway musical).
In addition to its lasting cultural currency and entertainment value, The Wizard of Oz occupies an important place in American film history in a number of other respects. Along with The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939), Oz was an early masterpiece of the three-strip Technicolor process. Like most of the early Technicolor films, it used color not to enhance realism, but to create a fantastic or historically remote realm. Color is an obvious source of symbolism in Oz (e.g. "the yellow brick road," "Emerald City") and even infiltrates its musical score ("Somewhere Over the Rainbow"). Anticipating a film like Pleasantville by some 60 years, Oz also creates irony and other meaning through the dramatic juxtaposition of color and monochrome (sepia) film stock. The film's soundtrack was also groundbreaking in that, apart from backstage musicals, The Wizard of Oz was perhaps the first film to use an array of musical numbers to advance a dramatic plot, rather than simply as set pieces for heightening emotion or for demonstrating the singing and dancing ability of its protagonists.
The film's visual effects are likewise historically significant. Although not quite the landmark that King Kong (1933) had been, The Wizard of Oz was nonetheless a remarkable and important testament to the increasing importance of film "magic" to the Hollywood style of production. The verisimilitude and dramatic power of such memorable scenes as the twister that transports Dorothy (Judy Garland) to Oz, the screen entrance of Glinda, the Good Witch of the North (Billie Burke), in a gigantic bubble, the "Surrender Dorothy!" skywriting sequence, and the melting death of The Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) are undeniable. Oz's visual grandeur is also the product of stunning glass painting composites of the Oz landscape and Emerald City skyline, wildly imaginative set designs in Munchkin land and the Wizard's palace, and the most memorable use of fantasy costuming and makeup in Hollywood history, gloriously highlighted of course by the Tin Man (Jack Haley), the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), and the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr).
Adapted from L. Frank Baum's popular "modern fairy tale" The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1899), the film version of the story directed by Victor Fleming (et al.) is arguably a far superior work of art. Although it preserves the simplistic moral lessons of Baum's work ("there's no place like home"), The Wizard of Oz creates much more complex characters than are found in the original text. This is particularly true of the main character, Dorothy. If in the novel Dorothy's journey to Oz is straightforwardly literal, the film's Oz quest entails a transformation of characters and situations from mundane Kansas into dream/nightmare symbolism. This device adds psychological depth to the tale, particularly pertaining to Dorothy's problematic relation to the various mother /father figures in both locales.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum's novel) does, however, offer a fascinating sub-textual political allegory of the late 19th century Populist Movement, which is understandably absent from a screen adaptation written several decades later. According to this allegorical reading, the novel's Dorothy represents a well meaning but naïve American public being led down a yellow brick road (the gold standard) to financial disaster. The road leads to Emerald City (i.e. Washington, the home of greenback dollars) and a sham Wizard (i.e. President Cleveland). Dorothy's companions represent politicians (The Cowardly Lion suggests William Jennings Bryant, the Populist Presidential candidate) or political factions (the Scarecrow suggests Midwestern farmers; The Tin Man evokes dehumanized Eastern factory workers; and even cuddly Toto is purportedly named for the era's "teetotalers.") As a political goal, "the way home" is the ideal of economic equity - to be secured, among other means, by the substitution of silver for gold as the standard for the dollar, legislation that would ease the spread of wealth to the nation's working class. Not coincidentally, the novel Dorothy's magic slippers are made of silver.
That the film changes this famous footwear to a visually more dramatic, but politically meaningless, "ruby" indicates the Populist subtext had lost its significance to Oz's late 1930s audience. In its place, some commentators have argued - quite plausibly I think - that a "pre-feminist" politics may be discerned instead. In this view, Dorothy embodies a late 1930s stage in the transformation of the social role of American women from the end of the 19th century to the present day. Garland's Dorothy was the first widely popular female character in American storytelling to be portrayed as an archetypal "hero figure" (one who - in Joseph Campbell's formulation - is usually marked by birth and reluctantly called forth on a journey/mission fraught with dangers and filled with a significance beyond her or his narrow self-interest). As an orphan chosen by chance/fate in the form of a Kansas tornado to become the dream-world liberator of Oz and its "little people" inhabitants, Dorothy is closely akin to Luke Skywalker, Frodo, and The Matrix's Neo - awkward, unconfident adolescents whose heroic adventures symbolize their maturation into adulthood.