Living Green in a Black and White World

Throughout my youth, CBS’ annual airing of the 1939 musical, “The Wizard of Oz,” was essential viewing. The straightforward narrative that naïve goodness overcomes evil was entertainingly reassuring. Many years later, after reading L. Frank Baum’s 1900 source novel, I discovered a unicorn: the movie is much better than the book.

I regularly incorporated the Oz movie story into my psychotherapy and kept a photograph of the four yellow brick road travelers in my office. The metaphor was easily grasped by my patients, so I frequently related it during their termination sessions. 

My patients’ problems were thinking (in need of a brain), feeling (in need of a heart), acting (in need of courage), or existential (in need of contentment in drab Kansas). They sought my services as a wizard, and I sat comfortably in Emerald City and coaxed them to confront their fears and bring me the broomstick of the wicked witch. While challenging their villains, they discovered inner resourcefulness. 

In the screenplay, when the quartet discovers that the wizard is a charlatan, Dorothy exclaims, “You’re a very bad man,” to which the wizard replies, “Oh no, I am a very good man. I’m just a very bad wizard.” I wanted my departing patients to know that they no longer needed anyone outside themselves to resolve their problems. 

  Novelist Gregory Maguire was uneasy with the witch’s portrayal as personified evil, so in 1995 he published Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a prequel to Baum’s classic, sympathetic to the misunderstood sorceress. Maguire named her Elphaba (utilizing Baum’s initials) and cast her as a complicated, but likable, heroine.

This story’s popularity soared with its 2003 adaptation into a very successful Broadway musical. Completing the artistic trifecta, “Wicked” was released in late 2024 as a big-budget movie and garnered 10 Oscar nominations–four more than the 1939 parent film received.

I first read Maguire’s novel in 2008 and remember enjoying the story for its playful ambiguity about good and evil. With my country’s increasing polarization, I reread Wicked, focusing upon Oz’s intolerance, and wondering about society’s inflexibility as well as my own. There’s a lot of gray in the world; how must it be for Elphaba who is green?

Maguire’s wizard is a remorseless con man who invents grievances to justify his repressive, authoritarian rule. He identifies scapegoats (literally) in the country’s talking animals and returns them to subservient roles. Everyone is class conscious and introduces himself by region and parentage. Beauty is associated with goodness and affliction with being ugly or cursed, and nonconformity is always bad. 

Veracity is fluid. The wizard declares, “The truth isn’t a thing of fact or reason. It is simply what everyone agrees on.” He confides his duplicity, “Where I’m from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren’t true… we call it history.” 

Elphaba is the illegitimate daughter of a clergyman’s wife, born with green skin. Acutely aware of discrimination, Elphaba develops a keen determination to promote fairness and advocates for the talking animals. The wizard’s scapegoat subjugation and intolerance for dissent turns Elphaba into a revolutionary. After a failed assassination attempt on the wizard’s emissary, she flees to a convent and later develops her magical powers, largely as a self-preservation strategy. Her fateful confrontation with Dorothy over her sister’s shoes is more assertive than threatening, and her demise is completely unintended when water is thrown upon her to extinguish a flame.

Like any good fiction author, Maguire tells a much more complicated story than a good/evil dichotomy. I find myself cringing at a character’s actions only pages after applauding her for a good turn. That’s reality. 

I was raised in a religious tradition that deplored empathy. Since any action was unquestionably judged to be either good or bad, the actors were easily identified. I could distinguish a saint from a sinner from 30 paces. Superficial as it was, the shorthand spared my youthful edition from parsing life’s complexities. 

Decades of intense listening corrected my vision. The universality of human foibles leads me to concur with Samuel Johnson, “As I know more of mankind, I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.” But this remains a work in progress for me.

Baum’s original story works well for happy endings. When psychotherapy is successful and people need an empowering coda to remember how to face life’s next hurdle, a benevolent – even bumbling–wizard and wicked witch work fine.   

But let’s face it, life is rarely as simple as good witches and bad wizards, or vice versa. When I delve into Wicked, I see Elphaba’s story as living “green” – coping with discomfort, standing apart, being misunderstood, and making her own way.  

After many years of listening to people’s stories, I’ve learned that motives are often tangled, and judgments are seldom clear-cut. In Maguire’s Oz, as in our own world, a person can be a villain or a hero depending upon your perspective. Red or blue political identity, like any single trait, cannot capture the full richness of a person’s character. Maybe Oz’s real magic is enjoying our journey on the yellow brick road with open eyes, learning to appreciate the many complicated colors we encounter–and even loving a few.