Immediately after watching Wicked, I searched my phone for a GIF. I wanted a copy of the moment when Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) filled the screen with her black cape: defying gravity and anyone who would exploit her. “To those who ground me / Take a message back from me,” she belts out, “No wizard that there is or was / Is ever gonna bring me down.”
This green – and black – luminary has just been abandoned by her pink – and white – friend, Galinda. She begs Galinda to realize and reject the Wizard’s fascist plan. But even with soldiers at the door, Galinda can’t imagine being disloyal to power. Even with this betrayal, Elphaba protects Galinda as the soldiers attack her, but she cannot save her friend from her own choices.
And so Elphaba falls, then flies, and is finally free, and the camera frames her beautiful defiance, her fierce loyalty not to power but to her values.
Wicked is, for me, a meditation on political power, authenticity, and happiness — and how small a circle they share in life’s Venn diagram.
And it proposes that there is joy for those who — in solidarity with something higher than themselves or deep within themselves— plant their flag in that small, sometimes lonely circle.
And that is why I immediately looked for a GIF of Elphaba — free and flying and alone. It was a picture of the very real – and very negotiated — joy that can accompany courage, honesty, and defiance in a world corrupted by privilege and callousness.
I should mention that, unlike many if not most reviewers of this film, I have never seen Wicked in any form before, and until about a decade ago, I had never seen The Wizard of Oz all the way through. As a fan of American musical scores, I had heard “Defying Gravity.” But that’s it. I didn’t even know the song was sung by a witch.
And so, Wicked was for me a movie like any other that I had never seen before. Except that it imprinted on me like only the best movies can. It left me searching for an image and puzzled by a question.
The image is the one I have described: Elphaba, flying, defiant and joyous. It struck me much like another image did, more than 30 years ago: the still of two best friends flying over the Grand Canyon in their blue Thunderbird at the end of Thelma and Louise.
This image of Elphaba, a free and defiant woman, feels necessary right now. It strikes me as instantly iconic, made so by movie magic perfectly intersecting with the zeitgeist. A woman, a black woman, leading the way ahead though none follow, denying the colonization of her gifts, denying power’s inscriptions on her body, vowing to defy all Wizards. The analogies draw themselves.
The question that Wicked left me with is this, and it points to the film’s second spiritual heart: How did Elphaba escape the temptations of earthly power?
Elphaba grew up without parents who accepted her. She felt damaged, responsible for her sister’s disability. She had no friends. Wherever she went people recoiled at her green skin.
Then, in the Emerald City, she is greeted with love and delight by the ultimate, the Wizard, whom she (and the audience) sees as a beneficent and wise force. The Wizard refers to her as daughter and tells her that she is “home.”
When Elphaba’s mentor Madame Morrible joins them, Elphaba the lonely and discarded child is finally surrounded by love and purpose: doted on by a father and mother, accompanied by her best friend, and assured of her gifts and her place in the world.
I thought this was her happy ending, the moment of full embrace for the outcast and orphaned.
Watching the Wizard offer Elphaba love and belonging, I recalled the passage about Jesus’s baptism, the moment when he meets his real father and God says, “I delight in you.” Acknowledged in his true self and gifts, Jesus can start his ministry. Only after this moment is he strong enough to fight back the Devil’s wilderness temptations.
I thought the Wizard’s embrace was Elphaba’s baptism moment, and so did she.
But then she glimpses the evil in the system. And in an instant, she sees the cost – to others and to herself – of everything she has ever wanted. She sees the exploitation and violence of the Wizard’s embrace. And immediately she rejects it all: the acceptance, the love, the power.
In that moment, the oppressed refuses to become the oppressor. In that moment, the little girl who had been defined by what she lacked recognized her immense power and chose not to use it for evil.
Where did she get the strength? She has no community behind her, no family to back her up. Recognizing her power and choosing not to abuse it means setting out alone – and she makes that choice.
It is the kind of sacrifice we see in sacred texts. It is Jesus in the wilderness with the Devil, who promises him the world. Unlike the gospels, Wicked does not offer a sufficient answer to the question of its hero’s Source. Some imagery suggests a psychological explanation of Elphaba’s moral center, but it’s not enough to close the question. It is better left open anyway.
But perhaps we might beg the question a bit, and end with this: If a discarded and scorned young woman can refuse the temptations of self-serving power, can’t anyone? Can’t we?