Rainbow Reflections

Oddly, the older I get, the more I enjoy "The Wizard of Oz." When a child, what it meant to be a friend of Dorothy was elusive. Now, I see the colorful camp within three queer men dancing over the rainbow with Judy Garland, to expose and inspire an old humbug from the closet, so that he may return the young men's kindness with the knowledge that there was never anything wrong with them in the first place. Nor in youth would I've appreciated what has to be the best ever drug reference in children's cinema, as the posse become pawns of witches, one putting them to sleep in a poppy field while the other stimulates them awake by a blizzard of cocaine. I'm sure there's a lesson in there on what happens when you leave Kansas for the Emerald City.

There are manifold paths to appreciating this evergreen paragon to the Golden Age of Hollywood, but as I've recently read L. Frank Baum's book, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," and been reviewing a bunch of Oz movies, I'll mainly focus on aspects of adaptation. Besides the glorious transition from sepia-toned black-and-white to Technicolor, the delightful musical numbers, articulately artificial theatrical design, taut quest plotting to go along with the nested storytelling and abiding by the rule of three, memorable lines and iconic ensemble cast, what makes "The Wizard of Oz" a cinematic marvel is its reflexivity. Very little of any of this was written by Baum, and one could argue Disney's groundbreaking long cartoon, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), was nearly as influential to the production of this film. Regardless, it's the quintessential film that improves upon its literary source in almost every instance. Come to think of it, I may only miss the puns Baum employed for the Wizard's gifts to the gang (a sharp brain of pins and needles for the Scarecrow, a soft heart made of silk and sawdust for the Tin Man, and liquid courage, if you know what I mean, for the Cowardly Lion), as well as the surprising number of decapitations in the book (although, one may always see "Return to Oz" (1985) to be enlivened by the removal of heads). Otherwise, despite the protestations of the likes of Michael Patrick Hearn (author of "The Annotated Wizard of Oz"), Baum's book is not great literature. Even for prescribed children's literature, it's simplistic and generally dully composed; it's slight compared to Lewis Carroll's Alice books, and the Oz series only seems to get worse afterwards. Although, it should be noted, the book was remarkable in its day for the use of color in W.W. Denslow's illustrations, and Baum repeatedly remarked on the grayness of Kansas, but the single hues related to each country in Oz pales in comparison to the Technicolor transition on film.

Additionally, the notion that Baum included an allegory regarding 19th-century monetary policy (the yellow brick road representing the gold standard and Dorothy's originally silver shoes being the promise of riches of silver from the West, as taken to the land "Oz," as in an abbreviation for ounces of those metals) only seems plausible until actually reading the text. Macroeconomic thesis it's not. That's not to say there's no political allegory, but it's nothing that meticulous. Both the book and the film, rather, being intrinsically American and, specifically, set in the West, reflect the dominant ideology of Manifest Destiny. It's important that Dorothy comes from Kansas, part of that once-wild frontier. As soon as she lands on the eastern banks of Munchkin Country, she's killing natives. Traveling west, she meets creatures representing declining states of civilization, from cultivation (scarecrow), to woodland clearing (tin woodman) and, finally, to untamed forest (a lion), before she ultimately reaches the City upon a Hill. Albeit, from which, Dorothy is further instructed to kill another indigenous inhabitant of the land of Oz. The film even excises Baum's episode where Dorothy and company wreak havoc upon a walled village made of china, which makes the commentary on colonialism more conspicuous. The conquest of the West and the rise of American imperialism was relatively recent history for Baum's turn-of-the-century fairy tale, and so Oz was a real place, but by 1939, it had become part of the American audience's subconscious history, if you will--the American Dream.

That's not enough to make "The Wizard of Oz" a cultural touchstone, though, referenced and seen probably more frequently than any other film ever made. It's not only part of America's myth, but also a global phenomenon--the preeminent representative of the country's greatest export of soft power, the myth Hollywood told about itself. It surpasses mere literary adaptation, then, and despite theatrical appearances to the contrary (the painted backdrops, e.g.), the film is hardly just an expanded stage production, either. Besides the framing of dreams being associated with cinema, there is the remarkable exploration through doors and windows here. During the cyclone, Dorothy and Toto become surrogate spectators via the window frame of the mise-en-abyme outside: the superimposed film-within-the-film. And the tracking dolly shot through the door as Dorothy enters the Technicolor of Oz is as purely, even miraculously, cinematic as it gets. A similar, if necessarily less impressive, shot introduces Emerald City. Furthermore, there's the dichotomy of reality (framed as Kansas and our world outside film) and of fantasy and illusion (the inner land of Oz and movies). Seeing this as a political or religious allegory is to miss a deeper meaning methinks and one that is specific to the cinematic transmutation. Note that the Wizard as Professor Marvel in the outer world of Kansas truly is a humbug who cannot see anything from his crystal ball. In Oz, however, he projects a giant, menacing head with special visual effects--smoke and mirrors--besides embodying his doppelgängers outside his movie-palace throne room. Meanwhile, the witches employ supposedly truer magic: the good one transports herself within a bubble, or as a superimposed image over a poppy field, for all to see, and the wicked one does see images inside her crystal ball. In effect, the battle between good and evil and magic and humbuggery is fought over cinema; it's where all of their power lies. Dorothy's journey is learning to decipher the dream reflection of life she's entered--the film she's been transported to by twister's projection, so she may awake and return home to tell everyone about it, which is what I've just done, too, with this review. But it wasn't a dream; it was a place, and you and you... and you... and you were there.

(Included in my ranking of Oz films.)