wait, did wicked kill ‘good’ stories
holding space for the wild legacy of wicked
I’ve been mentally writing this essay for weeks and thought it was going to be an insanely prolific exposé on the origins of Wicked that no one was talking about but now everyone is. Anyway.
Wicked has emerged as the ‘girlhood’ of Q4. And by that I mean it is our shiny new essay topic that aspiring thought daughters can mercilessly pick and probe at – and rightfully so.
From the stylistic choices to the utterly batshit press tour (we should all cry and hold your trauma-bonded coworkers), we have been served a seemingly endless smorgasbord of topics and themes to gnaw at.
Naturally, much of this dialogue has been concerned with the cultural legacy of the musical – gravitating to its shiny Kristin Chenoweth-scored moments of early 00s Broadway rather than the peculiar origins of the novel itself and the legacy of Gregory Maguire’s attempt to venerate one of the culture’s most iconic villains.
The father of fanfiction, Gregory Maguire
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West is fanfiction. Or ‘revisionist literature’ if we want to be more tasteful, akin to works like Wide Sargasso Sea or the Synoptic Gospels. This is something we have forgotten amidst its larger-than-life Broadway legacy.
In a very quaint way, fanfiction has emerged as a hallmark of Maguire’s writing. The New England-based author re-examined the likes of Cinderella and Snow White before taking on L Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (and Victor Fleming et al’s seminal adaptation). He finds new entry points into existing texts to give them fresh life – monopolising pre-established audiences whilst ensuring that beloved stories never have to end. His approach would even see him pen a novel in the early 00s about Alice (from Alice in Wonderland) solving crime. Delightful stuff.
In the wake of the film’s release, we’ve seen people reread the original 1952 movie with the new information invented in Wicked. Some comedically point out the novel/ musical’s plot holes whilst others misguidedly (but also maybe jokingly) take Wicked’s approach to events as canon.
Sadly, in Baum’s own text, none of his characters are shielding from Dorothy a rich underbelly of political revolution. The Wicked Witch of the West isn’t misunderstood. She is simply just the iconic cackling villain of your childhood nightmares. Oz isn’t real. It’s just a dream.
But alas, we now must do the mental gymnastics to situate them as two entities, parallel and spiritually connected, but never intersecting.
Todd Phillips is a Wicked girlie
This type of narrative revisionism takes me back to the spring of 2019 in the wake of a new film from the director of The Hangover. A film that would somehow become such a sacred text of incel-adjacent culture that Todd Phillips would opt to detonate this legacy by making it a terrible musical with Lady Gaga. In many ways, Joker is Wicked for straight white men – the Stephen Schwartz to incel pipeline going unspoken. (Or more importantly, the Kristin Chenoweth’s whistle pitch to having to hear Joaquin Phoenix say the phrase: “artificially inseminate a cow” to accept his Oscar pipeline).
Upon Wicked’s first curtain call in 2003, the show left an indelible stain on the cultural output – namely, popularising the act of turning recognisable villains into misunderstood heroes of their own stories. The Wickedian formula would, of course, be reproduced for Cruella or Maleficent – setting a precedent in our big epics that villains are simply misunderstood girlbosses.
Of course, the title of this essay is clickbait but Wicked definitely popularised a certain type of storytelling that is often uninterestingly executed and oversaturated.
The consequence of this type of approach means that these adaptations of existing cultural works and genres tend to steer clear from the complications of villainy and seek a “cheaper sort of sympathy.” More specifically, it serves to destabilise the structures and dynamics we expect from the narrative form – and arguably, not in an exciting or post-structuralist sort of way.
By suggesting that villains are not ‘evil’ and merely just complicated, we deconstruct not only the protagonist/ antagonist binary of a story but frankly, our entire value system. As a cultural practice, the process of wanting to reconsider and humanise those who have been collectively painted as ‘evil’ is a very important project.
However, perhaps there’s a line to be drawn between this process and the current era’s (very vital) fixation with why people are moving towards fascism, and the undercurrent of sympathy that comes from this type of mediation. Michael Hobbes made an interesting insight about this in a recent podcast episode covering the soon-to-be American veep’s memoir, The Hillbilly Elegy.
“It's like something about the over-analytical centrists, relatively well-off liberals, that it's like, ‘we have to understand this.’ And, basically, keep digging until you find something sympathetic. Which, as a philosophical principle, I think is really good, right? [The notion of] being generous, being fair. But also when that is not matched by any similar impulse on the other side, what you basically have is an entire media where it's like the conservatives are bashing liberals and liberals are bashing liberals.”
All of this to say, the mega-success of Wicked foreshadowed an odd era of occasionally misguided empathy which at its best, has diluted classic villains with redemption arcs and at its worst, has cultivated a cultural practice that humanises and understands to such an extreme degree that political violence can be nullified as well-intended behaviour.
Responsibility to one another and general decency become abstract, secondary and subjective. Maybe the suggestion that they were ever not those things is obscenely naive on my part.
Murder, torture and Stanley Cups (in that order)
There’s an odd sense of irony that Wicked’s most widespread cultural release happens at this moment. Many have already made comparisons between Oz and fascist leaders of today – which is perfectly fine and good. The queer undertones and its status as a sacred text of theatre kids make it the perfect (and productive) touchstone for liberal-leaning politics.
However, what’s missing from this conversation is a deeper probe into why the novel exists. Gregory Maguire wrote Wicked in reaction to a murder of a child by other children (the names and details I refuse to immortalise in this sad little substack but you can find out more here). Since finding this out, I have become very fixated on firstly, why Maguire would ever share that publicly and secondly, the fact that the family of the victim has to know this. How odd it must be to know the brutal murder of your child nearly thirty years ago would result in a brawl at a Target in Missouri over a limited edition Stanley Cup release.
In short, the text isn’t singularly concerned with fascism. If anything, it sort of maybe actually pulses in the orbit of more leftist understandings of crime and punishment. Perhaps even more telling about Maguire’s political agenda is the fact that he opted to pen a sequel to Wicked in 2005. In the marketing, he cited the horrors of the Abu Ghraib photography as his motivation to continue this story.
Again, who is to say why he must share such things but he has: “The book Son of a Witch was intended as a response of mine to the second Gulf War and to the pictures of people coming out of Abu Ghraib.”
All this to say: Maguire’s mediation on the concept of evil and goodness is rooted in the questions of our reality. Whilst he thankfully departed from the factual/ true crime details, this odd mix-and-match of historical circumstances irrevocably remains the undercurrent of this gaudy pink/green chaos.
To round this whole bat-shit situation out, Wicked has been released amidst a concerning moment in the punishment of child crime on a local level – the very topic that inspired it all.
A full circle from hell.
Ironically, in a 2021 interview, Maguire said: “I actually had intended and hoped that the book’s engagement with the question of evil would become obvious and we would have grown beyond it by now.”
That’s all
In conclusion, if you’re holding space for Wicked, maybe also hold space for some nuanced (leftist) thoughts about crime and punishment. Because shockingly, I think that’s what our resident fanfiction author Gregory Maguire wanted.
I would also direct you to this interview with Maguire where he talks jingoism, Saddam Hussein and Thomas Aquinas.