The Wicked Truth (eBook)

When Good People Do Bad Things

Suzanne Ross (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
224 Seiten
DOERS Publishing LLC (Verlag)
979-8-218-52917-8 (ISBN)

Infos

The Wicked Truth is the thinking person's guide to the wildly successful Broadway musical 'Wicked'. Using political, social, and historical examples, it explores the ways in which modern society is not so different than the mythical Land of Oz. The Wicked Truth challenges the very framework of our culture, our understandings of Good and Evil, as well as our sense of right and wrong. Whether you've seen the show or not, discovering The Wicked Truth's broad application, to everything from personal relationships to how our society is governed, will leave you spellbound.

Suzanne Ross has worked in education for over fifteen years, beginning as a Montessori preschool and kindergarten teacher before transitioning to a role as a corporate training consultant. In 1997, she encountered the work of René Girard and was amazed by how his theory illuminated many aspects of her life and work as an educator, parent, church member, and lover of fiction and theater. She is a member of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion, an academic group dedicated to exploring Girard's work, and has both attended and presented at its annual conferences. In January 2007, she and her husband, Keith, founded The Raven Foundation to raise awareness of Girardian theory, with The Wicked Truth being one example of the Foundation's efforts. Suzanne and Keith live in Glenview, Illinois, near their two married children, and work together at The Raven Foundation.

Textauszug

1. Looking at the World Through Green Colored Glasses

He opened the big box, and Dorothy saw that it was filled with spectacles of every size and shape. All of them had green glasses in them. The Guardian of the gates found a pair that would just fit Dorothy and put them over her eyes… When they were on, Dorothy could not take them off had she wished, but of course she did not want to be blinded by the glare of the Emerald City, so she said nothing.

– L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

I just mean, Glinda, is it possible we could be living our entire adult lives under someone’s spell?

–Maguire, Wicked

Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.

–Franklin D. Roosevelt, Radio address, October 26, 1939

The blockbuster Broadway musical Wicked1 opens with the celebration of a death. As the curtain rises, the stage fills with actors singing in unison about the defeat of an enemy of all the people. Their wild, exuberant chorus echoes throughout the theater:

Good News! She’s Dead!

The Witch of the West is dead!

The Wickedest Witch there ever was,

The enemy of all of us here in Oz, Is dead!

Good News!

Good News!2

Of course, the audience recognizes her by name – the Wicked Witch of the West – a woman so wicked that the adjective is part of her name. We know her as the enemy of the good people of Oz, the wondrously colorful land of the classic movie3 to which Dorothy of black and white Kansas is transported via twister and a bump on the head. Those of us of a certain age remember our excitement when, in the deep silence after the tornado, Dorothy slowly opened the door of her damaged house to glimpse the world beyond the rainbow. The profusion of color dazzled us, and we were unsurprised to learn that while this world contained extreme goodness, the evil here was more intense as well.

Among my favorite moments from the movie is the gruesome melting of the Wicked Witch. As she dies slowly, the Witch rubs her bony hands together and cries, “Who ever thought a little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?”4 Dorothy seemed so meek and powerless up to that point, and the Witch so ruthlessly evil. I can still recall the fear I felt as the Witch pursued Dorothy and her friends through the corridors, the monkeys screeching wildly behind her. I agreed with the Witch: How could a little girl defeat such wickedness? I was terrified. But the forces of good, however puny, emerged from the battle victorious. I was catapulted from deathly fear to joyous celebration as fast as it takes a little girl to throw a pail of water, and I couldn’t have been happier. When Dorothy returns home safely to discover that the evil she encountered was only a dream, it made my world feel a bit safer, too. It is a movie ending I have savored all my life.

 

A CLASSIC TALE OF GOOD AND EVIL

The classic movie, The Wizard of Oz, tells the familiar story of good conquering evil by using a little girl to defeat a wicked witch. Just to refresh your memory, here’s a quick summary of the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland as Dorothy:

Dorothy is an innocent young girl in search of her heart’s desire. She gets bumped on the head during a tornado and when she wakes up, finds herself in a strange land far from home. Her arrival causes the accidental death of a wicked witch, whose powerful magic shoes she comes to possess. As Dorothy tries to return to her home, she makes three unlikely friends, who are also in search of their hearts’ desires. The foursome encounters many adventures on their journey to ask the ruler of the kingdom, a wonderfully good wizard, for help.

The Wizard lives in a grand palace in the capital city, and he agrees to help Dorothy and her friends on one condition – that they bring him the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West. The four friends know that they will have to kill the Witch to get her broom, and although they feel frightened and unequal to the task, they also feel they have no choice. The Witch has been pursuing them on their journey to the Emerald City because she wants the magic shoes that once belonged to her now dead sister.

The friends have a benefactor, however, in the Good Witch of the North, who assists them as they travel to the city’s capital. With more than a bit of good fortune, they manage to kill the Wicked Witch and return to the Wizard with the broom. Unfortunately, the Wizard turns out to be a humbug with no power to grant their wishes. Amazingly, they find out that they already possessed the very things they went to the Wizard to receive. Dorothy is transported home with a click of her magic heels to discover that it was all just a bad dream. And so, the story ends quite happily.

 

Then in 2003, I saw an ad for a new Broadway musical declaring, “So much happened before Dorothy dropped in!” Well, okay, I thought. Maybe things did happen in Oz before Dorothy got there, but what more do I need to know? I had been reassured by the movie’s happy ending asserting that witches and goblins lived somewhere over the rainbow, not under my bed or in my closet. I was satisfied that good little girls could conquer evil. Whatever happened in Oz in this supposed imaginary “before” time was of no interest to the little girl who still lived inside me.

My adult self was equally doubtful – I could not imagine any way to improve on the story or the music of the well-known classic. The writing team for the musical – composer Stephen Schwartz and playwright Winnie Holzman – were impressive, but I wondered how they could compete with the songs “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead,” or lines like, “I’ll get you my pretty – and your little dog too!” I had not yet read the novel by Gregory Maguire5 that inspired the stage production for much the same reasons. I felt sure the movie had satisfied my need to spend time with Dorothy, the Wizard, the Witches (good and bad), the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion. Even the Wicked Witch of the West I knew as intimately as a dear friend. How could Gregory Maguire or the writers and producers of Wicked improve something that was already perfect?

If I had read the children’s book that inspired the movie, I might have understood what was motivating these writers. L. Frank Baum’s novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,6 first published in 1900, is not at all like the movie. They both contain the same characters and settings, and each deals with the theme of good conquering evil, but the conclusion each reaches about this conquest is quite different. Baum’s novel hesitates to reach any solid conclusions at all, raising more questions than it answers. It hints repeatedly that something deeper is going on beneath the surface of this epic battle, a hidden truth that is being concealed. His book is laced with clues that something is not quite right in the Land of Oz, and there exist deceptions and lies that we would do well to uncover. Reading Baum’s novel is an invitation to go sleuthing, an invitation both Maguire and the creators of Wicked eagerly accepted.

I’m glad they did. My beloved movie does not do justice to the revelatory potential of Baum’s novel. His story is more than a child’s fairy tale. It provides us with a rich, complex metaphor for the world we inhabit this side of the rainbow. As I began to read, I questioned the rhyme and reason of what occurred in Oz, but by the end of the novel I wondered if hidden in the text was an even more compelling question: What can we know about good and evil in our own world?

The creators of the movie transformed Baum’s admirable creative effort into a sweet tale that ends with a satisfying moral sound bite: There’s no place like home. There is no such sweet summation in Baum’s version. In Baum’s original, Dorothy does not get bumped on the head and does not fall unconscious on the bed as the house is lifted up into the cyclone. She stays wide awake as the house flies up into the air, with no suggestion at all that she is dreaming the entire episode. As if to dispel any such interpretation, Baum makes clear at the end of the story that when Dorothy returns home she finds not the old house that had flown to Oz, but a “new farm-house Uncle Henry built after the cyclone had carried away the old one.”7 This ending made it difficult for me to explain away all that happened by interpreting it as a dream or a child’s fantasy. Was I to believe that this story really happened just the way Baum was telling it? This fairy tale was like no other in the way it thwarted my attempts at easy interpretations.

To complicate things, just as I thought I knew a character, the ground shifted and my assumptions changed. If I paid attention to what the characters said, I learned one thing. But that understanding was quickly challenged when I observed those characters’ actions. In this way the story seems to insist that we not accept things at face value. Perhaps Baum is inviting us to question if the truth we all know and accept might in fact be an elaborate lie.

 

CONSPIRACY...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 5.5.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• ISBN-13: 979-8-218-52917-8 / 9798218529178