ImpromptuEnlightenment

​​​The Wizard of Oz  has always been one of my favorite movies. There is something about watching that world change from the dusty, muted tones of Kansas into the almost impossible color of Oz that still works, even after all these years. And when the movie was made in 1939, that transition into Technicolor was extraordinary. Oz didn’t just look different from Kansas. It felt different. Dorothy had entered an entirely different field of Experience.

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And then there were those shoes. Those beautiful ruby slippers that became so recognizable that it’s difficult to imagine Dorothy wearing anything else.

 

Except she did.

 

In L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, Dorothy’s shoes were silver. MGM changed them to ruby for the movie, in large part because brilliant red could take advantage of this relatively new world of Technicolor. Visually, it made perfect sense. If you’re suddenly able to show audiences a world exploding with color, silver shoes aren’t exactly going to announce themselves in quite the same way as sparkling ruby ones.

 

But something interesting happened when they made that change. The shoes became more visually spectacular, while something underneath them became less visible. Because Baum’s Dorothy wasn’t walking down the Yellow Brick Road in ruby slippers. She was walking a gold-colored road in silver shoes.

 

In America, around the time Baum was writing, gold and silver weren’t simply decorative choices. The country had been arguing rather intensely about them. The United States was on the gold standard, while the Free Silver movement argued for expanding the money supply through the use of silver. Farmers, laborers and people carrying significant debt were among those attracted to the movement because increasing the money supply could make debt less burdensome. So when historian Henry Littlefield proposed in 1964 that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz  could be read as a political parable of the 1890s, Dorothy walking a golden road in silver shoes became difficult not to notice.

 

That doesn’t mean Baum secretly wrote a political code and left us clues to solve it sixty years later. There is still disagreement about whether he intended any of this. And honestly, I’m not sure we need to prove that he did. People have been using stories to talk about things that are difficult, dangerous, unpopular or complicated for as long as we’ve been telling stories. Parables do it. Satire does it. Myth does it. We can say something underneath the story without standing in the middle of town pointing at somebody and yelling, “I’m talking about you.”

 

So whether Baum deliberately assigned every character a political identity isn’t really the question that interests me. It’s what happens when we look at the correlations.

 

Littlefield connected the Scarecrow with the American farmer, the Tin Woodman with the industrial worker and the Cowardly Lion with William Jennings Bryan, the political leader and great public speaker associated with the Free Silver movement.

 

Other interpretations developed from there, including the Wizard and Emerald City as representations of political and economic power.

 

And that’s where this started becoming much more interesting to me. Because look at what these characters believe about themselves.

 

The Scarecrow believes he doesn’t have a brain. If we look at him only from the outside, perhaps that’s understandable. He’s stuffed with straw. He’s standing in a field. He doesn’t carry the outward markers our society has decided represent education or intelligence.

 

But if the Scarecrow represents the farmer, think about what we’re actually saying. The person who understands the land, weather, seasons, planting, harvesting, animals, soil and how to nurture the earth well enough to feed the rest of us is the one we’ve decided doesn’t have a brain.

 

That’s something we still do. We look at how someone is dressed, what kind of work they do, how much money they have, where they were educated, how they speak, what their body looks like, the color of their skin, and countless other external markers, and we begin assigning internal qualities to them. We decide what intelligence looks like before the person ever speaks.

 

And throughout the story, the Scarecrow repeatedly demonstrates just how intelligent he actually is, while continuing to believe he doesn’t have a brain.

 

Then there’s the Tin Man. If he represents the industrial worker, the symbolism becomes equally interesting. He’s metal. He performs mechanical labor. He’s part of a machine. And what does he believe he’s missing?

 

A heart.

 

Again, look at the exterior and make an assumption about the interior. The factory worker whose days may appear repetitive or mundane doesn’t somehow become less human because of the work he performs. He loves. He grieves. He worries. He hopes. He cares for people. There is a human being inside the function we’ve assigned him. And throughout the journey, the Tin Man demonstrates compassion while believing he doesn’t possess the very thing he’s demonstrating.

 

And then we encounter the Lion.

 

When Dorothy and the others first encounter him, he doesn’t exactly walk over and say, “Hi, I’m a lion. How’s everybody doing?” He comes in roaring. Threatening. Performing what he thinks strength is supposed to look like. And then we discover he’s frightened.

 

That interests me because sometimes what looks like courage from the outside isn’t courage at all. Sometimes it’s fear making a lot of noise.

 

This is also where another telling of Oz begins to matter. Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked, and the musical that grew from it, takes the world we thought we knew and allows us to enter it from somewhere else. The Wicked Witch of the West has a name, Elphaba, and instead of beginning with Dorothy dropping into Oz, Wicked  lets us see some of what happened before Dorothy arrived and, more importantly, what that world looked like from the perspective of the person we had already been told was wicked. It doesn’t replace Baum’s story or the 1939 movie. It gives us another Entry Point into them.

 

And from that Entry Point, even the Lion looks different.

 

In Wicked, we encounter him first as a cub being kept in a cage. Elphaba recognizes what is happening to the Animals of Oz and tries to free him. The larger effort to silence the talking Animals isn’t simply about animals suddenly becoming inconvenient. Their voices matter. Their difference matters. Their ability to speak and participate matters. And power has a long history of becoming uncomfortable when the people, or in this case Animals, it would prefer to control begin speaking for themselves.

 

What happens to a being who begins life in a cage? What happens when you’re repeatedly taught that you don’t have power, that you’re unsafe outside the structure containing you, that something about you needs to be controlled?

 

Eventually you may begin believing the cage.

 

And that gives the Cowardly Lion an entirely different dimension for me. Maybe his fear isn’t evidence that courage is absent.

Maybe fear is what can happen when something powerful has spent enough time being taught that it isn’t.

 

We’ve talked before about what fear can do to human beings and how effectively fear can be used to control a population.

Keep people frightened enough and they may begin surrendering authority they would never willingly surrender otherwise.

 

That’s where the political interpretation of the Lion becomes particularly interesting to me. If you’re going to speak for people, eventually there may come a moment when speaking for them requires courage. Not prestige. Not position. Not a title. Not a good roar. Courage.

 

And I find myself wondering how many people enter positions of authority, including political authority, believing they will stand up when that moment arrives, only to discover that standing up may cost them something they’re not willing to sacrifice. That isn’t a question confined to Baum’s America.

 

When fear asks us to surrender our own authority, what do we do?

 

Because the Lion doesn’t receive courage from the Wizard. The Scarecrow doesn’t receive intelligence from him. The Tin Man doesn’t receive a heart. They have been demonstrating those things all along. Which makes me wonder whether the deeper question isn’t what they were missing at all. Maybe it’s why they believed they were missing it in the first place.

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Dorothy is told where to go. Follow the Yellow Brick Road. Find the Wizard. He can help you. Everyone seems to know this.

 

The Wizard is Great. The Wizard is Powerful. The Wizard has answers. Nobody appears terribly interested in verifying any of this. They just keep repeating it, which, when you think about it, is a pretty efficient way to establish authority.

 

Eventually Dorothy and her companions arrive at the Emerald City and discover that gaining access to power isn’t particularly easy. And when they finally do, the Great and Powerful Wizard tells them they must do something for him first.

 

Dorothy, who simply wants to go home, is sent with the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion to retrieve the Wicked Witch’s broom.

 

Which is a rather extraordinary request. The person they believe has all the power sends a young girl and three individuals who believe themselves deficient to accomplish something he is unwilling to do himself.

 

Except these four supposedly deficient people are already demonstrating that they are anything but. The Scarecrow thinks. The Tin Man cares. The Lion acts despite being afraid. And Dorothy keeps moving forward, making Choices and doing what the Experience in front of her requires.

 

They don’t know yet that they’re proving anything to themselves. As far as they know, they’re proving themselves to the Wizard. They still believe he’s the one who can give them what they lack.

 

So they go. They face the Witch. They get the broom. And they return to the Emerald City, expecting the Wizard to keep his promise.

 

While everyone else is occupied with flames and smoke and booming voices and the performance of authority, Toto notices what’s actually happening. Toto doesn’t need to understand the political structure of Oz. He notices something: there’s a man behind a curtain.

 

And that man has a story of his own.

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The Wizard wasn’t born the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz. He came from somewhere else too. He arrived in Oz from the sky, and the people who saw him arrive assumed he must be a great wizard. He stepped into the role they gave him and, over time, became the authority everyone had been told possessed extraordinary power.

 

There’s something interesting about that too. Everyone in Oz is looking to the Wizard to tell them what he knows, what he can do and what he can give them, while the Wizard himself has allowed the people of Oz to tell him who he is. They saw something extraordinary in his arrival, interpreted it through their own Perspective and gave him a role. And he continued living it.

 

People get cast into roles all the time. Sometimes we spend years living inside an identity someone else gave us without ever stopping to ask whether it was ours in the first place.

 

So Toto isn’t simply revealing that the Wizard is a fraud. He’s revealing the human being behind the performance. But I don’t think the curtain is the most important revelation. By the time Toto pulls it back, Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion have already gone out and done the thing the Great and Powerful Wizard sent them to do. They have already demonstrated intelligence, compassion, courage and their own ability to act.

 

And now the person they believed could give them those qualities has to acknowledge what has been in front of him all along. The Wizard doesn’t actually give the Scarecrow intelligence, the Tin Man a heart or the Lion courage. He gives them symbols that allow them to recognize qualities they have already demonstrated.

 

And Dorothy’s realization goes even further. Because the authority she traveled all that way to find doesn’t possess the power to get her home either.

 

That may be the part of The Wizard of Oz  that matters most to me.

 

Not that the Wizard isn’t powerful. That Dorothy is. So are the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion. They have spent their entire journey seeking externally what has been demonstrating itself internally all along.

 

And how often do we do exactly that?

 

We find another Wizard. A spiritual teacher. A religious authority. A political leader. An expert. A system. A practice. A person who appears to know more about who we are than we do. We walk another yellow brick road.

 

Surely somebody at the end of this one has the answer. Surely somebody can tell me what I need. Surely someone can give me permission. Surely someone else knows the way home.

 

Dorothy has been walking through Oz, wearing the means to get home. She just didn’t know she always had the power.

 

Her journey isn’t meaningless because she already possesses the power. The journey is the Experience through which she becomes able to recognize it. Her field of Experience becomes larger. She enters somewhere she has never been before.

 

Her Perspective changes. Her Observation changes. Different Choices become available because she’s encountering things she couldn’t encounter from her previous Entry Point.

 

And eventually she returns to Kansas.

 

Same Kansas. Different Dorothy.

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Dorothy isn’t the only character whose story changes when we enter Oz from a different Perspective.

 

We’ve already seen what Wicked  does to our understanding of the Lion. What happens when we turn that same Perspective toward the woman we’ve always known as the Wicked Witch?

 

Elphaba is green. She looks different. She thinks differently. And she responds to what she sees happening around her with kindness.

 

The people of Oz see something different and construct an identity around it. And once enough people gather around that story, repetition begins to give it the appearance of truth. Difference, instead of evoking curiosity, begins to evoke fear.

 

Wicked. Dangerous. Difficult.

 

Repeat those words often enough and eventually nobody remembers to ask whether they were true.

 

What if they’re simply words someone attached to a person before we arrived?

 

Wicked  complicates the morality of Oz because Elphaba isn’t trying to become wicked. She’s attempting to respond to what she sees happening around her. She questions authority. She refuses to participate. And suddenly the machinery of Oz can turn her into something the public should fear.

 

But there’s something else about Elphaba that matters here. While so many of the characters in Oz are looking outside themselves for someone to tell them what they possess, Elphaba’s struggle increasingly becomes one of refusing to let the world tell her who she is.

 

She has spent her life being seen before she’s known. Green. Different. Difficult. Eventually wicked. Other people keep handing her identities based upon what they see, what they’ve been told and what they need her to represent.

 

And yet Elphaba keeps moving closer to herself. By the end of Wicked’s  telling, she has to leave behind the identity Oz constructed for her in order to live as who she actually is. The world may continue believing its story about the Wicked Witch. Elphaba no longer has to live inside it.

 

Meanwhile, Glinda’s journey is different. She begins immersed in popularity, appearance, acceptance and the performance of being exactly what the culture rewards. Then Elphaba enters her life, and Glinda has to look at herself.

 

That’s not insignificant. Self-reflection can be considerably uncomfortable.

 

Glinda begins seeing things she didn’t see before. She comes to understand Elphaba differently. She takes a stand with her privately. But publicly? That’s more complicated. She remains within the structure. She doesn’t walk away from Oz with Elphaba.

 

And I find that fascinating because it’s such a human dilemma. What happens when we begin recognizing that the story we’ve benefited from isn’t entirely true? What do we do with what we’ve seen?

 

Fiyero’s journey asks another version of the question. He begins by dancing through life. Don’t think too much. Don’t look too deeply. Enjoy yourself. There’s something wonderfully seductive about superficiality when depth might require something from us.

 

Then he meets Elphaba. And suddenly he has to consider what kind of life he’s actually living.

 

Glinda is forced toward self-reflection. Fiyero is forced toward depth. Elphaba is forced to decide whether belonging is worth becoming someone she isn’t.

 

Different roads. Different Entry Points. Different Choices.

 

There’s another thing about Oz that interests me. Dorothy drops out of the sky in a house. She comes from somewhere the Munchkins don’t understand. They don’t know Kansas. They don’t know tornadoes. They know witches. So they interpret what happened through the world they understand.

 

A house fell from the sky and killed a witch. This girl arrived with it. Therefore…

 

Well.

 

You can see how stories get started.

 

Human beings have always interpreted unfamiliar things through familiar frameworks. If you’ve never seen a boat, somebody describing one can sound ridiculous. If everyone around you has been taught the same explanation for how the world works, another explanation may sound impossible.

 

Oz has its own culture. Its own authorities. Its own accepted truths. Its own ideas about who’s good and who’s wicked. And its citizens largely live inside those assumptions.

 

We’ve seen variations of this story everywhere from ancient parables to modern novels and films. Stories have always allowed us to examine ourselves from a slight distance. Sometimes it’s easier to recognize something when it’s wearing a costume.

 

Maybe that’s why parables survive. Maybe that’s why satire survives. Maybe that’s why fantasy survives. We can talk about power without naming the powerful. We can talk about conformity without pointing at the conformists. We can talk about propaganda without having to call it propaganda.

 

And sometimes, if we have eyes to see beneath the rhetoric of the story, we recognize something.

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I used to think Dorothy’s return home was simply the ending. She gets what she wanted. Kansas. Aunt Em. Home.

 

But now I’m not so sure that’s what’s interesting about it.

 

Because the Dorothy who returns isn’t the Dorothy who left. Her Experience is different. Her understanding of herself is different. She has encountered people she initially understood one way and came to know another way. She has encountered authority and discovered its limitations. She has been frightened. She has made Choices. She has loved. She has lost. She has discovered worlds beyond the one she knew.

 

And finally she discovers that the power to return home was never sitting in the Emerald City waiting for someone important to hand it to her.

 

It was with her.

 

Maybe home isn’t only the place Dorothy has been trying to return to. Maybe home is also what happens when we remember where our authority actually resides.

 

Not authority without responsibility. Not authority over someone else. Our own authority. Our own responsibility for the

Choices we make.

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And Wicked  isn’t the only time someone has entered Oz from somewhere else. The Wiz  reimagined the story through Black culture, music and Experience, giving us another Dorothy, another road and another way of exploring home. In The Wiz, that journey has often been understood as one toward self-knowledge. And maybe that’s another part of finding home. Knowing ourselves well enough to recognize where our own authority resides.

 

Maybe that’s why all these different interpretations of The Wizard of Oz  can coexist without requiring us to declare which one is “the real one.” Political parable? Maybe. Children’s fairy tale? Certainly. Hollywood spectacle? Absolutely. Story about difference and judgment? Look at Elphaba. Story about authority? Look at the Wizard. Story about recognizing what we already carry? Look at Dorothy.

 

Maybe stories this enduring survive precisely because we keep arriving at them from different Entry Points. And maybe that’s why a story written more than a century ago can still ask an uncomfortable question.

 

How many yellow brick roads are we walking because somebody told us that the Wizard at the end has something we don’t already possess?

 

Politically. Spiritually. Socially. Personally.

 

How often do we surrender our authority before anyone actually takes it from us?How often do we decide someone else has the brain? Someone else has the heart? Someone else has the courage? Someone else knows what good looks like?

 

Someone else gets to decide who’s wicked? Someone else knows the way home?

 

Perhaps that’s the trick hiding underneath all that Technicolor.

 

Not that there is no power.

 

That we’ve been looking for it in the wrong place.

 

And sometimes it takes a tornado, a witch, three unlikely companions, a fraudulent Wizard, a dog with absolutely no respect for curtains, and a very long walk in a pair of silver shoes to notice:

 

We’ve had it all along.

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© Original Work by Rev. Tina M. Adkins