Defying Empire: On the Perennially Relevant Political Message of Wicked

It’s easy enough to cast Donald Trump as the Wizard in the Wicked film adaptation released in November—perhaps as easy as it was to see George W. Bush in the role when the stage musical debuted on Broadway in October 2003. One might notice the glaring similarities between the three: the desire to construct an enemy so as to maintain power in perpetuity, the use of language to launch wars off that desire, and the mobilization of the military and its weaponry to make such rhetoric physical and, as a result, irreversibly destructive. The Wizard himself makes this strategy plain:

Elphaba… when I first got here, there was discord and discontent—and back where I come from, everyone knows the best way to bring folks together is—give them a really good enemy.

This—along with themes such as friendship, otherness, and belief in one’s self—is a rather overt message within the story of Wicked, and no less so in its newest glossy finish. The critique of a corrupt leader is embedded in Wicked’s narrative, yet has been largely absent from discussion during the months-long press tour (now on its award season leg with Oscar buzz and a Golden Globe win for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement). Then again, it’s hardly shocking that the promotion of the first part of a $350 million franchise would sidestep any sort of adjacent, let alone precise or overt political statement. The Hollywood machine so often demands apolitical vagueness, obscuring depth with spectacle, celebrity, and acclaim for box office achievement.

Other critical themes—notably propaganda, surveillance, and empire—have also passed under the radar, or so far as the promotional and for-your-consideration campaigns go. These, too, are easy to link to Trump, and I’m never one to miss an opportunity to blame contemporary American issues on him, Ronald Reagan, either of the Bushes, Bill Clinton,  Barack Obama, or Joe Biden. But true to the nature of empire, these ideas extend far beyond any one Wizard. They reflect something more pervasive—not just the moral bankruptcy of a singular leader but of a system devoid of morality altogether. A system that remains intact even after the Wizard departs or when a president’s term eventually ends.

In Wicked, the Wizard is a charismatic figurehead for a mythologized conception of Oz that has been constructed and enshrined into its history so as to consolidate power, wealth, and control in the hands of a few. Early on in the movie, Elphaba Thropp pauses in her song of longing (“The Wizard and I”)—her brows furrow as she hears cheering nearby. When she follows the sound, her gaze eventually falls upon a Mount Rushmore-esque bust of the Wizard. Just a few scenes prior, another monument made out to honor the so-called Wonderful Wizard at the entrance of Elphaba’s Ivy League school, Shiz University, crumbled to the ground—a result of Elphaba’s magic—to reveal a more truthful mural over which it was built.

Here, the myth of an idol wizard cracks, figuratively but also literally to reveal three Animals underneath—former leaders of Oz, prophetic and illuminated. In Wicked, animals are not animals, but Animal beings equal to humans in every sense. But viewers come to find that the Wizard and the system in which he stands at the helm of have launched a campaign that, like any imperial project, systemically disappears these individuals—robbing them of their culture; making it so they cannot move about freely, but instead must exist in a cage; and stripping away their language, literacy, and ability to speak. Along with establishing hegemony and enforcing displacement, control over language is—as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin wrote in The Empire Writes Back—one of the main features of imperial oppression:

The imperial education system installs a ‘standard’ version of the metropolitan language as the norm, and marginalizes all ‘variants’ as impurities…Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which conceptions of ‘truth’, ‘order’, and ‘reality’ become established.

In this way, Wicked is less and less about how Elphaba became the Wicked Witch of the West—and also less about a single dictatorial figure such as the Wizard played by Jeff Goldblum—and more about a dictatorial structure, the propaganda it manufactures, and the genocide and ethnic cleansing that it sanctions. Those who actively oppose these evils, such as Elphaba and the Animals themselves, are made to be enemies of the state, wicked in their ways. Later on—after Elphaba rejects the Wizard’s plans to use her powers to surveil her fellow Ozians—Madame Morrible, who had been grooming Elphaba under the guise of mentorship up until this moment in the story, constructs a narrative with language not only precise and deliberate, but also inciting, amplified by microphone to all of Oz:

Citizens of Oz! There is an enemy who must be found and captured! Believe nothing she says! She is evil…Her green skin is but an outward manifestorium of her twisted nature. This distortion, this repulsion, this Wicked Witch!

In April and May of 2024, hundreds and hundreds of students gathered on campuses across the country to demand their schools divest from companies that manufacture weapons used by Israel in its decades-long apartheid regime over Palestine. In response, university officials and state governments turned their weapons—fitted in riot gear and armed with batons, mace, and assault rifles—against the students. This is but a microcosmic example of how an empire such the U.S. weaponizes its military and utilizes propaganda against its own citizens, just as it does to those abroad. Journalist and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal writes of this in Dreaming of Empire, the first book in the three-part Murder Incorporated series:

Like all empires, the harsh and violent forms of control that have been used on the “wretched of the earth,” have migrated back to the homeland in a time of decay to keep the population in check. The tyranny we have imposed on others is now being imposed on us.

But we cannot expect anything different when our institutions are—as Shiz and the Emerald City are to the Wizard—shrines to agents of empire. On the south lawn of my school, the University of Texas, stands a Roman-like bronze statue of George Washington no less deifying than Horatio Greenough’s toga-wearing version. As students took to the lawn to protest UT’s role in ongoing genocide, Washington loomed over them—as if it was him giving orders to the cops and state troopers to descend upon the demonstrators. Bystanding students stood on the statue’s platform, their phones trained on their classmates being tackled to the ground. Some smiled and laughed, as if to gleefully second Washington’s orders—complicit and compliant. And in a sense they were Washington’s orders, insofar as his statue underscores why university and state officials were so emboldened to sanction violence against their students, let alone to maintain funding for mass death.

The purpose of an empire’s propaganda is to affirm and then re-affirm the empire’s continued existence. Having Washington standing by, confident and strong, surely reassures law enforcement squads as they drag dissident students through the dirt, and university officials as they sign-off on another investment to Lockheed Martin. Having the Wizard’s kind smile and allegedly knowing eyes carved into the walls of Oz’s institutions—along with posters and effigies of a caricatured Elphaba—surely means his plans of repression are just, his guards are right to hunt the witch, and the citizens are patriotic in their celebration of her death.

These propagandized shrines to imperial rule, weak and flimsy in morality, are expertly and meticulously crafted to vindicate empire through image and language. Each statue, monument, poster, and sculpture manufactures myth into fact. And when myth is enshrined—rather than the Wizard or Washington, the cops or guards, the university officials or the Munchkinland mayor—it is, instead, anyone who questions this myth that is deemed the “wicked” one.  “These protestors belong in jail,” Texas governor Greg Abbott tweeted. “We won’t allow antisemitic, pro-Hamas protesters to take control of our universities,” Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick posted on X. In an issued statement, UT Austin president Jay Hartzell wrote, “Our University will not be occupied,” undoubtedly intentional in his lattermost word choice.

Such rhetoric not only attempts to delegitimize the students—and thus delegitimize and distract from why they were protesting to begin with—but is, too, inciting, laying the groundwork for a future where repression on campus is even more normalized than it already was. Overt were the dozens of violent arrests and the politicians’ demonizing rhetoric. Overt, too, was the university’s decision in the following semester to implement a policy barring university functions, ceremonies, and publications from taking “political” stances—all while continuing to host figures like former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on campus. More covert, though, is the subsequent institutionalization of protest and demonstration. New departments such as “Event Readiness and Response” lay out arbitrary rules and regulations for how students can express dissidence. Protest and dissent is then folded into the very system of control that student protesters are demonstrating against. Causing disruption, for example, is prohibited—as if disrupting business-as-usual is not the whole point.

Ozians and Americans alike are taught to live uncritical of the obvious incompatibility between empire and liberation. The privileged Galinda Upland and what looks like nearly all of the Shiz student body fawn over a wealthy prince, Fiyero Tigelaar, as he sings “Stop studying strife / And learn to live ‘the unexamined life’” in “Dancing Through Life”—an anthem that underlines how unacknowledged privilege begets a careless complicity which begets fertile ground for propaganda to flourish. But it is not Galinda or Fiyero, nor the Wizard or any Ozian institution that should function as our moral center. Elphaba comes to find that it is not her job to attempt to appeal to those in positions of privilege and power, and certainly not when their ideas of liberty require genocide and dispossession. As revolutionary activist Assata Shakur writes in Assata: An Autobiography:

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.

This is not to synonymize the fight of anti-genocide student protesters—and certainly not the plight of the Palestinian people—with that of a make-believe witch, but rather to say that more often than not, art acts as a mirror. According to Gregory Maguire, author of the 1995 Wicked novel, the Land of Oz has always reflected the U.S. And in its reflection, Wicked reminds us of the ease with which imperial myths are constructed, accepted, and perpetuated, and how power consolidated becomes power self-sustaining. Behind his golden mask, the Wizard commands armies, rewrites narratives, and erects norms with the pull of a lever or the shift of a gear. The danger lies less in whoever it is behind the mask than in the machinery—the empire—they control and sustain.

Perhaps that is the most apt reflection of our reality within Wicked. The Wizard eventually departs, but the shrines to them—the busts, the monuments, the statues, the levers and gears—remain. They tower over us and uphold the myriad myths of empire—myths that manufacture fact and choreograph complicity, that construct enemies within the U.S. as they do in Oz, and that ensure those deemed “wicked” are those never mourned.