This week, I’m done grousing and I’m going to talk about something I love, which also happens to be the most influential American novel ever written.
I am, of course, talking about The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
You perhaps think I am exaggerating?
Last week I was in the bookstore, browsing through the mangas, and I was stopped by the title Dorothy of Oz. It was a Korean manga, science-fantasy variation on the Baum classic. With this in my hand, I turned around, and was confronted by A Lion Among Men, the latest in Gregory Maquire’s Wicked series, which itself follows on the heels of earlier re-imaginings such as Philip Jose Farmer’s Barnstormer in Oz. On the comics rack, I saw the new Marvel adaptation, and I understand from reading Bookspot Central there’s yet another graphic novel version coming out soon. Recently, the SciFi (or SyFy, what’s up with that?) channel re-imagined the story in Tinman and that is a long way from being the first time Oz has been on the screen. Everybody knows the 1939 MGM musical (possibly the most quoted movie of all time), but there have been Oz movies made almost as long as there have been movies. Which doesn’t include the stage productions, from the original musical staged by L. Frank Baum himself at the turn of the previous century, up through The Wiz, and of course Wicked.
All because of a children’s book written over a century ago by an ex-chicken breeder, ex-dime-store manager, ex-traveling salesman, ex-actor, ex-journalist.
Now, I am an Oz geek. I am not ashamed to admit it. I quite literally grew up on the Oz books. I learned to read out of The Wizard of Oz. I had a babysitter, the teenage daughter of family friends, who had a bunch of the Baum sequels and whenever she came over to sit, or we went to their house to visit, those books were open. When she went away to college, she gave them to me, and I still have them. I’m now reading them to my son.
And let me tell you, these are some truly weird books. You get past The Wizard of Oz and you find out Piers Anthony’s Xanth has got nothing on Oz. There’s a magnificently strange scene in The Tin Woodsman of Oz where Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodsman, discovers his old head, in a cupboard, and has an argument with it (did I mention it’s his old flesh-and-blood head?). Or there’s the magician who makes a glass cat, but doesn’t want it to have the to repeat Tin Woodsman’s problem with not having a heart. So, he puts in a ruby heart. The problem is, because the heart is made of stone, the cat is hard-hearted.
But it’s the story in the first book that everybody knows. It’s the tale of Dorothy and her three companions that we all love and that gets re-told and re-worked and is so firmly a part of the cultural landscape.
Why?
I mean there’s the obvious reason that it’s out of copyright and so anybody can do anything with it, but that wasn’t true for the 20th century when most of the great adaptations were made. So it’s got to be more than just found material.
Every so often, I’ve tried to work out the enduring hold of The Wizard of Oz, but I’ve got to say I’ve never quite managed it to my own satisfaction. I mean, I love the stories because I love them. Because they’re neat. Because they’re weird. Because Dorothy is unflappable without being cloying (all props to Judy Garland, but she didn’t get across the sheer nerve of the Dorothy in the books). But clearly I’m not the only one who remains captivated by the story.
The 1939 movie’s got a lot to do with it, of course. Although, it didn’t at first. MGM never made back its $3 million budget and was considered a flop (!!) until it was rescued by TV (ain’t that just the tail wagging the dog?), and we all came to know it with Judy Garland’s breathless, dreamy Dorothy, Margaret Hamilton’s amazing Wicked Witch of the West, not to mention Burt Lahr’s Brooklyn-accented Cowardly Lion and those wonderful songs by E.Y. Harburg.
But while the movie has provided the most enduring visuals (and the best quotes) it’s the story itself that captivates. In a lot of ways, Oz is the first iteration of that great American genre; the buddies on a road trip. Seriously. The Yellow Brick road is the most famous thoroughfare in American letters. And on it we have a group of mis-matched friends each of whom is searching for something (all together now: “A heart, a home, a brain, da noive!”) to make them complete. They are not princes and princesses, they are working folk who have all had hard luck somehow; a poor farm girl, an unsuccessful scarecrow, a cursed lumberjack (if you’ve read the book you know he’s made of tin because the Wicked Witch of the East put a spell on his axe and he cut himself to pieces), and a cowardly lion. They are all looking to a Wonderful Wizard to save them from their troubles, but in the end, they all save themselves.
Which is what is really remarkable about the story, because it is reconstructing and deconstructing the traditional fairy tale at the same time. The tales the Brothers Grimm collected there are endless variations on the clever peasant boy or girl heading out to find something they need (you can actually measure the age of a fair tale this way. In the oldest stories, they get food, in the newest they get royalty), and finding help on the way. But in the traditional stories, what is needed is genuine, as is the king or wizard who can ultimately bestow it. In Oz, the characters have what they need inside them, and the wizard is a con man. In fact, in the book anyway, the Emerald City itself is a fake. All the people have to wear green glasses, supposedly so they’re not blinded by the brilliance of it, but actually so that it will look green.
It’s a story of independence as well as friendship, personal triumph as well as a successful quest.
There’s also the fact that what they’re after is not riches, or royalty or even a decent lunch. One wants to be smarter than he is, one wants to be able to love, one wants to be brave and one just wants to go home. Except for Dorothy, the quests are internal. The three companions all want to be better people, but not like Pinnochio who had to change his whole nature and then get a fairy to decide to make him real. Lion, Scarecrow and Tinman are happy enough in their own skins. None of them considers himself unreal in any way. They just have parts of themselves they wish were better. The belief in the possibility of self-improvement and getting along on the your own strengths is what makes this story uniquely American. There’s no miracle of birth, no fairy godmother, no destiny, no divine intervention. It’s just people doing their best.
Another amazing thing about Oz, especially for the time it was written, is that it really is an incredibly gentle work. Baum did that deliberately. He was reacting to the horrible Victorian-era moral fables like Shock-Headed Peter (in which boys who suck their thumbs have them cut off) and The New Mother (in which disobedient girls are abandoned by their mother and left with a monster). As a result, Oz is notably lacking in moralizing, attempts to be Improving or punishments for evil. Even the death of the witches is accomplished with remarkable tidiness. Nobody is rolled downhill in a barrel stuck full of nails (as in the Brother’s Grimm), nobody has to get their happy ending by dying and going to Heaven to get their happy ending (as in Hans Christian Anderson). That whole speech Dorothy gives at the end of the movie about how she’s learned to never look for paradise beyond her own back yard? That’s Hollywood adding an air of hard-nosed Protestanism that never shows up in the book. Baum just has Dorothy hold out bravely until the end, when she really makes it home from the real journey she has been on. Oh, she’s a good kid, but no one lectures, no one moralizes, and God does not enter into the question at all. The story was written for fun to entertain children and as such it holds up beautifully.
And that’s the other reason it’s lasted. Because Baum declined to give his story a specific moral, it can be read and re-read by each generation with fresh eyes. Like Shakespeare (yes, I said Shakespeare and I meant it), the story is simple enough that someone can always be a new way to tell it, or find a new setting to place in it. Oz is a big country and leaves plenty of room for the imagination.
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I love Oz!
I was wondering what do you feel about a contemporary in Barrie’s Pan?
I think Pan’s harder to update. Don’t get me wrong, I love Peter Pan. Spent hours reading it, and have actually read the prequel, but it’s got 2 problems, okay, it’s got 3… among it’s problems are… The first is that Neverland just doesn’t have the scope or the marvelous weirdness of Oz. And the second is, gender balance. The lost boys are all, well, boys. In the original girls are specifically excluded (because they’re too smart, but still, excluded is excluded) and there’s the whole business of wanting Wendy around to be their mother…then, of course, there’s the Indians, which would also have to be dealt with somehow.
So, Jay, why do you love Oz?
I’m afraid it’s not as complex or gifted with hindsight explanations. I was hooked really young and simply never let go. My appreciation for source material came as an adult, but the film just hit me at a time where as a kid you still ran to find the other end of the rainbow (even if it was for a pot of gold and not home). It’s not built on interpretations of an adult (gold standards and such).
It’s simply the first adventure I went on and in a way I think that probably isn’t possible anymore. When I was a kid, you caught stuff on television or not at all. Sure you had some Beta Max tapes, but at this time seeing Oz on TV was a bit of a ‘event’. Literally as a child of the, 80′s your television window was probably only a couple hours a day at the most(rather be outside), so everything you watched was something more than the in-demand entertainment of today.
Plus, a kid I was into cartoons, and though obviously unrealistic, Oz had REAL people which made it unique. I had no idea that Dorothy was actually 60+ years old when I was watching it – it’s timeless.
Anytime I hear Garland’s “Somewhere over the Rainbow” I’m kind of reminded of fun, pure adventure, and what without question played a pivotal roll on why I run a site like this one. For me it’s kind of like the opening scene in ‘A New Hope’, Plenty of people like the material, but there are some of us who have been effected by the of first glimpse of a Star Destroyer or a Kansas girl and her dog that continually have us searching for material to capture or be captured in such a way again. All that I meet and learn on the way, I owe to them.
Silly, but that’s why I love Oz.
Jay, you just reminded me of the intense enjoyment I had when I watched the first StarWars movie (which apparently now is the fourth) as a child! This movie is exactly as old as I am, it is the very first movie I remember watching and I still recall the my intense feelings of excitement and suspense as squirmed through Luke’s final approach to blow up the Death Star. It is still my favorite among this series for exactly those reasons (plus I didn’t get to see the two sequels until years and years later). I was six years old and I loved the adventure of it- I simultaneously wanted to be Luke Skywalker and had a big crush on him.
You know what’s weird to me is that we (a broad observation, and perhaps a bad one) is that we (speaking as a straight dude) tend to gravitate toward Harrison Ford character more as we get older. Of course he’s our favorite character, of course we would be the rebel, of course we’d be the guy with coolest car, who gets the princess. As a kid though, it never even crossed my mind that you’d want to be anybody but Luke (well, maybe Lando – that dude was pimp).
I sometimes wonder if that’s progress or getting lost (though Han certainly is not a bad model). I’ve found myself very much lately trying to remove myself from avoiding simple good or what I enjoy in the name of progress, and it shows through different media I enjoy.
Luke Skywalker was cool. As cool as Severian on his best day.
Well, speaking from my point of view – as a teen I discovered that Harrison Ford had much more sex appeal than Mark Hamill.
In terms of psychology, I think that the Luke Skywalker character functions as such an archetypical coming-of-age hero that he was easy to identify with as a young child. As a six-year old I most certainly not identify with the female heroine. It just didn’t register with me that as a girl I was supposed to identify with her – I had some very heated arguments in school with the boys because I didn’t want to be the princess waiting to be rescued! Luke was the young man developing into a hero and almost all my play-mates, boys and girls, identified with him. Then in the teenage years all the girls discovered that Han Solo was HOT!
Given hindsight, Leia is actually a pretty strong character. I’m not going to say she broke molds (as I’m just not enough of an film buff beyond my lifetime to say that), but as I look back it had to be first for me.
- She survives torture by Vader who probably zipped into conscious as a badass faster than any character in cinematic history (other than perhaps the Wicked Witch!). Just in ‘New Hope”:
- she mocks both Vader and they in charge of the “that’s no moon”
- she takes control of the situation during the firefight with the storm troopers
- she is (as we know it) not only a Senator in the ‘existing’ government, but a leader of the Rebel Alliance
In ROJ she has the classic, “thermal detonator!” scene as she walks in Jabba palace, and of course later kills him (physically).
Absolutely though, then she was ‘to be rescued’, but I think you see of the duality even in spoofs like Spaceballs.
As we later learn the efficiency of Vader (through movies, novels – or whatever) her ability to withstand Vader in a New Hope (remember Vader read Luke with ease in ROTJ – and his son had been trained) is somewhat augmented.
I think for me the only other time I was consciously aware of a strong female characters – as a kid was – in Robotech. I had read that she was an influence on Weaver’s character in Alien(s) (which made her a full blown action hero).
It honestly never struck me that Ford would be ‘hot’. Was Ford really that kind of pimp in his younger days? it’s hard for me to doubt Indiana Jones, but I may have just been young to even think on those terms!
Jay, I totally agree with you that Princess Leia was a strong character – but it was something that I only saw as I got older. As a teen I appreaciated that she was a kick-ass heroine, and I loved her romance with Solo.
In terms of sexiness, I think it was more the character of Solo than Ford that was attractive – the appeal of the charming rogue is not to be underestimated. But I do find it very interesting how the different characters has provided various points of identification and psychological investment that changes with age, and it is something that I feel is very much tied up with their function in the narrative. As the young hero coming of age Luke provides a point of identification that can cross gender-boundaries whereas Solo and Leia, due to the element of romance, are more convential in terms of gendered identification.
George Lucas was very much inspired by the Joseph Campbell’s work on the structures of myth and it could be very interesting to take a closer look on some of these issues.
I’d say he was obsessed with Campbell myself!
You know what sales Solo even more for me? It’s Chewie. AT the time (as a kid) it’s hard to not view Chewie (at least initially) like you would a pet (obviously he was much, much more than that) and we always kind of have that notion that dogs or animals can judge people. Chewie trusts Han (handcuffs scenes etc.)
Later we know that Wookies have been cast into slavery (Deathstar among other things) and the origins the relationship itself, and we view Han as a character that has a certain moral compass as it applies to race, species etc (in an Empire which was very much human dominated, and at least passively anti-’alien’)
I know that trek dealt with these issues long before, but even as a kid it made sense on a lot of levels that Solo was good ‘joe’ that got swept up in what was essentially a very myth/storytelling like beginnings of a dynastic feud that took on galactic significance.
I have only one thing to say about A New Hope (’cause I’m saving it up for a column):
HAN SHOT FIRST!
The real reason of Solo’s enshrinement in the hall of awesome!
Can’t wait!
I’ve always marvelled at Chewbacca’s aptitude as a mechanic – one would think that all that long hair of his would snag on and get tangled in the more delicate parts of the amchiner. *wink*
I mean machinery, can’t type today.
Wookies in general were known to be very mechanically inclined as a whole. Probably another message/statement when considering their homeworld/physical characteristics.
That scene was a revelation to me at 10 yrs. old, which was when I saw A New Hope (when it opened in the theaters may I add), which I persist to referring to as “The 1st Star Wars,” because it WAS.
I find it really interesting that we’ve gone straight from Oz to Star Wars. It’s not a juxtaposition I would have thought of before, and yet it a weird way it really fits.