It’s easy to get lost in bright costumes, flashy CGI effects, and impressive vocal performances. But beyond its sparkly facade, Wicked—the hit Broadway musical recently adapted into a two-part blockbuster film—is a story that discomfortingly parallels our current political reality, in which explicitly racist rhetoric and policy from top government officials has become commonplace as our country slowly creeps towards authoritarianism.
At a time when the rights of transgender people and immigrants are being stripped, and funding for necessary public services like libraries and Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program benefits is disappearing, the second and final film installment of Wicked holds a mirror to the confusing direction our country has taken particularly in the year since the first installment premiered in theaters.
Wicked: Part I was a box office hit and cultural phenomenon: The film garnered ten Academy Award nominations, and spawned countless merchandise opportunities, such as Wicked Barbies and Oreos. Inspired by Gregory Maguire’s 1995 book of the same name, Wicked serves as a funhouse-mirror prequel of L. Frank Baum’s iconic 1900 children’s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—one that situates Oz’s world and characters in a similar fantastical world, but with its own dark political reality.
Wicked didn’t see immediate success as a novel, but found its audience over time, and eventually reached the height of its popularity when Broadway titan Stephen Schwartz decided to adapt the story into a musical.
The show’s Broadway run began in October 2003, on the coattails of the election of President George W. Bush in 2000 and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The show directly referenced the 2000 election, Elphaba’s sister Nessarose, becoming the governor of Munchkinland and referring to herself as an“unelected official”—an insult often hurled at Bush after his contentious election.
Though the film adaptation was released more than two decades later, the production of Wicked: Part I was, too, amid a tumultuous political climate. The movie’s conception came in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, its director, Jon M. Chu, told Variety earlier this year. The movie was also produced during President Donald Trump’s first term, and was eventually released in 2024, just a few weeks after he was re-elected. Unlike the musical, the Wicked film did not alter material to directly reference these specific political realities.
Wicked tells the life story of Baum’s famous villain, the Wicked Witch of the West, who in this story is given the name Elphaba and portrayed in a far more sympathetic light than its source material. While Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West seems to have no obvious motive behind her magic-aided oppression of the less powerful, Elphaba is depicted as a thoughtful, studious young woman who is subjected to endless torment and ostracization from her community due to her unusual green skin.
For much of the movie, Elphaba, played by Cynthia Erivo, is accompanied by a second witch, Glinda, who is her antithesis—white, popular, and portrayed with glamour by Ariana Grande. While Glinda is initially unfazed by the cruel subjugation of anthropomorphic animals in Oz, Elphaba’s righteous fury at their treatment eventually moves her, and they eventually develop a friendship so strong that Elphaba invites Glinda to join her as she sets off to meet with the enigmatic Wizard who governs all of Oz.
But at Elphaba’s meeting with the Wizard, she discovers that he is a utilitarian, xenophobic leader who, far from wielding the potential to change the color of her skin, as she had hoped, has no magical powers at all. The Wizard tries to convince Elphaba to join him, but she denounces him for his treatment of the animal community. Glinda, however, is wowed by the popularity and power the Wizard holds. In the final act, Glinda teams up with the Wizard, becoming an agent of the state, while Elphaba actively fights against his regime of oppressive governance and forcing animals into cages, though they share a brief moment of reconciliation in the musical’s emotional climax, “For Good.”
Ramzi Fawaz, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, wrote in a recent essay that at its core, the Wicked movie that Glinda and Elphaba’s relationship is “fundamentally undermined by their individual desires to be seen, recognized, deemed popular or talented by figures of illegitimate authority like the corrupt Wizard of Oz.”
Fawaz, whose research examines how film and literature influences its audiences’s political perspectives, says that the Wizard of Oz and its spin-offs have remained popular because the systems which inspired the story still dominate today.
“Many of us in the modern era are desperate to be able to be agents of our own destinies,” Fawaz said. “We want freedom and yet we also are deeply seduced by domination and the will to
control others. . . . Every time the story of Oz has been retold over the past twentieth century, it has resonated in different ways with different audiences because that’s a contradiction at the core of modern capitalism that has yet to go away.”
And while “For Good” morally equates the witches’choices, letting Glinda off the hook for her participation in a wicked system, Fawaz sees this ending as an accurate representation of the choices that many Americans currently face.
“This is what we do with the people we love all the time, the people that are our friends, the people that we are closest with. We often give them a break, because we need them, and we love them and we're transformed by them,” Fawaz says.
In the Broadway musical, Glinda doesn’t have to face true accountability for betraying Elphaba and complying with a fascist system. But in Wicked: For Good, Chu has the opportunity to hold Glinda, and the regime, accountable—and make a statement about the eerily similar Trump presidency while doing so.