How Art Reflects the Evolution of Human Consciousness

And a SPOILER ALERT for the movie WICKED

Please forgive the length of this article and feel free to save it until after you may see the movie.

Hello beloved reader,

I’m embarrassed to admit that Monday December 2, 2024 was the first time I’ve been in a movie theater since Covid. The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. That’s nearly four years ago. Maybe you’ll get a chuckle from laughing at me, I certainly often do — especially when I’m unconsciously identified with my ego which seems to happen more often than I’d like. But hey, welcome to the human experience.

Jamie and I saw a matinee of the movie WICKED in a theater with lazy boy chairs that reclined back to almost flat, and the movie both entertained and intrigued me.

Another head’s up: please do not read any more of this post if you don’t want to know anything about the movie before you go see it. But there is so much to discuss😁

The movie opens with a scene from the story of The Wizard of Oz when the Wicked Witch has just died. You remember the song? Ding-dong the witch is dead, get out of bed you sleepy head. Ding-dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.

But then it shows one of the munchkins asking Glinda the “good witch,” Didn’t you know the Wicked Witch? Weren’t the two of you friends?

Thus the seed is planted for the story of Wicked: we flash back to the beginning of the life story of the Wicked Witch, who is born green, and named Elphaba — according to the author of the book Wicked on which the musical and the film are based, her name is a nod to L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

I’m intrigued by the historical timing of each of the art forms: the books, the movies, and the Broadway musical. The following timeline shows at what point each art-form debuted in our human his-and-her-story (not just history) and how each reflects the evolution of human consciousness.

1900 — The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the book written by L. Frank Baum was published at the turn of the century. Along with Dorothy and her dog Toto, it features the scarecrow who needs a brain, the tin man who needs a heart and the lion who needs courage — perhaps a metaphor for what was valued in the culture at the time, and maybe is an eternal theme.

The story juxtaposes the ‘Wicked Witch of the West’ and ‘Glinda the Good Witch’, embodying the classic battle between good and evil. Reflective of its time, the themes of good versus evil were depicted in a black and white kind of way with no room for the complexity of both light and dark, as embodied in the classic symbol of Yin and Yang.

It’s not until nearly 100 years later in 1995 that the author, Gregory Maguire wrote the book Wicked that explores the complexities of morality.

Perhaps pointing towards how the American culture was beginning to value the power of observation and awareness, more than judgement and condemnation.

This may of course be simplistic, but still perhaps worth considering: aren’t judgement and condemnation (and ego) some of the most significant factors that move people towards war?

When researching the author Gregory Maguire, I was fascinated to learn he was raised Catholic and is gay.¹ Perhaps the time in which he grew up there was more stigma around being gay, perhaps causing suffering. And again, it’s usually through suffering that people’s consciousness evolves. So as an author, he was exploring new territory and breaking new ground by investigating and exploring the nature of evil.

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1939 — The Wizard of Oz, the American MGM musical film based on the book was released. “Though not an immediate financial or critical success, it became one of the most enduring family films of all time.”²

A female writer, Rebecca Onion, reports in a 2021 PBS article:

“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz contains many of the ingredients of the magic potion” that Oz audiences have come to know and love, writes Salman Rushdie in his influential 2019 79-page essay on the MGM adaptation that hit screens in 1939. … “The Wizard of Oz is that great rarity, a film that improves on the good book from which it came.” …But perhaps Rushdie’s most perceptive observation is his point about the MGM The Wizard of Oz’s unusual focus on a triangle of powerful female characters—Dorothy, Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West. The Wizard’s influence, which seems so huge at the beginning of the story, eventually melts away. In an oft-quoted line, Rushdie observes that in the film, “The power of men is illusory…The power of women is real.”³

Perhaps The Wizard of Oz reflects an earlier stage of the wave of the Rising and Re-Claiming of the Divine Feminine. Cultural change sometimes happens at a galacial pace, until it seems like it’s happening all at once.

The same theme shines through in the movie WICKED, when Elphaba says to the Wizard,

"You have no real power.”

She realizes it's all smoke and mirrors and says something along the lines of,

“Power is not about trickery; it’s about truth and using it to serve others, not control them."

The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn, addresses issues of power in his beautiful book, The Art of Power. It resonates with me how he writes about the right use of power is to ease one’s own suffering first, then to help to ease the suffering of others. Another thing I appreciate about the movie Wicked, is how its mainstream/mass-appeal will speak to both red and blue voters, while simultaneously presenting an authoritarian and tyrannical ruler who abuses his power. Perhaps a metaphor that will help all voters understand how power can be abused.

And another great quote is when the Wizard says,

"The best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy."

I laughed out loud when Jeff Goldblum delivered this line. There is so much truth in it, and how it speaks to the human condition of finding it so difficult to own our own “muck.” It’s so much easier to project our shadow onto someone else and delude ourselves that we don’t have a shadow or “muck” or negative seeds in our human character. Perhaps one of the most common human delusions. Like Thich Nhat Hahn writes, we all have positive and negative seeds within us, and it comes down to the choice: which seeds will you choose to cultivate?

1949 — “While the film was sufficiently popular at the box office, it failed to make a profit for MGM until its 1949 re-release, earning only $3 million on a $2.7 million budget, making it MGM's most expensive production at the time.”⁴

1989 — Deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” to America’s film heritage, it was among the first films selected in 1989 for inclusion in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.”⁵

1995 — The book, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire was published.

Wikipedia says:

The book follows Elphaba from her birth through her social ostracism, school years, radicalization, and final days. Maguire shows the traditionally villainous character in a sympathetic light, using her journey to explore the problem of evil and the nature versus nurture debate, as well as themes of terrorism, propaganda, and existential purpose. Maguire began contemplating the nature of evil while living in London in the early 1990s. He noticed that while the problem of evil had been explored from many different perspectives, those perspectives were seldom synthesized together. He wondered whether calling a person evil might be enough to cause a self-fulfilling prophecy.⁶

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A male journalist writes in a recent, November 23, 2024, BBC article to coincide with the release of the film:

Maguire knew that the topic he wanted to explore in the novel was the nature of evil. Specifically, what does being “evil” mean? Are we just characterising certain types of behaviour? Are we assessing the decay and corruption of someone’s moral fibre? …

“The green witch is evil. We all know she’s bad. But if you ask a person why she is evil, they can’t answer. The brilliance of Maguire’s book is that he interrogated that very question” – Dana Fox …

Shortly after the book was released, Maguire learned that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike had quoted from it in an essay he wrote on the subject of evil, he says. “The one line he quoted from Wicked in the article, which sums all of this up, is,

‘It is the nature of evil to be secret.’

In a 406-page novel, he had found the one sentence that was the most coherent and comprehensive conclusion I had drawn up.”

…Wicked continues to be relevant because “certain people are still othered in our society, or made to be the bad guys so other people can gain power”. And Wicked’s continued resonance is centered on Elphaba's narrative, as she moves from feeling like she doesn't belong and not wanting to have green skin towards self-acceptance and self-love. “You don't have to have green skin to know what that feels like. Everybody has felt that way about themselves in life,” says Fox. “There's a little Elphaba inside all of us. There's a little Glinda inside all of us. Empathising so profoundly with these characters is why people have loved this show and story for so long.”⁷

Perhaps Maguire’s exploration and investigation into the question of what does it mean to be evil captures something in the zeitgeist, and I speculate that much of his drive to investigate this topic may be inspired by his Catholic education. He writes in a November 2024 interview with Kathryn Post of Religion News Service, published in America, The Jesuit Review, “I was taught up until the end of 12th grade by Catholic nuns.”⁸

source

Maguire also writes in this article,

Religion teaches us to be collaborative and communal (by churchgoing and respecting others who may not be like us), but also to be independent, and in possession of our own moral guidance system.

We’re meant to own the behavior of our own souls, and we’re meant to belong to a community and make it better.

In “Wicked” the musical, that same crisis between the impulse to be a citizen and care about society, and the impulse to be an individual and not anesthetize yourself away from your own individuality because it offends society, does exist. I wouldn’t say that is only a religious impulse, but it’s one of the things that religion does.

However, I would offer that perhaps this is what Catholicism teaches.

Perhaps Buddhism doesn’t teach “to make it better,” which has the subtext of, we’re not okay as we are.

Perhaps Buddhism simply encourages people to see “what is.”

To cultivate the powers of observation and radical acceptance and loving kindness versus judgement and condemnation.

And to contribute to a community, along with an intention towards easing suffering in oneself, and others. To make oneself and the community more aware, more conscious.

I aim to shine the light on this not with an intention to say that one religion may be “better than” the other, but with the intention to simply understand the conditioning each religion has on the people who have been brought up in that religion.

~

2003 — Wicked premieres on Broadway and still continues, more than 20 years later.

The New York Theatre Guide writes:

The secrets to the staying power of this Wizard of Oz prequel? There are the tuneful songs (think Popular, For Good, and Defying Gravity), the girl-power story that makes being different a plus, and throngs of theatregoers who come back, again and again, to take in the journey – and friendship – of Elphaba, the misunderstood "wicked" witch, and Glinda, the conflicted "good" witch.⁹

From the BBC:

While it wasn't a bestseller when it was released in 1995, the book was a word-of-mouth hit, says [the author] Maguire. “Every year it would sell more than the year before. It was the genuine definition of a sleeper hit.” Stephen Schwartz's decision to adapt the book into a musical made it even more popular. … Wicked has been playing in New York since 30 October 2003, making it the fourth-longest-running Broadway show of all time.¹⁰

And in a NYT article called Mr. Wicked, the female journalist Alex Witchel writes,

Marc Platt, the musical’s initial producer, said: “Part of the genius of Gregory’s idea is taking a character from a beloved story in our culture, about whom we have a very specific point of view, and seeing her in a completely different light. Elphaba is very much an outsider, and Gregory tapped into that. All of us have had that feeling of being outside and wanting to be in, loved and cared about. It’s a classic underdog story.”¹¹

2024 — Wicked the movie is released at Thanksgiving.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Maguire

2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Wizard-of-Oz

3. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/american-oz-why-wizard-oz-so-wonderful/

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Oz

5. https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Wizard-of-Oz

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_(Maguire_novel)

7. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241122-wicked-author-gregory-maguire-on-the-real-meaning-of-the-story-that-captivated-the-world

8. https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2024/11/20/q-and-wicked-author-gregory-maguire-souls-saints-religion-oz-249323

9. https://www.newyorktheatreguide.com/theatre-news/news/a-timeline-of-wicked-on-broadway-and-beyond

10. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241122-wicked-author-gregory-maguire-on-the-real-meaning-of-the-story-that-captivated-the-world

11. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/magazine/11maguire.t.html