Published on June 2, 2025 6:20 AM GMT
I watched Wicked (the 2024 movie) with my ex and his family at Christmas. My current stance is that it was pretty fun but not especially incredible or deep. I could be pretty wrong—watching movies isn’t my strong suit, but I do like chatting about them afterwards. Some thoughts:
- Glinda is initially too shallow and awful to be taken seriously as a character, so it’s hard to care about her. It felt like she changed too much too fast as a result of Elphaba being good to her, especially in the direction of being not a throwaway idiot played for laughs. Elphaba feels too much set up by the world to be a sympathetic victim-hero—like, she has an unimportant flaw and then everyone everywhere despises her for it, and at the same time they are committing great evil and she is the only one who can see this. It feels a bit like a self-aggrandizing pity fantasy of a child (‘once upon a time there was a little girl called [my name] and everyone was mean to her for no reason because they were bad and also they hurt animals and she was the only person who cared, and also she really had strong magical powers that nobody else had…’).
Given her situation of being aggressively mistreated and perceiving great ills in the world around her, I don’t know that she behaves particularly relatably, admirably or interestingly for most of the movie. She is defensive and incurious and doesn’t seem to have much going on until the most blatant wrong falls into her lap. (And this wrong is even being committed against one of her only friends, making acting on it particularly socially easy and called-for by basic decency.) So I guess her character also seems hard to be invested in. I’m not sure what makes a sympathetic victim-hero feel like a pure incarnation of a moving archetype versus an on-the-nose trope review, but for me it landed a bit too much as the latter. On the other hand, Elphaba’s singing is really something. Though her solo songs mostly didn’t do that much for me. I did enjoy the acknowledgement of the human tendency to have dumb fantasies about being respected by people you don’t know in “The Wizard and I”. In non-solo songs, I had fun with “Popular”, “Dancing through life”, and “What is this feeling?” Though Elphaba’s description of Glinda as simply ‘blonde’, is contrary to the narrative that she is above taking appearances to define people, so I don’t get that bit. About five other songs did little for me or I don’t remember. I wonder if some people like them, or if people making musicals have some other aim in including all the meh songs. “Defying Gravity” seems great, though still most of the time doesn’t quite do it for me. One thing about it is that it is powerfully living out an implicit fantasy that is probably common in the abstract—you are constrained and being told to do things you don’t want and there are more powerful forces closing in and about to wrest what little control you have, and what if suddenly you could just fly up and be stronger than anyone and have all the power and control? What if just believing in yourself would unleash this? (It doesn’t usually work, but worth a try, and a great soundtrack for trying!) One response I initially had to Wicked was ‘wow this male lead asks for the reworking of my male charisma scale to go up to at least fifteen—how is this guy not famous? A damning blow to the efficient Hollywood hypothesis?’ However on investigation, not only is he famous, but he starred in an entire season of Bridgerton that I watched. So, new mystery: Jonathan Bailey in Bridgerton did not ask me to recalibrate my understanding of charisma. Did he get more charismatic? Does the writing do a lot? If I contacted him, would he tell me? (Ok, his Wikipedia page says he was described as “unbelievably charismatic” in 2016, so that’s reassuring on some front. But now two mysteries—why so different at different times, and why do so many movies hire other actors?) If you enjoy the song “Dancing through Life” without thinking much, it might encourage you to have a carefree attitude, per its content. Yet this message is brought to you by people who have put incredible amount of care and conscientiousness into dance training, choreography, songwriting and so on. So if you like the creation, you should actually consider liking non-carefree attitudes more. (This behind-the-scenes video strongly confirms: dancing through giant rotating ladder-rooms is not for the spontaneous.) Imagine you are alone in a dangerous world, but there is someone good and powerful on your side out there, who helps you and directs you and warms your heart in your solitary struggles. Then having at last fought your way to their side, you see it was all a fiction and you are looking into the eyes of evil. This can be a vivid and interesting moment! Wicked contains an instance of this narrative, and I feel like that aspect of it didn’t have the emotional punch that is possible.
I read a fantasy book with this plot once, where it turned out that the good and wise king—the protagonist’s main distant ally in a frightening world—really just had magic that let him commit murder then have eyewitnesses believe his words claiming innocence. So all word about him was good, but at his side you realized the truth, maybe only for a moment between murder and amnesia! That was a plot twist that stuck with me. Maybe Wicked wasn’t meant to get a big punch from that, or maybe it did for others—but it was a key element of the story, and for me this part kind of rolled by without moving me.
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