Wicked vs Maleficent

 “Witch” has historically been used as a pejorative for a non-conformist woman, someone who does not obey the expectations of her culture. It’s little wonder, then, that a society with more progressive mores would commandeer the witch archetype into a warrior for social justice, or that the most famous witch of them all would spearhead this retyping.

    Yes, I am thinking of a certain Broadway musical and a fiery, green-skinned, justice-bent rebel-rouser. 

Wicked is a stage musical that follows the infamous Wicked Witch of the West as featured in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. By shedding light on what happened before Dorothy dropped into Oz, Wicked recasts the witch as not a villain, but a misunderstood heroine. The show has been defying gravity on Broadway for coming on twenty years now, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.

  When Disney’s Maleficent came along a little over ten years later, the shorthand description of the film was basically “It’s Disney trying to do Wicked but with Sleeping Beauty,” and I don’t think Disney is in the least bit shy about the striking similarities. Like Wicked, Maleficent recasts a certain supreme sorceress as a misunderstood idealist who has her own account of what happened in the traditional telling of her story. The two projects are not complete mirrors--Maleficent embraces a vibe that is much more in line with dark fantasy while Wicked's tone is much lighter, bordering on farcical--but there is certainly an inherited premise. Yet despite that marketing line, I haven’t yet seen many attempts to really compare the two texts. So I thought ... why not?

         I want to focus on how both texts portray critique and the idea of rebelling in general. In addition to being my gateway into the world of Broadway, Wicked was also my first encounter with the idea of social critique, as I suspect it was for many, many others. I also wanted to examine my own feelings toward both texts since I had such wildly different reactions to both of them, especially upon early exposure. I listened to “Defying Gravity” daily during most of my adolescence, and meanwhile horned Angelina Jolie was the first horseman of the apocalypse. I’m a little older and wiser now, and with a hopefully more mature perspective, I’d like to reexamine both properties.

Here we go. 

The Yellow Brick Road

        In Gregory McGuire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, the unnamed witch is given the name Elphaba. In this book, Elphaba is the weird girl who, even aside from having green skin, is not conventionally attractive, but she is opinionated. She sees the injustices in Oz, specifically the animals who are slowly being stripped of their right to speak, and commits to right the wrongs of the world. Elphaba brings the matter to the attention of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, only to find out that the Wizard isn’t so wonderful. And so Elphaba sets herself against The Wizard who in turn makes Elphaba into public enemy #1.

         The book was adapted into a stage show which premiered on Broadway in October 2003. The musical uses the same basic launching pad, but it exercises quite a bit of creative liberty and indeed acquired a following separate from that of McGuire’s novel.

Concept art by Marc Davis

    It was around this time that Disney coincidentally started playing with the idea of building up their catalogue of animated characters through spin-offs and origin stories. In the words of Producer Don Hahn, "It was about 2003, maybe, when were sitting around one day, asking, 'Who is a really strong and interesting female character we can base a movie on,' and somebody said 'Maleficent,' but I can't point out exactly who it was. It made sense, because she was this really popular villainess who is glamorous and like a runway model. Still, she's been wounded somehow in the past."

    Disney animation played with the idea for a while, but as we discussed in our overviews of both Tangled and Treasure Planet, Walt Disney Animation was kind of in flux throughout the 2000s, and so this Maleficent story more or less stagnated. Then come the 2010s and the overwhelming success of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and suddenly it seems like this idea of revamping the Disney animated catalogue might actually be a fruitful idea, particularly through the medium of live-action filmmaking. Tim Burton would actually sign on to direct this adaptation, but he would eventually depart owing to his commitment to Dark Shadows, and directorial efforts would fall to first-time director Robert Stromberg.

The Shape of Water (2017)

    At a glance, both projects are born out of a shared observation: society makes monsters out of people who question or challenge it. There have been a lot of observations about how, say, monster movies of classic Hollywood carry heavy undertones of historically marginalized groups, likening literal monsters to ethnic or socio-economic minorities and reflecting the culture's widespread fear of "the other." The last several decades, though, have seen storytellers reclaiming these narratives, allowing monsters and witches alike to tell their stories. Maybe these monsters weren't so scary after all, and maybe the true monsters were the ones who threw them in a cage in the first place.

    Neither Wicked nor Maleficent make full use of this inherited premise, but between the two, Wicked winds up bringing more to the conversation, and so we'll start there.

Wicked

    One of the most notable differences between the Maguire's book and the stage show is the extra spotlight given to Glinda. You’ll notice Glinda is featured in the show’s poster alongside Elphaba where she is absent on the original front cover of McGuire’s novel. In the book Elphaba and Glinda are still college friends, she even accompanies Elphaba the first time she meets The Wizard, but Glinda is just a part of the ensemble. They only interact one time after Elphaba is vilified by the wizard, and there is no last emotional goodbye before the melting. That all came when the property jumped to Broadway.

     One of the biggest selling points of Wicked the musical is the way it champions female friendship. Though Elphaba and Glinda spend a part of their time as opponents, as they do in The Wizard of Oz, the show ultimately celebrates their relationship. The emotional climax of the show comes toward the end of the last act in a song titled “For Good” in which both characters reflect on how the imprint they left on each other’s life has ultimately made them into better people.

         For all its cathartic nirvana, Wicked the musical admittedly runs into a lot of internal contradictions. The show has this weird problem where it’s at once too light and too dark. We see things like hate speech immediately following jokes about “teaching history instead of harping on the past." Wicked also prides itself on being this treatise on the ambiguity of morality and what it really means to be good. Glinda poses the question in the opening number, “Are people born Wicked, or do they have wickedness thrust upon them.” Yet all the main characters are easily sorted into camps of good and bad, or at least sympathetic vs unsympathetic.

    As an example, there’s a character named Boq who has the hots for Glinda in school. Since Glinda at the start of the show is a shallow narcissist, she evades Boq by manipulating him into asking out Elphaba’s little sister, Nessarose. (She eventually becomes the Wicked Witch of the East.) This is doubly tragic in that Nessa is genuinely smitten with Boq, or at least the attention he grants her. When Boq ditches her in the second act, Nessa retaliates by trying to use magic to force him to stay with her. This inadvertently causes Boq to lose his heart and become the Tin Man, and Nessa blames the whole accident on Elphaba. For such a colorful show, there are a surprising number of unlikeable characters.

    Meanwhile, Elphaba is overflowing with righteous indignation, and she is victimized at every turn from literally the moment she walks on stage. There’s even a moment in the first act where she bemoans to the audience how much easier her life would be if she didn’t have such an outstanding moral compass. The show constantly reminds the viewer that Elphaba is the only beacon of light in a world that is not just mean, but petty.

    Wicked the Broadway phenomenon also never really places the onus of navigating moral ambiguity on Elphaba herself. She never really does anything the audience would consider morally reprehensible. We don't see her committing some transgression hoping that the ends justify the means or anything like that.

    There’s a song called No Good Deed where Elphaba agonizes over the disaster her actions have caused and ultimately decides to embrace her reputation as a wicked witch, but this isn’t framed as her owning up to any mistakes she’s made. It’s just confirmation that the world is uniformly against her and she never really stood a chance at being the hero because society just won’t let her. This isn’t the case in the novel where Elphaba not only takes morally questionable action, like attempted assassination, but experiences internal conflict over whether the ends justified her means until her melting day. In the musical, though, Elphaba is eternally misunderstood and never really in the wrong.

         It’s little wonder, then, that Wicked speaks more to a teenage audience. I know for me at least there was something very gratifying about being made to relate to the only righteous person in a room full of shallow dum-dums. This charged “me vs the world” narrative, which is so integral to the appeal of a property like Wicked, was validating once upon a time, but nowadays feels like residue from a more childish mindset. 

     These are the thoughts of someone who has been somewhat hardened by adulthood and the reality that social justice is a lot more complicated than the version you’re sold as a high-schooler, but I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding—I still love Wicked. I just relate to it a little differently.

Growing up, my favorite parts of the soundtrack were songs like “Defying Gravity,” and while I still enjoy them very much, I find myself more and more drawn to other aspects of the show like Glinda’s confessional toward the climax of “Thank Goodness,” the Act II opener. Here, Glinda’s facing the consequences of choosing security and popularity over moral rightness. She chose not to defy gravity with Elphaba on her justice quest, instead entering the service of the very wizard Elphaba is now fighting. In her new position of power, Glinda’s widely adored but ultimately hollow because she’s living outside her principles, and she doesn’t really have the vocabulary to articulate why. So she just continues playing along in this puppet show.

    In this great big cast of characters, Glinda is really the only character in the show who truly wrestles with what it means to be good or bad. Elphaba’s arc more or less concludes at the end of the first act. By the time Elphaba is defying gravity, her want vs need dynamic has resolved: Elphaba wanted the Wizard to make her socially accepted, but she needed to fight for what she believed in no matter the cost, and the first time she’s faced with that ultimatum, she makes no hesitations. Elphaba doesn’t really come to any new revelations within the last half of the show except arguably that she is worthy of getting the cute boy, but even that is somewhat tangential and more dependent on other characters rising to her level. The bulk of the story is carried not by Elphaba’s growth but by Glinda’s.

Notice that Glinda has the same basic want vs need as Elphaba, but she doesn’t bloom until the very end of the show when she finally turns her back on the wizard and becomes the leader that Elphaba wanted to be. Even though Elphaba is our main character, Wicked really is Glinda’s story.

    Perhaps there are a select few among us who are born with not only an ability to clearly discern right and wrong but also the conviction to follow right under any circumstances. But I’d guess that for most of us, it’s not a matter of being born good or even having goodness thrust upon us. It’s choosing to sacrifice popularity or approval in the service of something greater. And for most of us, it takes a few tries before we’re really ready to close our eyes and leap.

    Wicked runs into a lot of internal contradictions, but still works. While a lot of the show is very flashy and borderline hammy at times, I think it surprises even itself with its quiet complexity.  You see this really picking up in the second act after Elphaba is vilified by all of Oz. It’s like after we learn the Wizard is a scummy-scumbag, the dam just breaks and all the other characters suddenly aren’t safe from the harsh truths of adult living.

    The ending likewise is bitterly twisted. Elphaba survives, and even gets her boyfriend, but she has to leave her homeland forever and let her best friend think she is dead. Even Glinda’s ascent to true goodness is somewhat tainted by the sins of the country she is now in service to. The show ends with Glinda becoming the leader to the same people who killed her best friend because they were just that gullible. There isn’t really a happy ending to be had for Glinda or Elphaba, just the grace that comes with committing to one’s values in a world that does not reward true goodness.

         Wicked is a phenomenon, easily one of the best things we’ve got from the great white way, and I’m not the only one who loves this property. Even while I was drafting this piece, the show returned to Broadway after the corona shutdown, and watching the pro-shots of the show’s return with the audience lose their minds as the curtain rises got me a little teary-eyed. A film adaptation has been discussed for years now, one that might actually come into fruition one of these days. (I have faith in you Jon M Chu.) 

With as strong a following as Wicked has, it’s no wonder that it would spawn imitators, which brings us to ...

 

Maleficent

    Now, something I don't necessarily consider a flaw but do think is worth bringing up is that filmmakers at Disney early on seemed to make some executive decisions about what kind of film Maleficent would be: this wouldn't just be an origin story, and it wouldn't be just a social commentary. Following Wicked, it would be a full-on redemption story. By comparison, Todd Phillips' Joker paints a sad backstory for his future criminal mastermind, but while this added context says something about the failings of society, it also doesn't turn him into a hero (no matter how much online incels want to see him as such).

    In figuring out "Well, why would a person decide to curse a baby like that?", I don't think that recasting Maleficent as a misunderstood idealist is the only way they could have gone. This could have been a story exploring how, I don't know, the society turns fairies into evil witches because of capitalism or something, and that would have been a valid approach. But I also don't think that Maleficent played it this way just because that's what Wicked did. The Wizard of Oz and Sleeping Beauty occupy comparable but distinct spaces within the larger pop culture framework that are worth noting here.

      This is most visible within the (very twisted and contentious) discourse surrounding the Disney Princesses. In a way, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella kind of take turns being this week’s embodiment of all that was backwards about the days of our ancestors. Because Disney is constantly expected to answer for the sins of princesses past, modern Disney devotes a lot of energy to trying to please a crowd that does not like movies like Sleeping Beauty.

      A key note that I tend to bring up in my essays focused on Disney lore is the discrepancy between the Disney that thousands of talented storytellers spend years perfecting and the Disney that lines up the shelves at your local Wal-Mart. Yes, Disney is a merchandise machine that is very efficient at recycling its own content for a profit, but much of the Disney discourse isn’t so much interested in the content itself as much as the process of recycling. As I argue in my essay on The Jungle Book, this conflation leads to a lot of cheap critique of the Disney canon, which movies like Sleeping Beauty are certainly made to answer for.

       It’s worth bringing up in this section of the essay because it’s entirely unique to Disney. The Wizard of Oz hasn’t really come under scrutiny in recent decades the way movies like Sleeping Beauty have. Maybe if "Oz" had spawned a multi-billion-dollar empire with dolls and theme parks, we’d be seeing hot takes about Dorothy getting away with literal murder (“what’s that teaching little girls?") or how regressive it is that the entire film centers on two girls fighting over a pair of shoes. But in this timeline, The Wizard of Oz isn’t ever asked to defend itself. Wicked’s critique is almost entirely pointing outward, focusing on institutions and society at large, not the text it is adapting.

On the other hand, Maleficent’s critique is internal as much as it is external, deliberately subverting a lot of tropes associated with Disney princess lore. The biggest twist was of course pulling the rug from the original film’s true love’s kiss between Phillip and Aurora. And so, a revisionist take on the Sleeping Beauty story versus something like Joker feels very deliberate. It is using this opportunity to appeal to a specific demographic, to validate the ideas of a group who believes that the entire Disney catalogue needs revising anyways.

   Mind you, I’m not saying tried and true Disney fans don’t or can’t appreciate Maleficent. I know a select few who don’t feel at war between loving classical Disney and this direction. I’m told that Mary Costa, the voice of Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, really enjoyed Maleficent. But as for me, I was very much with the crowd that saw this as a betrayal of Disney-dom. This undoubtedly influenced my perception of the movie when I finally did see the movie, a good year after it came out when I had the lovely Cinderella remake to wash out the bad taste in my mouth.

         Years after this first viewing, my feelings have settled some, such that I can recognize why a person might respond to the movie. I still don’t really like Maleficent, but I have learned how to speak about it objectively.

    Like Elphaba, Maleficent is a super powerful misunderstood magical woman who is vilified by the world. The big baddie is not the Wizard, but King Stefan, father to Sleeping Beauty herself. Here the gendered element is even stronger in that King Stefan literally takes Maleficent’s wings from her in a thinly veiled rape allegory, and this is the thing that darkens Maleficent’s heart. She strikes back at Stefan by cursing Aurora at her christening, only to realize years later that she actually kind of likes this kid. Maybe sentencing her to death was a bit extra. When Maleficent’s curse takes effect, Maleficent kisses Aurora on the forehead, and this is the true love’s kiss that breaks the curse. Love literally heals the world.

         Aside from the tone, there is one central stylistic difference between Wicked and Maleficent. Remember how in Wicked, Elphaba didn’t really need to grow to have a more complete understanding of the world. Everyone else just needed to back off and let her do her thing. Maleficent doesn’t do that with its activist.

     Maleficent has a real want vs need arc that she needs to reconcile. Maleficent wants to strike back at the man (and by extension the world) who harmed her, but she needs to find healing by opening her heart. The rebellious one is also the one who has the most learning to do. This is one way where Maleficent arguably improves on the model set by Wicked. In her movie, Maleficent gets to learn and grow. She gets the good grace of being wrong sometimes but still being a good character. She’s improving not just the world, but also herself. (Aurora in this movie doesn't really get to have a character arc, which I count less as a flaw than a missed opportunity.)

         And that's why this story almost works. Here’s the story of a woman who’s been not merely burned by society, but twisted and mutated by it. She isn’t just hurt by Stefan’s betrayal, she’s transformed. Maleficent comes out of the ordeal not believing in goodness. She ultimately finds peace of mind not by tearing down the world that hurt her, but by building up someone else who needs help. “I was so lost in hatred and revenge. Sweet Aurora, you stole what was left of my heart.” Loving Aurora is the thing that changes Maleficent from villain into heroine. When I set aside the reductive commentary on the Disney Princess narrative, I see where this resonates.

    Just so, Maleficent still inherits many of the structural flaws embedded in Wicked. Even worse, the film lacks many of the assets that balance out the sum, and a lot of that starts with how Maleficent is much less clever than Wicked in how it rewrites its source material.

    The sequence of events in Wicked has a few discrepancies between the narrative of The Wizard of Oz (there are witch hunters that weren’t there in the MGM film), but overall the two accounts don’t really contradict one another. Wicked doesn’t tell you that the witch was never after the ruby slippers, just that Elphaba cared about the slippers only because they were the last mementos of her little sister with whom she had a complicated and strained relationship. Wicked changes your understanding of The Wizard of Oz not by rewriting it but by adding extra context, spinning extra insight, extra character.

    The distance travelled in Maleficent meanwhile, is far shorter. All this film has to do is download all the talking points from the likes of Honest Trailers. Phillip's true love's kiss not awakening Aurora, that's the kind of thing that will reliably be hailed as "unexpected" by a certain crowd, but ... no one was really surprised by this.

    Compare Maleficent to this year's Cruella. That film also saw an origin story of an amoral Disney villainess, but the film works much better than Maleficent. The plot twists are rooted more in the psychology of the characters within the story than trying to subvert central tenants of Disney mythology. What we get as a result is a film with genuine discovery that works on its own terms. What we get in Maleficent is pandering. Wicked-lite.

    Maleficent, who by the way has “never understood the greed of men,” is super-victimized in this film, even more than Elphaba. Again, one point potentially in Maleficent’s favor is that Maleficent actually gets to dabble in genuine evil, something Elphaba never really does in the show. But the film is only too quick to retract this mark on Maleficent’s record. Not five minutes have passed after the curse when the film starts to signal that Maleficent is Aurora’s greatest ally and a good guy, actually.

         This brings us to another thing that was directly lifted from Wicked: the leading pair of empowered women. If Maleficent is this movie’s Elphaba, it follows that Aurora is Glinda. And like Wicked, the story celebrates this girl-on-girl teamwork, but this is another point where the movie thinks it’s being smarter than it actually is. I see a lot of lovers of this movie praise this story choice as a feminist victory, but people forget that in Sleeping Beauty that circle of sisterhood was actually much larger.

The internet has been so focused on slandering true love’s kiss that it overlooks how Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is a very female-centric story. And I don’t just mean it’s a film marketed toward little girls—it has a strong female presence. Count the named characters with speaking lines, and the women actually outrank the men. (This is another trait the movie shares with Cinderella, wouldn’t you know?) And while not every man in this movie is drinking himself into an early grave, the women are the most powerful players, especially the three fairies who are often left out of the Sleeping Beauty discussion. 

    The narrative throughline of Sleeping Beauty is the lengths that Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather will go to keep their adopted daughter safe and happy. There’s a lot of internal competitiveness between the fairies, especially Flora and Merriweather, but even through their comedic squabbles they still ultimately build each other up, and all in the name of helping someone they all care for. If motherly love doesn't get to swoop in and save the day at the end of Sleeping Beauty (though remind me, who was it that busted Phillip out of the dungeon anyways?) it's because it was always there to begin with.

         That’s not how the fairies are played in this new-and-improved version of the tale. Not only are they bumbling unto incompetence, there’s none of that warmth that we see in the 1959 film. Moreover, they resent not just each other but this baby they’re saddled with raising.

         That the Sleeping Beauty fairies are all middle-aged women of more average body-type is also significant when you consider the connotation of the “witch” archetype as a rejection of social norms allotted for women. The fairies are not conventionally beautiful in the vein of most leading ladies in film, and yet in Sleeping Beauty they are given equal screentime to Aurora. 1959 Sleeping Beauty not only celebrates women supporting each other, it also allows for a wider representation of femininity. In short, Maleficent trades in three rounded female characters, none of whom are bound by conventional expectations of female beauty, for one Angelina Jolie.

      If Disney really wanted to try feeding the fires that have been burning them for years, that's their prerogative. But the expectation then falls on them to actually craft something that builds on or improves upon the politics of the film it is critiquing. But in trying to promote its misunderstood heroine, the movie ends up dragging down every other female character in the film, including and especially Aurora. Writer Monika Bartzel summed up the films self-inflicted handicap in her piece for The Week in January 2015:

    “In Sleeping Beauty, Aurora had a nurturing family and a trio of good fairies who were flighty (yet responsible). She had the gift of song, the man of her dreams, and an iconic, charismatic villain who audiences loved. In Maleficent, Aurora is the product of a cold and loveless marriage and a vengeful, unhinged rapist. Her safety relies on a trio of clueless and dangerously careless fairies, and her Godmother is the woman who cursed her — and who had, in turn, been violated by her own father.” 

    Even Maleficent herself is somewhat downgraded in this telling. She doesn't, for example, ascend into dragonhood in the film's final showdown. Funny enough, that privilege was actually passed onto one of the male characters--her shapeshifting raven, Diaval. I guess that maybe they wanted to keep Maleficent’s final confrontation with Stefan human-scale, but if they really were chasing a story of female empowerment, would a dragon transformation not have made even more sense here? What could be more empowering than this victim of assault taking on the form of an ultra-powerful creature and blasting her abuser out of existence? (I know in the sequel she evolves into a giant phoenix for like two seconds, but ... it’s not the same.) The movie doesn’t give much thought to its own political or social commentary, which pretty on-brand for this movie’s writing in general. Everything is surface level.

         The ultimate reason why Maleficent belly-flops is the same reason why it burns so many fans of the animated Sleeping Beauty. The creative decisions respond less to the demands of compelling female storytelling and more to the half-truths perpetuated by years of hot takes. It’s looking backward, not forward.

Wicked Witches and Supreme Sorceresses

       One might argue that Maleficent should be evaluated on its own terms, not in relation to the text it is born from. Deciding what kind of context does or doesn’t count as fair game is always a tricky balance, but I think it’s safe to say that Maleficent wants to be compared to Sleeping Beauty. Having Phillip’s salvific kiss fail to awaken Aurora only kicks because of the viewer’s context for the animated film. The film depends on that comparison. Otherwise, who cares about whether or not true love’s kiss exists in this universe? 

    Unfortunately for Maleficent, criticism is a two-way conversation. If the film is actively going to probe and critique the text it is adapting, it follows that the film should also have to stand up to critique that flows the other way. And as writ, Maleficent is only a progressive text if you distort or otherwise ignore key facets of the text it is critiquing.

         What about comparing it to Wicked? That’s a slightly different game. Maleficent is not a literal adaptation of Wicked, even if it does commandeer many of its most significant features. Just so, I don’t doubt that Maleficent would have never been made without the overwhelming success of Wicked. It’s fair to question how Maleficent does or doesn’t pull off the same tricks as Wicked.

Articulating why exactly Wicked works better than Maleficent is no simple task, but I feel comfortable saying that a part of it has to do with the motivations of either text. Gregory Maguire revealed recently that,

“Stephen understood what the book is about: identifying with someone who has been ostracized … He knew I had not written Wicked to be a parody of The Wizard of Oz but that I wanted to honor and unpack that story instead. The biggest change they made was the ending. I felt aghast but came around to it because the messages remain the same: time is short, cherish who you love, and what you do matters.”

    Wicked indulges in a little adolescent victim-mentality, but the incurious echo-chamber style narcissism of Maleficent? That's much more grating.

        --The Professor