On the cover of [SSex
These films are: The Wizard Of Oz (1939) and It’s A Wonderful Life (1946).
I watch slasher flicks with glee and cheesy horror with rapt attention and extensive note taking. My favorite film genres are horror, comedy, and pornography. When I was a child, I wasn’t allowed to watch the scary movies but I always ran straight into the horror section and studied the covers and synopsis on the back. I actually fare well in horror trivia for these reasons even though there are large gaps in my viewing record. Very little on the screen actually scares or terrifies me. I find the traditionally frightening quite exciting and entertaining. Nothing brings a smile to my face like a gory and bloody on-camera evisceration. I am delighted by the fact that it is not real. I love watching artists communicate their imaginations to me in a skillful way.
When I watch those above films from start to finish, however, I feel no delight in the human condition. I can be no longer at ease at the end of these films because of the way that they ultimately laud mediocrity and the status quo. Allow me to explain.
The story of Dorthy in Oz is amazing. It’s a neat and tidy hero’s journey with delightful imagery that has captivated audiences for years. I remember the first time I watched The Wizard Of Oz. I loved it all; the songs, the costumes, the characters, the sets, and even the flying monkeys. I loved it all. Even at that first childhood viewing, something unsettled me about that ending. It made the entire thing implausible in my mind I mentally deleted it from the record as a grievous error on the part of the editor, clearly.
Oz, you see, is a place of non-stop delight. On the heels of a string of major political victories resulting in the liberation of two large populations of people and finding out the bitter truth that all wizards are really humans behind curtains, Dorthy is offered a leadership role. Everything is in color, the city is a glamorous art deco, she has three gay best friends, her dog is at her side and yet the moral of the story is, for some unknown fucking reason, for her to return to a life in black and white in the midwest during the great depression. Dream big, but happiness can only be truly found in your own black and white, depression era back yard.
Even at a single digit age I had to ask what the fuck was wrong with Dorothy? “The Great Depression” or Oz is a “cake or death” question if you ask me. As I got older, the ending bothered me more and more. Then I stumbled into the great American classic that so many people can’t get enough of, Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life.
Legend has it that the character “George Bailey” was named after a canyon in the city where I spent my childhood and adolescence. Everyone knows lines from this movie at least because television stations will play it for 24 hours straight during the holiday season. Jimmy Stewart delivers his heartwarming performance and everyone knows that every time a bell rings, an angel gets it wings.
Now aside from the sentimental schlock that makes me run in terror the basic premise of the film is: some people are just destined for a life of total mediocrity. George Bailey has dreams. He longs to get out of his town and see the world, have a few adventures, get to really experience life. He watches other people go off and do great things. His brother is a war hero and he stays at home. He has a wife and children that he loves very much but he’s unfulfilled. Well guess what, George: no matter how big you dream, you no matter how strong you yearn, you will fuck up the world order with your own personal happiness. The status quo is the wonderful life.
I have no problems with claustrophobia in literally tight and closed off spaces. When I watch It’s A Wonderful Life I feel like I can’t breathe. I have to open a window and go for a walk. It hangs over me like a sense of dread. What is the fucking meaning of this movie and why is it the perennial classic? I always pretend that the people in the town took up a collection to send poor George Bailey, keeper of unrealized dreams, on a vacation somewhere on the other side of the world alone for a couple of a months. Give the poor guy something.
Langston Hughes wrote the antithesis of It’s A Wonderful Life with impeccable word craft in “Dream Deferred”:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
For another take on The Wizard of Oz, I recommend that you check out Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s graphic novel, Lost Girls. The plot concerns Alice (of Wonderland fame), Dorothy Gale, and Wendy Darling (from Peter Pan) meeting as adults in a small Austrian lodge just before World War I, and telling each other the stories of their sexual awakenings, including both consensual and nonconsensual acts. In Moore and Gebbie’s version, the tornado which carried her to Oz is actually the first orgasm that she had while masturbating. (NSFW illustration.) Not only is Lost Girls one of the best graphic novels of the past twenty years, but despite his upscale, highbrow following, Moore doesn’t hide behind the bourgeois pretension of “erotica”; he says right up front that it’s pornography, and a brilliant example of the form it is.
I don’t have quite the visceral reaction against Wizard of Oz that you do, although I lean towards agreeing with you that it has a really tragic sense to it. I may have to re-read the novel. My memory is that Baum’s portrayal of Kansas and the Gales was even bleaker than in the movie. I remember the beginning of the book talking about Auntie Em and Uncle Henry as being grey and lifeless. The sentimentality and hope you hear when Dorothy sings “Over the Rainbow” in the movie is nowhere in the book. It feels more as though Dorothy can’t even imagine rainbows any more. Oz has its own problems, though; the reason that the Emerald City is Emerald is that everyone wears green glasses.
The one thing you take away from Baum’s version that’s different is that yes, Dorothy does come back to Kansas and her grey, dust-filled relatives, but she doesn’t have to stay there. She comes back to Oz, again and again, in all the following books.
I have absolutely read the books but all films should be analyzed at least once through the lens of their existence as an antonymous entity. It’s like a theoretical control group. Why the filmmakers made the choices that they did are interesting to me especially when examined with the culture climate of the time. That would be a lengthy blog post. A delightful one, no doubt, but lengthy.
I’m just fascinated by the popularity of xenophobic films. It’s a very Sarah Palin “Real America” kind of notion. It’s painted as selfish and destructive to pursue personal happiness outside of your status quo and I find that pointedly interesting. Dorthy horrifies me a little more because of its parallels to coming of age. In the film, the color and vibrance of Oz is a swan song for a childhood to be overcome in order to enter solidly into the world of grey adulthood. When I think of it as a specifically female coming of age story, it reminds me of how you’re treated when you get your period and “become a woman.” Everyone talks about the grandeur of creation and the powerful potential of your body. Then they tell you it’s off limits until they say so.
There’s just a kind of cruelty to show the beauty of that which we can imagine and then pull the rug out from underneath with the message TOO BAD FOR YOU!
I think that between the two, It’s a Wonderful Life feels like a more personal, intimate kind of horror to me. Bedford Falls feels a little more like the shithole suburb I grew up in, and Stewart’s performance is much better with more personality, than the wide-eyed “Golly!” that Judy Garland plays Dorothy with. Stewart actually does play George as living in his own personal horror film, and does it well. I think that the film would probably be a better one if it continued just a day or so longer. The reason that it feels like such a cheap trick is that it stops exactly at the right moment for it to be a “happy” ending. When George gets up tomorrow, there’s still going to be a lot of problems waiting for him, and there’s no sign that Potter’s going to pay for his crimes. And other than a few moments of euphoria, have all those dreams really gone away? Would you really trust him not to find himself back at the bridge in a few days, weeks, months?
I love your thoughts about The Wizard of Oz as a female coming of age story. Seen from that angle, it also embodies the weird Victorian fetishism of childhood “innocence,” especially for girls. It forces the question, why should it be childhood that’s painted in colors, and adulthood in black and white? That’s what I like about Moore and Gebbie’s interpretation of the tornado: it’s specifically the adult sensation of orgasm that brings color into Dorothy’s world. It turns the fetish of innocence and virginity on its head. It welcomes adulthood, rather than depicting it as a loss. That sentimentality around menstruation that you mention is an interesting, and horrifying example. Like all myths based on religion, you’d have to be schizoid to really understand it; you’re supposed to be simultaneously proud of your ability to bear life, but at the same time, that’s tinged with regret for some mythical loss of purity. It’s a rigged game. In Christian mythology, the only ideal mother is one that can have children without fucking.
That’s exactly what freaks me out about Wonderful Life, but I’d never put my finger on it before. Thank you. As for Oz…
A family friend I’m supposed to call an “uncle” once sat by himself in a corner on Thanksgiving and recited the entire script of Wizard of Oz, word for word. Including the songs. Barely audible, and to no one but himself, although his elderly mother heard and kept commenting on how proud she was of him for remembering it all. The guy was in his late 40′s.
I can’t watch the movie without feeling an overwhelming sense of tragedy, now.
Did you try to sync him up with The Dark Side of the Moon?
No, I figure I need a relative that compulsively recites the entire album, and then sync both of them up, to really get the full experience.
That experience being, of course, unadulterated cosmic dread.
So kind of like a cross between Roger Waters, Frank Baum, and H.P. Lovecraft, in other words.
Now all I can think of is this video.
Oh, my effing FSM: that’s just fucking brilliant. I’m going to have to figure out some way to use the phrase “clitoral antennae” on a semi-regular basis.
I’m never going to be able to read Lovecraft again without hearing it in that narrator’s voice. Which will be an improvement.