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Complex Numbers #976432 added February 27, 2020 at 12:03am
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The Original Dark Side
First, let me set the mood here.
Got that going? Good.
Now a few words about The Wizard of Oz.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190808-the-subversive-messages-hidden-in-the-...
The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz
It’s easy to mistake the 1939 classic as traditional family entertainment – but 80 years on from its release, the musical is more radical and surreal than ever, writes Nicholas Barber.
(Article is dated six months ago, near the actual 80 year anniversary)
In December 1937, Walt Disney Productions released its first feature-length cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It went on to be cinema’s biggest hit of 1938, a success that not only encouraged Disney to make other fairy-tale cartoons for decades to come, but also encouraged another studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, to try its own fantasy musical about an orphaned girl and a wicked witch: The Wizard of Oz.
80 years on, Disney has clearly won that particular war. Only now they're making fairy tales about superheroes and Jedi. Whatever works.
The pig-tailed Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) is so wholesome, the Harburg and Arlen songs are so delightful, and the Technicolor adventures are so exciting that it’s still easy to mistake The Wizard of Oz for traditional family entertainment, 80 years on from its release in August 1939. But it upends the conventions of good-v-evil storytelling in ways that would have had Walt Disney fuming.
Much has been written about the symbolism inherent in Oz. I won't belabor the point here, but there's definitely a darkness to it. The article skips the symbolism, too, opting instead to look at the movie through the lens of world events at the time, as well as the things we've experienced and learned since.
The message is that people will march behind any authority figure who makes a splash, however undeserving they may be. It’s a subversive message in 2019, and it was even more pointed in 1939, when fascist dictators were stomping across Europe.
Or, perhaps, haven't quite learned.
It’s significant, too, that the Emerald City of Oz isn’t the turreted faux-medieval Ruritania where Snow White lives, nor is it the Istanbul-ish collection of domes and spires drawn by WW Denslow in the original book’s illustrations. Instead, it is a modernist mass of neon-striped skyscrapers – and, like almost everything else in the land of Oz, it is blatantly artificial.
Yeah, that's not just an artifact of the limited capabilities of special effects in 1939. A lot of it was deliberate.
A couple of years back, someone decided that it would be a good idea to update Oz (the book and its sequels) into a series called Emerald City. It, too, was a reflection of its time, our time, dealing with modern issues of feminism, gender, and culture clashes, especially the one between science and religion. Critics were less than thrilled. Critics aren't always right, though; in my own opinion, the series started out very strong, but devolved into chaos. I maintain it's worth watching, though it was cancelled after only one season.
Notably, the showrunners knew about and exploited the popular connection between Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/pink-floyd-dark-side-wizard-of-oz/
It's important, I think, to experience entertainment in the context of its time. A lot of the songs from the late 60s and early 70s, for example, are impenetrable if you don't know about the Vietnam War. But we tend to ignore history, or, worse, forget about it, so the occasional article like this one helps us to keep things in perspective. |
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