A Film Canon

Whereas Frank L. Baum's iconic novel offers children pure escapism, and adults a sophisticated political allegory, The Wizard Of Oz fuses the two to create a sophisticated emotional experience, with the aid of two major alterations. Firstly, protagonist Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) is not presented as a little girl, but as a woman-child. Secondly, the Kansas sequences are elaborated, and the reality of Oz more ambiguous. On the one hand, this serves to emphasise everything extraordinary about Oz and, more specifically, the aestheticism of Technicolour. Although Fleming was ultimately unable to include Baum's 'China County' subplot, everything shines with the cleanness of porcelain, while the monochromatic worlds of the novel are replaced with a series of visual feasts, most iconically in Munchkinland, the field of poppies and the Emerald City, whose pervasive greens are offset by a horse that constantly changes colour, and the smoke and mirrors of the wizard. On the other hand, the changes to Baum's novel complicate Dorothy's relationship to home, producing an ambiguous melancholy encapsulated in her rendition of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow". As the Kansas sequences attest, Dorothy yearns for escape, and yet when this escape comes, it merely renders home sufficiently strange to make it appealing again; or, more accurately, clarifies that strangeness exists in the most familiar things, all of which can be strategically defamiliarised and revalued. Hence the central paradox, or twist; namely, that the very act that the Scarecrow, Tin-Man and Lion must perform to gain the wizard's help - saving Dorothy from the Wicked Witch of the West - ends up precluding their need for help, allowing the Scarecrow to demonstrate his 'brains' (planning the operation), the Tin-Man his 'heart' (crying over Dorothy's loss) and the Lion his 'courage' (leading the operation), and explaining the peculiarly anticlimactic quality of the wizard himself. The result is a distinctly new brand of musical, in which the inspirational narratives of the Depression are replaced by something closer to the spirit of Disney, and adults are encouraged to contemplate their childhood, and children their distant adulthood.