Why Does ‘The Wizard of Oz’ Still Cast Such a Wicked Spell? Because It’s the Movie That First Flipped the Patriarchy on Its Head

“Wicked,” the stage musical, took its first bow 22 years ago. The novel it’s based on, “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” was published in 1995. All of that happened well before the #MeToo revolution. Yet in the years since that revolution kicked off (you can date it to the week of October 2017 when the Harvey Weinstein story broke), one of the many forms that the new feminist consciousness took was to seize upon stories of women from the past and “reframe” them, only now with a more enlightened understanding of everything those women accomplished (and the odds they were up against). We might be talking about a rocket scientist like Dana Ulery, a politician like Shirley Chisholm, or Britney Spears. And “Wicked,” with an impish defiance that anticipated the #MeToo project of reconfiguring the sins of history, dared to place the Wicked Witch of the West in that hallowed company. It said: She has been misjudged, misunderstood, misportrayed. As a stage musical, and as a lavish two-part Hollywood movie, culminating in the newly released “Wicked: For Good,” that fuses confectionary psychedelic imagery with enough sisterly conflict and transcendence to make a lot of us swoon, “Wicked” presents itself as the backstory of “The Wizard of Oz.” But it also seems to be challenging “The Wizard of Oz,” peering at it from a 21st-century vantage point of feminine struggle and liberation. There’s a reason that “The Wizard of Oz” is uniquely suited to that reverse-angle treatment. Certainly, it’s one of the most transporting movies ever made. Yet what is it about “The Wizard of Oz” that speaks to us with such mythological timelessness? We tend to think of it in terms of the film’s eye-popping imagery (no sci-fi movie, and no CGI, can match the cockeyed splendor of how the land of Oz looks), its etched-in-time performances, the barely suppressed freakishness of it all, the whole MGM-on-mushrooms backlot dream atmosphere, not to mention the singular incandescence of “Over the Rainbow.” Beneath its candified surface, though, what remains haunting about “The Wizard of Oz” is that the film unveils a surreal cosmology of topsy-turvy gender-role reversals. Simply put, it’s Hollywood’s first vision of the patriarchy. that dares to imagine a world after the patriarchy. And that’s why in “Wicked,” “The Wizard of Oz” proves to be so ripe for “reframing.” It’s a movie that reframes society and reframes itself even as you’re watching it. In black-and-white dustbowl Kansas, the quintessence of the “ordinary” old America, Judy Garland’s pigtailed Dorothy lives on a farm with her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, surrounded by eccentrics like the mean Miss Gulch and the quackish Professor Marvel. But when she lands in Oz, what she discovers isn’t just a land of chattery Munchkins and acid-head Technicolor décor. She discovers. a radically different power structure. Two women loom large, like good and evil goddesses: Billie Burke’s aristocratic Glinda, arriving inside a giant soap bubble, and Margaret Hamilton’s hypnotically seething Wicked Witch of the West, one of the three or four ripest images of evil a Hollywood movie ever gave us. (What are the others? Offhand, I’d say Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and Darth Vader.) These women rule the roost, setting the tone for what “The Wizard of Oz,” beneath its glowing colors and fairy-tale story, really is: Hollywood’s first radical vision of matriarchy. And here’s the sleight-of-hand trick of it all. The land of Oz doesn’t present itself as a matriarchy. The most powerful figure in the kingdom is a man: the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Everyone drops his name in awed tones. The regal Glinda defers to him. Even the imperious Wicked Witch is intimidated by his power. So the land of Oz, in form, is a traditional patriarchy. Except that it’s not. Because what we finally learn is that “the Wizard of Oz” doesn’t exist. That looming patriarchal monarch is an illusion, a hologram glimpsed through smoke and fire. Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West really are the two most powerful figures in Oz. And as you look more closely at Margaret Hamilton’s extraordinary performance as the Wicked Witch, another level of this phantasmagorical landscape clicks into place, a kind of submerged reverie of identity. What is it about the Wicked Witch that’s so uniquely scary and mesmerizing? It’s that Hamilton invests her with a look and energy that fuses the masculine and the feminine. The movie is telling us, in a nightmare way, what is going to frighten people about matriarchy: the primal anxiety that women will subsume and replace men. That fear asserts itself in the homicidal gaze of Hamilton’s presence. The Wicked Witch’s dream mission is to murder femininity (“My pretty!”). But this, in fact, is a perversion of what true matriarchy is. The more enlightened version is the one presented by Dorothy and her three friends: the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion, all visions of men who have had their power taken away. Yet their love for Dorothy is real; that’s what their power becomes the desire to transcend their goofball selves by protecting her. What this all adds up to is that “The Wizard of Oz,” in the guise of a 1930s Hollywood kitsch fantasy musical, is really presenting us with a hallucinatory, time-tripping vision of a future that is female one where the old patriarchal rulers, like the Wizard, are façades waiting to be torn down, where the passion of women (good and evil) exerts far greater power, and where ordinary dudes, trying to make themselves better (by improving their brains, hearts, and valor), exist to serve and defend the transcendently soulful teenage heroine who has landed in their midst. In the end, of course, she does go back to Kansas. But by then she’s ready to rule.
https://variety.com/2025/film/columns/wizard-of-oz-wicked-feminism-patriarchy-critic-analysis-1236589628/