'Wicked' Feels Disturbingly Relevant During Trump's First 100 Days
HuffPost
As the movie makes its streaming debut on Peacock, the parallels have only become more pronounced — and more disturbing.
On Sunday, the Trump administration loaded roughly 250 immigrants onto planes and shipped them off to a mega-prison in El Salvador where they will remain for at least a year. There were no trials, no due justice and no criminal records for many of the deportees who have been sent to a country they don’t even know.
As this story has unfolded over the last few days, revealing disturbing new details on a sometimes hourly basis, I’ve found myself thinking of “Wicked.” Before you close this tab in disgust, hear me out.
“Wicked,” the book-turned-musical-turned-movie based on “The Wizard of Oz,” may just be the best modern allegory for Trump’s second administration, which is currently orchestrating mass deportations against anyone with brown skin and a tattoo.
“Wicked,” which just made its streaming debut on Peacock Friday, offers a surprisingly nuanced take on how fascism can take root in a democratic society. When the film first premiered in November, mere weeks after the presidential election, the parallels between its depiction of the Wizard of Oz as a populist leader who uses a scapegoat to seize power and President Donald Trump’s return to the White House wrote themselves. Now, five months later, as we hurtle through Trump’s first 100 days in office, the similarities have only become more pronounced — and more disturbing.
“Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” was written by Gregory Maguire and published in 1995. It retells “The Wizard of Oz” from the perspective of its so-called Wicked Witch, who Maguire named Elphaba (a riff on the name of the story’s original author, L. Frank Baum). After arriving at college as a young woman with nascent magic powers, Elphaba soon uncovers the Wizard’s evil plan to seize control of Oz by scapegoating a community of talking animals. She then launches an underground resistance to fight back as the Wizard continues to accumulate power. The story, which starts before Dorothy ever arrives in Munchkinland and eventually overlaps with the version fans already know and love, reveals how Elphaba was framed as an evil terrorist by a fascist government and its complicit subjects, including her one-time friend, Glinda the Good Witch.
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