
The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz - herendin2
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190808-the-subversive-messages-hidden-in-the-wizard-of-oz
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not2b
One think I didn't realize until my daughter and I read the book together: in
the book there were two good witches, the witch of the North (the first one
Dorothy meets after landing on the witch of the East), and the witch of the
South (the one that tells her she can use the shoes to get home). The movie
combined the two characters. Then they had to come up with a reason why the
good witch didn't immediately tell Dorothy to click her heels together and go
home. In the book, only the Witch of the South knew this.

~~~
justinator
Hmm, that is kinda of strange - especially since there's two evil witches,
right? She kills the first one in the begging of Act 2.

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TomMckenny
Also interesting are the jokes that were removed and added.

The Lion gets his courage from a bottle in the original (the joke being a
reference to a common joke at the time that some people get their courage from
a bottle of liquor) But 1939 was so close to the prohibition fiasco, it seems
the producers did not like this joke.

Likewise, the scene in the field of (presumably opium) poppies that put
everyone to sleep was only added in 1939. It's hard to imagine that joke being
added in, say, the time of height of the war on drugs: could Bart Simpson play
with opium poppies and pass out to audience laughter 1980's?

~~~
byproxy
"The Simpsons" are a bad example for your point, I think. I've been watching
episodes again and they often put the kids in morally questionable scenarios
(much to my laughter). Lisa got drunk at Duff Land (a theme park devoted to
beer), for example.

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joshuaheard
Funny TV Guide description: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl
kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to
kill again.”

~~~
joegahona
I sometimes wonder if those TV Guide descriptions were intentionally funny and
deranged like that because they had such little space to summarize an entire
movie. The TV Guide description for the 1985 Cher / Eric Stoltz movie MASK was
"A teenage boy has a wild mom and a misshapen face."

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nitwit005
I suspect for most of this, they were just trying to be funny or weird rather
than intending this symbolism/meaning to come across to the audience.

One of my economics textbooks contained an explanation of the theory that the
yellow brick road was a reference to monetary policy (gold standard), but that
theory seems to have been heavily challenged (See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_T...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_The_Wonderful_Wizard_of_Oz)).

~~~
jihadjihad
Perhaps we had the same textbook, because that's also where I heard that from.
Krugman and Obstfeld, International Economics?

~~~
nitwit005
You're probably right. I've forgotten at this point, even thought I apparently
remember the content.

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rabidrat
From "Debt, The First 5000 years":

L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is
widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William
Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform –
vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow
the free creation of silver money alongside gold. … [O]ne of the main
constituencies for the movement was debtors: particularly, Midwestern farm
families such as Dorothy’s, who had been facing a massive wave of foreclosures
during the severe recession of the 1890s. According to the Populist reading,
the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast
bankers (promoters of and benefactors from the tight money supply), the
Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn’t have the brains to avoid the
debt trap), the Tin Woodsman [sic] was the industrial proletariat (who didn’t
have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion
represented the political class (who didn’t have the courage to intervene).
The yellow brick road, silver slippers, emerald city, and hapless Wizard
presumably speak for themselves. “Oz” is of course the standard abbreviation
for “ounce.”

~~~
jackhack
How far we've drifted as a nation.

People then seemed to realize the danger of fiat money, yet The Federal
Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow
Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital
for their home states -- and it passed on a simple majority of those present
vote. The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of
the US Government) seized control of the US monetary system and their policy
of deliberate inflation has eroded purchasing power 97+% (50% reduction since
just 1970!). Even though the constitution still describes the value of a
dollar as a specific weight of gold, like most other things in that document
it is ignored.

Private ownership of gold was decreed to be illegal just 20 years later --
Presidental Executive Order 6102, signed on April 5, 1933, by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt "forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and
gold certificates within the continental United States" was designed to
prevent an internation run on our (drastically less valuable) dollar. Silver
was removed from the coin in 1965, completing the transition to fiat money.

President John F. Kennedy voiced support for returning America to the Gold
Standard. He was assassinated soon after. His Vice President, who assumed the
Presidency, wasn't so foolish as to express support for that idea.

Now it seems to be a spending free-for-all, as if there is no concern
whatsoever for the peril that debt (national or private) presents.

What a dangerous time we live in. "Ignore that man behind the curtain!" Who,
then, was Glenda, the Good Witch meant to represent?

~~~
airstrike
> President John F. Kennedy voiced support for returning America to the Gold
> Standard. He was assassinated soon after.

He also voiced a million other things that you might as well pin his
assassination on, if you're so willing to jump to conclusions.

~~~
ssully
The Netflix movie The Irishman is about a labor union organizer/mob hitman [1]
who claims to have assisted in JFKs assassination at the behest of the mob/
Jimmy Hoffa.

You can literally spin a wheel of different motivations for groups who wanted
JFK dead and they all have their own convincing reasons. Except hackjack's
little conspiracy here, which seems to be missing a final paragraph about why
we need to switch to using Bitcoin as our standard currency.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Sheeran](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Sheeran)

~~~
neaden
Frank Sheeran is widely thought to have made up pretty much everything in that
book I wouldn't take his claims seriously at all.

~~~
ssully
No worries, I don't. That's why I included it in my example of a fictional
roulette wheel of reasons.

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jfengel
Mocking people in power is a time-honored tradition. It's not even really all
that subversive: they were playing with well-worn, easily recognizable tropes.
It's all part of the film's pretty conventional message: believe in yourself.

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Causality1
This kind of thing is why I love that JRR Tolkien spent a whole introduction
page lambasting people who read too much into symbolism in books and stating
explicitly that Lord of the Rings was written as an exercise in long-form
storytelling with no hidden meaning.

~~~
benj111
That just sounds like a (very) elaborate troll. Write a three part book
stuffed full of symbolism and then write an essay complaining how people read
into the symbolism.

And surely what the reader sees in a work is at least as valid as what the
author intended. If I see Mordor as Stalinist Russia, isnt that my
prerogative? Its selling the art form short if the only possible
interpretation is the authors own. /rant (against a dead guy)

~~~
Causality1
>And surely what the reader sees in a work is at least as valid as what the
author intended.

I'm going to have to agree to disagree with you on that one.

~~~
benj111
In the entire concept, or just the degree of importance?

Lets take the example of Farenheit 451, wikipedia [1] suggests an evolution
(at least) in Bradbury's own interpretation of his own book:

"In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury said that he wrote Fahrenheit 451 because
of his concerns at the time (during the McCarthy era) about the threat of book
burning in the United States. In later years, he described the book as a
commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature."

So which is right? And neither of those seem to match up with the popular
interpretation of it being against state surveillance and censorship. If
that's what it says to so many people, if that's why it's so popular it seems
strange to discount that interpretation.

Then we look at older works where the cultural nuance passes us by. Should we
not be allowed to enjoy Shakespeare on our cultural terms instead of (always)
through the prism of Elizabethan culture?

Then you've got things like Anne Franks diary. I suppose half the point is
getting inside her head, but on the other hand you're reading it knowing
what's going to happen, and interpreting it as the author intended is,
impossible?

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451)

~~~
slx26
I think the most controversial thing you actually said is "valid". That word
is very ambiguous, and it's no surprise there's disagreement around it.

You can definitely make any interpretation you want. They will be _valuable_
as long as you can take something from them, regardless of the author intent.
As you have just shown, even authors might change or make additional
interpretations as time passes. The world keeps changing, the contexts change,
and we make new interpretations. That's pretty cool. But the other thing is
whether they are _true_ or not (whether they reflect something that the author
really attempted to express). In this case, it's not strange to me that many
authors want to explicitly say that they didn't attempt to hide some political
meaning or similar behind their works. The problem is not that people reads
into what they write, but that they attribute to them things they never meant.
And that's an imposition on an author, which is not nice, and that's what a
lot of people will discuss with you when you say that any interpretations are
"valid".

~~~
empath75
If a politician tells you what he meant to say in a speech do you take it at
face value? People lie to themselves and others all the time about what they
have said and why they said it.

The text is the truth. What the author says about it is useful but not the end
of the story.

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decebalus1
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_T...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_The_Wonderful_Wizard_of_Oz)
is an interesting read

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joker3
I've heard that the Cowardly Lion was played according to pretty much every
gay stereotype of the day. That seems to fit the thesis of this article very
well.

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krustyburger
I’ve always meant to go through and read the entire Oz series by Baum. I’ve
heard that it’s surprisingly enjoyable from start to finish, given the number
of books.

~~~
mttjj
I've read them all but it's been years. I want to go back to them. They are
great books. Silly, goofy, and weird but very enjoyable. The world of Oz books
is surprisingly complicated[1] but I would say the original series penned by
Baum is definitely worth checking out.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books)

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inflatableDodo
A detail of history connected to The Wizard of Oz that I particularly like, is
that when the US Navy heard about 'Friends of Dorothy', they set up an
investigation to try and catch Dorothy, to find out what she knew about gays
in the military.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend_of_Dorothy#Military_inv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend_of_Dorothy#Military_investigation)

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timw4mail
While there may be political or allegorical undertones, I generally try to
enjoy things like movies at face value.

Reading into the story like this ruins the escapism.

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drdaeman
I've read the comments and wanted to write another, but then remembered that a
smarter man had written a better one already.

> “I don't understand this at all. I don't understand any of this. Why does a
> story have to be socio-anything? Politics... culture... history... aren't
> those natural ingredients in any story, if it's told well? I mean...' [...]
> 'I mean... can't you guys just let a story be a story?”

> \- Stephen King, "It"

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danzig13
One realization I had about the movie: the witch writes a message to Oz to
send Dorothy. He immediately tricks her into going there; presumably to her
death.

Not a very good man.

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dekhn
the book series is interesting. one of the main characters (Ozma, the queen of
oz) spends her childhood as a boy and then is transformed back to a girl.

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noja
Is it though? There are a hundred different interpretations of Hotel
California too, but in the end it was about the excesses on the music
industry.

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anotherevan
I always enjoyed Peter David's review of The Wizard of Oz.

[https://www.peterdavid.net/2002/07/25/bid-3-pay-no-
attention...](https://www.peterdavid.net/2002/07/25/bid-3-pay-no-attention-to-
that-fan-behind-the-curtain-aug-10-1990/)

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chengiz
This kind of analysis is the more intellectual equivalent of finding hidden
messages in the Bible.

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asabjorn
The real hidden promise is the promise of a portal (rabbit hole) that will
turn your normal grey daily life into technicolor, and that you can bring what
you find through this portal back to enrich your own little house in the
prairie.

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anonymousiam
"The message is that people will march behind any authority figure who makes a
splash, however undeserving they may be"

Funny how BBC's view remains true whether it's 2019 or 2009.

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JJMcJ
For the bimetallic - Oz of course is an abbreviation for ounce which was how
the precious metals were priced.

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andyv
I can't remember the book now, but it was about a 1984-like state. There was a
passing reference to their revision of "The Wizard of Oz" in which the Wizard
gave Dorothy, Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow tools (weapons) they needed to
defeat the wicked witch.

Until then, I'd taken the Wizard of Oz at face value.

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clarkcox3
"Hidden"?

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tardo99
How does all of this connect with The Dark Side Of The Moon?

~~~
Jaruzel
Watch Wizard of Oz with the sound off. Just as the MGM lion finishes roaring,
drop the needle[1] onto the Dark Side of the Moon LP, and watch as the songs
sync up to the imagery.

\--

[1] Or un-pause the CD/MP3 etc.

~~~
benj111
"Pink Floyd band members have repeatedly said that the reputed phenomenon is
coincidence"

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Side_of_the_Rainbow](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Side_of_the_Rainbow)

~~~
Jaruzel
I was neither agreeing or disagreeing with the concept, merely pointing out
how it's done. Also even as a life long Floyd fan, I have never done it.

