WIZARD OF OZ 70th Anniversary

Greetings, folks:
As many of you know, I recently created a graphic novel called THE REBELS OF OZ, based on the original works of L. Frank Baum and following an adult Dorothy Gale's return to Oz to overthrow the tyrannical regime of her former allies Scarecrow, Tinman and Lion. And as such, somebody asked me recently what my thoughts were on this 70th anniversary of the well-loved musical motion picture starring Judy Garland.
It's an interesting question. I was never a fan of the movie, to be honest. I was attracted to the graphic novel project I did for a number of reasons: I was interested in returning to that medium, I wanted to exploit the new softwares that made creating such a project so easy. And I liked the story of Dorothy going back to face down her now-corrupted allies. I thought it was a nice story about the drawbacks of intelligence, bravery and sensitivity, and the need to face and accept your past.
But the movie never really grabbed me. I find the sets and costumes kind of cheap. Honestly, I know this film was shot on a sound stage, with painted backgrounds and wooden sets. But when the film was refurbished and digitized (which I think it has been a few times) couldn't they have blurred out that obnoxious line between the edge of the set and the bottom of the painted background? When they're trotting "Off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz..." I keep wincing, half-expecting them to skip face-on into that backdrop. And while the music is good and the acting overall is pretty solid, the script is very, very weak. Now I know this will rankle a lot of people. I'm just a largely unknown writer, after all, and this film is considered a classic. It is often used in screenwriting books as one of the great screen examples of the Hero's Journey and of the basic three-act structure (I've even mentioned it myself in my writing seminar WRITE MAKES MIGHT: Stronger Structure in Storytelling, now on DVD from my site, Fletcher Rhoden.com). But throughout most of the movie Dorothy pouts and whines, she runs away from home, rides a bicycle and talks to her pet in a voice that sounds almost cartoonishly meek and childlike. She's carried from one place to another by a force of nature, helpless in the hands of a virtual God in the Machine. She is then sent on a fool's errand and does just what she's told without question, without countering. Later Dorothy is plucked out of the action near the midpoint and spends much of the rest of the act sitting in a tower sobbing, waiting for death. Once rescued, she spends the rest of the time running away from the witch until accidentally killing her. Then she pleads and pouts some more to the Wizard. By today's standards, this behavior is considered much too passive. Today's heros do the rescuing, they don't sit around needing to be rescued -- especially today's female heroes. While I realize it can be considered less than fair to hold one work up to the standards of another era, I would say that the best works in any era do hold up to the standards of another. Even by today's standards, for example, the Mona Lisa is still a great painting, the great pyramids are still great engineering feats. Charlie Chaplin's City Lights still holds up. Which is why it's not a matter of holding TWOZ up to the standards of its own time and not our own; even back then lead characters were more dynamic. These elements of story are consistent all the way back to the first stories ever told; those of the hunts to kill the mammoth and the cave bear, told by the hunters to their Neanderthal and Cro Magnon women and children over 15,000 years ago.
There's another glaring weakness with this film that is centered around the depiction of Dorothy Gale. In the first book, Dorothy is 8-years-old. In the movie based on that book, she's supposed to be 12, but is portrayed by an actress of about 15 (Garland was born in 1922.) So what we wind up with is a 15-year-old, fast becoming a woman, who is dressed like a 12-year-old and acts like an 8-year-old. Then she runs off and travels across a country she doesn't know in the company of three single middle-aged men. And these men, all outcasts and without significant social ties, can only find wholeness in the company of this woman/child. The psychosexual undercurrents of these relationships are not new ground, but in this day of child predation I think they deserve a second look. Strippers and hookers (whose business it is to be sexual) dress up as Judy Garland's Dorothy, so it's not hard to find the contemporary manifestations of this troubling dynamic. A brief surf on the internet will reveal even more frightening echoes of MGM's Dorothy Gale. Seventy years on, the legacy of THE WIZARD OF OZ continues to evolve along these strange lines. As long as Hollywood continues to hypersexualize young women, I expect the Oz legacy to continue on its twisted course.
www.fletcherrhoden.com/therebelsofoz.htm