Not An Oz of Truth
When I expelled what was in me for the first time with my first collection of poems, the first thing to rush in, in its place, was this nearly 100 year old film, even older children’s story, now in its postmodern retelling phase with the upcoming launch of a movie based on a Broadway musical based on a novel based on the original story.
The Wizard of Oz is one of the most influential films of all time, and we’re closing in on its 100 year anniversary. It’s both timeless and modern, and in the grand tradition of fairy tales throughout history, much darker than it seems at first glance.
I’ll admit it. I am attracted to how something so colourful and wonderful could hide so many sinister secrets: like the many on-set disasters and tragedies that occurred during the filming of the movie, the true story of the tin man reading more like body horror than children’s tale, the forceful starvation of a young actress so she would remain childlike, the use of technology to craft an illusion foretelling the proverbial wool being pulled over our eyes to shape entire societies, the sly change from silver to ruby shoes to “make it pop”, the emerald city’s folks with green-tinted glasses chained to their heads to maintain the illusion that the entire city is green when it is in fact, not. The amount of massacring happening in a story for children that, if book accurate, would surely be rated R, more Tarantino than Mr Rogers. I could go on.
To call it a visual feast is an understatement: this movie is the first of its kind and the precursor to filmmaking not just as a glimpse of the world captured and replayed, but a heightened, almost hallucinatory vision. The bright primary colours, the Emerald City a dazzling mirage of hope and ambition, the golden farmlands of the Midwest, the entire journey a visual and metaphorical allegory of going from grey to colour, from the familiar to the unknown. Compared to today’s sets and technologies, the Wizard of Oz’s painted backdrops seem rudimentary, but rather than coming across that way, it feels like looking at a nostalgic painting more than it feels like watching a really old movie. It wasn’t just ahead of its time. It made the times. Little known fact: the tin woodsman is essentially the first android to appear in popular culture.
What sets The Wizard of Oz apart from other fairy tales is its distinctly American setting. “Theres no place like home” is a call to patriotism. It’s a playfully dark adventure tale exploring life’s journeys, the desire to expand our horizons and assert our identities, and the necessary tension and relationship between imagination and invention—but most of all, the increasingly thin line between wonder and terror, between illusion and truth. Are we seeing what’s there or what someone else wants us to see?
As I learn to do the impractical thing we call make art, it’s becoming obvious that there is nothing impersonal about any of it. And every bit of this collection is based on a truth, or a lie, or an illusion, I’ve lived through. Somewhere in there is an ounce of truth.