Salman Rushdie wrote an amusing little book in 1992. The title of the book is The Wizard of Oz. It’s about the famous movie with Judy Garland’s Dorothy and Toto and the Wicked Witches, East and West. The movie The Wizard of Oz is celebrating its 75-year anniversary this month. For three-quarters of a century, this unusual movie has been infecting the brains of young people all over the world. Rushdie was one of them. At age ten, Rushdie wrote his first story. He called it “Over the Rainbow.” Strange to think that there is a direct line from The Wizard of Oz to Rushdie’s now-classic tale of the partition of India, Midnight’s Children (1980).
Rushdie is an unabashed lover of the film. Call the film, he writes, “imaginative truth. Call it (reach for your revolvers now) art.” Rushdie also has strong opinions about what this artful film is and is not about. It is not about going home. Yes, Dorothy frequently talks about going home. After her house falls on the Wicked Witch of the East, the munchkins and the Good Witch Glinda tell her to go home immediately. She isn’t safe in Oz, they tell her, not with the Wicked Witch of the West still lurking about. So Dorothy follows the Yellow Brick Road in order to find the Wizard, who will help her return to her home in Kansas. At the end of the movie, she clicks her ruby slippers together and repeats, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.” In a movie that Rushdie says is not about going home, there is quite a lot of home-talk.
But that’s not, says Rushdie, the real story. “Anybody,” he writes, “who has swallowed the screenwriters’ notion that this is a film about the superiority of ‘home’ over ‘away’, that the ‘moral’ of The Wizard of Oz is as sickly-sweet as an embroidered sampler — East, West, home’s best — would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice, as her face tilts up towards the skies.”
Point taken. Garland’s Dorothy does yearn and tilt as she sings her famous song. That song is, indeed, the soul of the movie. Ostensibly, Dorothy runs away from home to save her little dog Toto. But maybe that is just an excuse to go on an adventure. One minute Dorothy is worrying about her scruffy small beast, the next minute she is crooning about a magical place she heard of once in a lullaby. Everybody needs a good reason to break the bonds of home and seek out something new, something “over the rainbow.” “In its most emotional moments,” writes Rushdie:
Rushdie’s explanation for this failure of imagination in the movie is that the filmmakers lost their nerve. The default position for the “moralizing” and “sentimental” Hollywood studio system was always for the safe and staid. The pat ending of The Wizard of Oz, thinks Rushdie, can and therefore should be ignored.
But it must be asked: What tension does the plot of the movie contain if Dorothy doesn’t go home?
In fact, Dorothy starts going home very early in the movie. First, she sings her lovely song about rainbows, grabs Toto and leaves the family farm. In a few minutes, she runs into Professor Marvel, the travelling salesman/quack/fortune teller. Professor Marvel realizes he has stumbled upon a little girl who has foolishly run away. He tricks her into worrying about her aunt and wanting to go back home. Within minutes, Dorothy is on her way. That would have been the entire plot of the movie. Little girl worries about dog, dreams about far away places, “runs away” from home for an hour or so, then rushes back to where she belongs and to the people who love her.
But fate has other things in store for Dorothy. There is an event. A freak of nature. A tornado comes. Dorothy is knocked unconscious and the world starts spinning. Perhaps Dorothy has even invoked the cyclone with all the yearning in her song. Now, she is going to have a real journey, whether she likes it or not. But it is a journey in which she never, actually, leaves home. The conceit of the movie (we find out later) is that Dorothy never even leaves her bed. She merely dreamed up Oz after getting bumped on the head. Or did she?
The question to ask, however, is not “Did Dorothy leave home”?” but rather “Did she want to leave home?” Did she want to leave Kansas more than she wanted to stay? Did she want to leave simply in order to experience the joy of coming back home? Do we have to leave one home forever in order to find our true home? Is it even possible to talk of home without some knowledge of what is not our home? Home seems an eternal problem.
Rushdie is an unabashed lover of the film. Call the film, he writes, “imaginative truth. Call it (reach for your revolvers now) art.” Rushdie also has strong opinions about what this artful film is and is not about. It is not about going home. Yes, Dorothy frequently talks about going home. After her house falls on the Wicked Witch of the East, the munchkins and the Good Witch Glinda tell her to go home immediately. She isn’t safe in Oz, they tell her, not with the Wicked Witch of the West still lurking about. So Dorothy follows the Yellow Brick Road in order to find the Wizard, who will help her return to her home in Kansas. At the end of the movie, she clicks her ruby slippers together and repeats, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.” In a movie that Rushdie says is not about going home, there is quite a lot of home-talk.But that’s not, says Rushdie, the real story. “Anybody,” he writes, “who has swallowed the screenwriters’ notion that this is a film about the superiority of ‘home’ over ‘away’, that the ‘moral’ of The Wizard of Oz is as sickly-sweet as an embroidered sampler — East, West, home’s best — would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice, as her face tilts up towards the skies.”
Point taken. Garland’s Dorothy does yearn and tilt as she sings her famous song. That song is, indeed, the soul of the movie. Ostensibly, Dorothy runs away from home to save her little dog Toto. But maybe that is just an excuse to go on an adventure. One minute Dorothy is worrying about her scruffy small beast, the next minute she is crooning about a magical place she heard of once in a lullaby. Everybody needs a good reason to break the bonds of home and seek out something new, something “over the rainbow.” “In its most emotional moments,” writes Rushdie:
This is unarguably a film about the joys of going away, of leaving the greyness and entering the colour, of making a new life in the place ‘where there isn’t any trouble’. ‘Over the Rainbow’ is, or ought to be, the anthem of all the world’s migrants, all those who go in search of the place where ‘the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true’.Rushdie is, therefore, highly annoyed by the ending of The Wizard of Oz. Waking up again on her bed in good ol’ Kansas, Dorothy declares, “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look further than my own back yard. And if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.” This is no longer the anthem of all the world’s migrants. This is an encomium to staying put. “How does it come about,” Rushdie asks, “at the close of this radical and enabling film, which teaches us in the least didactic way possible to build on what we have, to make the best of ourselves, that we are given this conservative little homily?” How could anyone renounce the colorful world of Oz, Rushdie wants to know, the dream of a new and different place, for the black and white comforts, the utter drabness of Kansas and all the homespun hominess it represents?
Rushdie’s explanation for this failure of imagination in the movie is that the filmmakers lost their nerve. The default position for the “moralizing” and “sentimental” Hollywood studio system was always for the safe and staid. The pat ending of The Wizard of Oz, thinks Rushdie, can and therefore should be ignored.
But it must be asked: What tension does the plot of the movie contain if Dorothy doesn’t go home?
In fact, Dorothy starts going home very early in the movie. First, she sings her lovely song about rainbows, grabs Toto and leaves the family farm. In a few minutes, she runs into Professor Marvel, the travelling salesman/quack/fortune teller. Professor Marvel realizes he has stumbled upon a little girl who has foolishly run away. He tricks her into worrying about her aunt and wanting to go back home. Within minutes, Dorothy is on her way. That would have been the entire plot of the movie. Little girl worries about dog, dreams about far away places, “runs away” from home for an hour or so, then rushes back to where she belongs and to the people who love her.
But fate has other things in store for Dorothy. There is an event. A freak of nature. A tornado comes. Dorothy is knocked unconscious and the world starts spinning. Perhaps Dorothy has even invoked the cyclone with all the yearning in her song. Now, she is going to have a real journey, whether she likes it or not. But it is a journey in which she never, actually, leaves home. The conceit of the movie (we find out later) is that Dorothy never even leaves her bed. She merely dreamed up Oz after getting bumped on the head. Or did she?
The question to ask, however, is not “Did Dorothy leave home”?” but rather “Did she want to leave home?” Did she want to leave Kansas more than she wanted to stay? Did she want to leave simply in order to experience the joy of coming back home? Do we have to leave one home forever in order to find our true home? Is it even possible to talk of home without some knowledge of what is not our home? Home seems an eternal problem.
by Morgan Meis, The Smart Set | Read more:
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