The Wiz · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

There is a stone lion on the steps of the New York Public Library. You have walked past it, or past a picture of it. In The Wiz it turns out to be alive, and terrified, and it has been terrified for a long time.

That one joke carries the film. Tony Walton designed both sets and costumes, and his idea was not to build Oz but to find it. Munchkins peel off a graffiti wall in a playground. The Tin Man rusts in a dead amusement park. The Poppy Field is a red-lit plaza worked by streetwalkers. Evillene runs a sweatshop under the street. Nothing here is imported from a storybook; it was all already on the block. Lumet's governing insight, and it is a real one, is that a city is already a fantasy landscape to anyone afraid of it.

Deleuze has a precise name for that operation, though it sounds worse than it is. He calls the visible, dateable setting a derived milieu, and the thing showing through it an originary world: a savage layer of appetite and degradation that the social surface only just covers. In his usual examples the crust cracks in one ordinary place, a boarding house, a shop. Here it cracks everywhere at once, because the premise is that the crust is the city. The subway sequence is the proof. Trash cans come at Dorothy. Pillars wake up. A peddler turns predatory. No witch is needed; the fixtures are enough. Deleuze would file that under expressionism, which for him is not a period style but a claim: that things have a non-organic life, that light and shadow can charge a pillar until it wants something. It is the most frightening stretch in any Oz film, and it frightens because it is furniture.

Now the concept that should change how you watch Diana Ross. The standard complaint is miscasting: too old, too small, too withheld, opaque where a musical star should beam. Hold the Emerald City sequence up against Deleuze's movement of world and the complaint turns over. His account of the musical is that the dancer stops being the source of movement and becomes its passenger. The private step passes out into the world, and the world takes over the dancing. The tornado is the crude mechanical version of that transfer, and it is also why Deleuze links the musical to the dream-image: the character no longer generates the movement she is inside. On the World Trade Center plaza, fashion is decreed by loudspeaker and several hundred dancers change color on command. That is what Deleuze calls a dividual, a crowd handled as one affective unit, a single body wearing hundreds of surfaces and switching mood as a bloc. Ross mostly stands in it. If the star dances the world, you get Gene Kelly. If the star holds still while the world dances around her, you get something stranger: a musical whose numbers are what the city does to a woman, not what she does. That is exactly the film Joel Schumacher's rewrite produced when it aged Dorothy into an adult Harlem schoolteacher who has never been south of 125th Street.

Which brings up the wound. The movement of world needs the shot to hold. This is the one point where classical film theory and Deleuze agree with the chorus line: Astaire's rule, that you shoot the whole dancer and you don't cut, is the same argument Bazin made on other grounds, that when the event is a body moving through space, cutting into it destroys the event. Dede Allen built her reputation on the opposite instinct. Bonnie and Clyde, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon: rhythm derived from anxiety, overlapping sound, aggressive fragmentation. Aim that at choreography and you get coverage. The Wiz cuts its numbers into pieces, so you feel them without being able to follow them. Energy instead of movement. That is the structural reason all this scale never converts into lift, and it is worth naming plainly, because it is the film's own best idea sabotaged by its own cutting room.

Two moments survive that intact. Richard Pryor's Wiz is played small and scared, a failed Atlantic City politician stranded by a balloon, which is Deleuze's inversion-image to the letter: the sublime figure replaced by his feeble double, power deflated rather than satirized. And "Brand New Day," where sweatshop workers shed their coverings, arranged by Quincy Jones as a church number rather than a showtune. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, would call that a gest: a posture that makes a social relation visible in the body itself. Liberation staged as labor taking off its uniform.

Oswald Morris shot it, and color here is argument rather than description. Morris had pumped colored smoke onto sets for Moulin Rouge and shot Fiddler on the Roof through a brown silk stocking to force one unified palette across a musical; his method was always to key a whole film to a prior visual source. Here the source is graffiti-era New York, and the progression from snowbound Harlem through poison-red poppies to programmed green-gold reads as a designed argument. It also recodes the 1939 film's most famous cut, sepia into Technicolor, as a slow chromatic migration instead of a threshold. The rest of the debt is just as specific: Minnelli's Cabin in the Sky proved fantasy could be achieved by design and camera movement through built sets, and Lumet's whole method here is that design is the interpretation. Stormy Weather taught the number built against architecture. Carmen Jones put an all-Black company in anamorphic deep space rather than proscenium framing, which is what lets Morris's plaza compositions hold small figures against vast walls. And "Ease on Down the Road" is Deleuze's vector, the zig-zag line that stitches spaces which do not adjoin in the real city into one continuous journey.

Forward is harder, and honesty matters more than tidiness. The film lost a great deal of money, and its failure is routinely blamed for foreclosing studio investment in Black-cast productions for a decade, a claim that functions as explanation and alibi at once. What it demonstrably left behind is the Astoria complex revived as a working studio, and a meeting: Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson, whose collaboration remade popular music within eighteen months. Watch Jackson in the Scarecrow prosthetics, weightless and completely legible in his body, and then ask where a performer like that finally got the sustained framing this movie's editing refused him. The answer isn't in a theater.

Watch it again for the stillness, not the singing. Ross planted while three hundred people change color behind her is the whole thesis, and it is one no Oz had staged before: the fantastic is not somewhere else. It is your block, seen scared.