Wicked · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Cynthia Erivo's Elphaba is green, and you knew that before you bought the ticket.

That's the problem the film sets itself, and it answers it first as a craft decision: the green is makeup, not digital paint. Greasepaint on a face, catching Alice Brooks's warm key light, present in every frame, carried by an actor who has to act through it. Nobody added it later. It's a physical fact about a body in a room.

The green isn't Chu's invention. The 1939 Wizard of Oz handed the culture a shorthand — green skin, pointed hat, broom — and for eighty-five years that shorthand has meant one thing on sight.

Deleuze has a precise name for an object like that. He calls it a mark: a thing that carries meaning because of the customary chain it belongs to. When you see this, expect that. He worked the idea out on Hitchcock, where a key or a wine bottle means exactly what the plot has trained you to expect of it. A demark is the break in the chain — the anomaly that won't behave, that stops you and makes you interpret instead of recognize.

Wicked's entire method is demarking, and the clever part is that it never removes a single mark. It keeps all of them. The hat, the broom, the Emerald City silhouette, the slippers. It just shows you the afternoon each one was acquired. What looked like an attribute of a person turns out to be the residue of an event.

Why bother with the vocabulary? Because "origin story" makes this sound like brand maintenance, and it isn't. Mark and demark name what the film is actually doing: showing how a society makes a person readable at a glance, and what that costs the person.

Which is why you matter so much here. Deleuze files the mark under the relation-image, the register where meaning sits not in the action but in a relation somebody has to hold — and the somebody is the audience. The dramatic irony isn't a trick, it's the operating system. You arrive already knowing which one becomes the Good and which the Wicked. Every scene plays twice, once as it happens and once against what you walked in with. Winnie Holzman's book, adapted here with Dana Fox, is counter-narrative in the strict sense: it needs your prior version intact in order to work against it.

Then the machinery. Goldblum's Wizard, Yeoh's Madame Morrible, and a goat named Dr. Dillamond who teaches at Shiz. Deleuze calls the making of a story a people tells about itself fabulation — legending, subjects caught in the act. He meant it as a power belonging to people denied a history. Wicked shows the same power run by the state: Oz manufacturing a witch because a scapegoat is cheaper than a reckoning. Elphaba doesn't discover a lie. She discovers a workshop.

Now the singing.

Deleuze's best idea about musicals came from watching Astaire and Donen. In a real number, the dancer stops being the source of the movement. They hold, and the world takes over. He calls it the movement of world, the dance absorbing the dancer, motion passing out of the individual and into the whole. Chu came up through dance filmmaking and the film is built to make this visible. Nathan Crowley designed an Oz meant to be walked through, and the choreography puts crowds inside the architecture rather than in front of it. Brooks stages numbers as continuous spatial events, the camera traveling the Shiz quad and the OzDust ballroom instead of assembling them out of pieces. Myron Kerstein's cut refuses the fragmentation modern musicals default to. So a number here isn't a mosaic of poses. It's one traveling body of motion in which the performer is a part and the crowd is composed by the set into a single unit, everything moving as one thing.

"Defying Gravity" takes the idea vertical. Backlit, the frame opening upward, Elphaba on the broom and rising. She isn't propelling herself anymore. She's taken up.

And then the movie ends.

That's the formal consequence of splitting the show in half. Deleuze, after Bergson, separates the closed set of the frame from the Open: the sense that past the edge lies not the next room but a whole still in the middle of changing. Blockbusters almost always close their sets. This one ends on an ascent with no destination in the shot, and leaves it open on purpose. The whole rhythm bends toward one upward gesture and then withholds the landing.

Underneath all of it is a body actually spending itself. Erivo and Grande sang live on set to an earpiece piano, the method Les Misérables put into circulation in 2012, so the image is indexed to real exertion happening in front of the lens. Kerstein holds shots long enough for breath and effort to register. Deleuze's cinema of the body is about postures that carry duration instead of illustrating a plot beat; he found it in tiredness and waiting, but the ceremonial version counts too, and this is that. It pays off in the character. Erivo plays Elphaba coiled, externalizing almost nothing until she sings. She is over-read on sight and illegible in person. Song is the only channel she's given.

Colour finishes the argument. Paul Tazewell dresses the film as a two-note grammar, Glinda's structured pinks against Elphaba's austere black, the wardrobes charting the split before the plot will admit it. Then there's the grade: muted, atmospheric, and genuinely contested — painterly to some viewers, muddy to others, applied to the most chromatically famous world Hollywood ever built. You can think it a mistake and still see the logic. Technicolor saturation is itself part of the inherited chain, the look of a world whose meanings were already settled. Desaturating it is a demark applied to the palette.

The debts are specific. 1939 for the iconography it quotes and inverts. Les Misérables for the vocal method. La La Land for the unbroken take that lets a song survive the cut. In the Heights for the crane-and-Steadicam vocabulary Chu, Brooks and Kerstein had already built together. Chicago for making stage-to-screen a commercial proposition again. The Sound of Music for the aerial opening and the symphonic register John Powell writes in. What it seeded is too recent to name honestly. What it banked is clear: that a tentpole can be made of live tulips, standing sets and greasepaint at a moment when the industry's reflex was to build worlds out of LED walls, and that the long, live-sung take scales to this budget.

The open question is whether the film's bet survives contact with its own marketing. Wicked argues you can unmake a mark by showing how it was made. It was sold on pink and green. So watch the green across the running time. It begins as something done to her. It ends as something she puts on.