Wicked: For Good · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Somebody grew a field of tulips.

Not rendered, not built. Grown — the production planted a real tulip field outside London so that Munchkinland's pink would enter the lens off a living petal. That is a lot of trouble to take. And it goes to the one place in Oz whose prettiness is a cover story: an engineered idyll sitting on top of an occupation. A real flower, honestly photographed, doing a lie's work.

That gap is the film. Gilles Deleuze has a small, sharp set of terms for it, and they are worth twenty minutes of your life because they change what you see here.

Start with the easiest. Deleuze calls an object a mark when it means by habit: you see it and you know what comes next without thinking. Green skin. A pointed hat. A bucket of water. Since 1939 these have been among the most stable marks in world cinema. They don't get interpreted, they get recognized. A demark is the anomaly that snaps that customary chain and forces you to actually read the image instead. For Good is a demarking machine. Chu stages the melting and the arrival of Dorothy's house in negative space, from the reverse angle. These are events you have known since childhood, now happening to someone, with the camera on the wrong side. The Tin Man and the Wicked Witch of the East turn out to have been people in the room, with names and a subplot. The bucket stops being a resolution. You have to look at it.

But why does green mean wicked at all? That question is the film's real subject, and here Deleuze gets more useful. He borrows from Robbe-Grillet the idea of a crystalline description: a description that doesn't point at an object so much as compose one, and then quietly replace it. The Wizard's regime does not discover a Wicked Witch of the West. It writes her. Morrible's press machine and the Emerald City's increasingly authoritarian geometry manufacture a figure vivid enough that the actual green woman becomes surplus to it. This is why the story needed two films instead of one long one. The first gives you the object. The second shows the description eating it. The mob that gathers at the end is coming for the description, not the person.

Which makes the Wizard something Deleuze took from Orson Welles and never let go of: the forger. Not a liar. A liar needs a truth to be measured against, and the forger's power is that there is nothing behind the curtain to check him with. Goldblum plays him as exactly that, an amiable fraud whose only real product is Oz's belief in Oz. Deleuze called this the powers of the false and meant it admiringly: the false as a force that generates a world rather than corrupting one.

The most interesting version of it here isn't inside the film. It's between films. Falsifying narration, for Deleuze, is when incompatible versions of the same events are both offered as true and neither cancels the other. That is precisely the relation between For Good and the 1939 Wizard of Oz, whose Technicolor iconography this film quotes directly as source imagery. Both meltings now exist. Neither has been withdrawn. It's worth pausing on why that is a real achievement. Photographic cinema arrived carrying an implicit guarantee. Bazin argued that the camera transfers reality onto film, that the image is a species of evidence, and there is a lay version of this in the film doesn't lie. Chu loads his production with those guarantees. Real tulips. Built sets. Erivo and Grande singing live on set rather than mouthing to playback, so what you hear is breath in a room. Then he spends all that trustworthiness telling you the most convincing image in Oz was fabricated by the government.

Dorothy, meanwhile, is barely here. Deleuze distinguishes what sits just off-frame from an absolute out-of-field: a beyond that you cannot locate in the film's space at all. Dorothy is that. She isn't next door. She's in another movie, in your memory, since you were six.

Glinda supplies the other half. Deleuze's fabulation means people caught in the act of legending themselves, inventing the story that might make a people possible. Glinda does it under state supervision. She legends herself into Glinda the Good, and Ariana Grande plays the cost precisely: a comic buoyancy that keeps its shape while curdling underneath into knowing complicity. The bubble, the sustained brightness of the voice. Deleuze would call these a gest, a posture that exposes a social relation instead of expressing a private feeling. Watch her hands and you are watching the regime.

The craft carries all of this. Alice Brooks's color is programmatic in the strict sense: Ozian green and Glinda pink pushed toward the artificial and saturated, Elphaba's scenes storm-lit and high in contrast. Deleuze's affective colour is a color that absorbs a scene and its feeling, and here the palette is the propaganda system. The tell is that the film's climactic reunions are lit to reunite the color schemes and not just the women. And Chu, a dance director by formation, keeps numbers whole: crane and Steadicam moves timed to musical phrase, a song unfolding as one continuous spatial event, with Kerstein reserving the cutting for dramatic scenes. Deleuze's name for a shot is the mobile section, movement that expresses a change in the whole rather than measuring it. In a musical, the number is the change in the whole. Cut it into montage and you describe it. Move through it and it happens.

The debts are specific. The Sound of Music codified the "open up," releasing a staged number into landscape on a crane, which is Chu's stated method for expanding songs written for a proscenium. West Side Story proved choreography could be tracked across real exterior space instead of played to a fourth wall. Moulin Rouge! set the maximalist template of camera welded to song. Chicago rebuilt the Broadway-to-Oscar pipeline this film works inside. Les Misérables pioneered live on-set vocals for a blockbuster musical, the technique that gives Erivo and Grande their unpolished presence. And 1939 supplies not a style but the marks themselves. What For Good seeds hasn't been written yet. But it has demonstrated something the industry will notice: a canonical text can be countersigned rather than remade. You can install a rival version beside the original and let the two coexist permanently, each making the other stranger.

Be honest about the limits. In its bones this is still a movement-image film, with situations that press and acts that resolve them. Its Deleuzian interest lives elsewhere, in the traffic between images and the memories we bring, and in the productive power of a well-made lie.

Which leaves the question the film actually opens rather than closes. It bets that a description can be undone by another description, that being truly seen by one person outweighs being written by a state. The reunion says yes. The mob still comes. Next time you see the bucket, you'll have to decide whose ending that is.