The “war on woke” has a new target and her name is the Wicked Witch of the West. If you’re a fan of the musical Wicked, you’ll also know her as Elphaba, the moniker imagined by Gregory Maguire in his 1995 prequel to L Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. As played by Margaret Hamilton in the 1939 movie, she was the nemesis of Judy Garland’s Dorothy; as played this year by the musical theatre star Cynthia Erivo, she has conservative men across Britain and America bursting their blood vessels.
Since Maguire came up with his novel – an extravagant piece of fan-fiction that suggests this “witch” might simply have been misunderstood – it has been reinterpreted as a stage musical and now as a movie in two parts. Wicked’s target market consists of teenage girls who see themselves in this backstory for Elphaba and her college-friend-turned-rival, Glinda the Good Witch. In the 21 years since Stephen Schwartz’s adaptation opened on Broadway, the show has been a cult phenomenon among young musical fans, blithely ignored by everyone else. Now the screen version has brought into mainstream conversation and the land of Oz has become a battleground in America’s culture war.
As a musical, Wicked is harmless to the point of vapid. Winnie Holzman’s storyline for the show is a more anodyne affair than Maguire’s hallucinatory fever dream of a book, which included bestiality and orgies. It features Elphaba as a talented girl arriving at a magical college, only to be bullied by Glinda and a clique of rosy-cheeked sycophants because she happens to have been born with green skin. This is Mean Girls meets Hogwarts. It has two songs you’ll remember: Popular, in which Glinda reveals the secrets of social success, and Defying Gravity, in which Elphaba vows to pursue excellence and fight prejudice. Wicked is sweet and fun and ultimately forgettable.
All of which makes it sad to watch Jon M Chu’s movie become a flashpoint for grown adults. Since opening last weekend, Wicked has been subject to increasingly rabid media attacks. Some of this follows a familiar pattern: outrage for clicks.
It is no surprise that Erivo, a black woman who describes herself as queer, has been the target of particular bile.
Yet take a look at the organised and powerful social media accounts pushing attacks on Erivo, and it becomes clear that Hollywood is facing a new type of challenge. Wicked has been released into a landscape in which well-funded political marketeers are adept at turning key cultural moments into wedge issues. These are darker arts than anything conjured by the Wicked Witch of the West. Film studios need to decide whether to respond by leaning into the politics of polarisation, ramping up a strategy that already targets movies at different segments of the US electorate, or by making the case for blockbusters that can still bring progressives and conservatives together.
The attacks on Wicked range from the plausible to the overtly ridiculous. British media outlets objected to a British Board of Film Classification note that expounded on its PG rating by explaining that the movie featured “discrimination”. “Seeing beloved characters being mistreated, especially when Elphaba’s skin-colour is used to demonise her as the ‘Wicked Witch’, may be upsetting and poignant for some audiences,” says the advice.
Piers Morgan was among those who denounced this as the working of the “woke brigade”. Has he seen Wicked? Sure, BBFC advice to parents can be po-faced and limiting. But the BBFC has been issuing such warnings since 1912 – following a Daily Mail campaign against an early screen depiction of Jesus – which hardly makes it the cutting edge of wokery. Morgan’s complaint seems to be that it is “nonsense” to claim that a movie about bullying based on skin-colour could be understood as an allegory for racism. Which is a bit like objecting to a note that The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe might be an allegory for Christianity.
More serious attacks on the film, however, have emerged from a cluster of high-impact, anonymous accounts on X (formerly Twitter) that have flourished in the era of Elon Musk. One such, an account named “End Wokeness”, was set up a few months after Musk bought the platform and already boasts 3.3 million followers; its banner image is a photograph of a bloodied Donald Trump raising his fist after surviving an assassination attempt. Elsewhere on X, an account named “Defiant L’s” has joined the game. It is linked to a website named “Resist the Mainstream”, which the Bloomberg news agency has traced to a Macedonian-based disinformation network pushing conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and Trump’s 2020 electoral loss. Defiant L’s has been endorsed by Elon Musk as “one of the best accounts on X”.
The attacks on Wicked promoted by these accounts have received widespread coverage. They blame Erivo’s casting on “wokeness” and complain about munchkins being played by actors of average height, instead of dwarves as in the Oz movie. A video clip pushed out by the End Wokeness account went viral after it showed Erivo and her co-star, the singer Ariana Grande, holding hands emotionally while a reporter asked them to comment on the LGBT community “holding space” for the song Defying Gravity in the aftermath of Trump’s election victory. (The phrase “holding space” refers to a trend for fans to post lyrics from the song online and reflect on their meaning.) What seems to have been missed by other commentators, however, is the role of such social media accounts in pushing the clip, one of hundreds in a packed press tour, to mainstream attention. These are familiar tricks in Trumpworld.
Back in 2022, it was reported that the Daily Wire website, led by Ben Shapiro, had spent between $35,000 and $47,000 promoting misleading video clips and news articles attacking Amber Heard, during her defamation battle with her ex-husband, Johnny Depp. The clear intention was to warn young men that the 21st century had become hostile terrain thanks to the excesses of feminism: Trump is the political solution to this problem. End Wokeness and Defying L’s are part of Shapiro’s shared ecosystem. The open-source analyst Ryan McBeth has alleged that the former account is run by the alt-right activist Jack Posobiec, whom the Southern Poverty Law Centre categorises as an extremist with alleged neo-Nazi connections. Related accounts amplified recent attacks on the black actress Halle Bailey when she was cast in Disney’s remake of the Little Mermaid, and Colombian-Polish actress Rachel Zegler when cast in Snow White.
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British commentators jumping on the anti-woke bandwagon likely have no idea that they’re doing the work of far-right disinformation specialists. Nor have members of the cast of Wicked helped themselves by gushing through an overexposed press tour. But our culture sphere needs to wake up to the fact that our responses to major movie events are increasingly being shaped by a white supremacist media operating out of Texas – or, in this case, Macedonia.
Hollywood studios would do well to call out this misinformation when they see it. Their other option is to cater exclusively to one side or other of the political divide. That would prove bad for business and bad for the rest of us.
Kate Maltby writes about theatre, politics and culture
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