The Wizard of Oz: An Enchanting Adaptation

Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz is a fantasy story loved and cherished by millions who read it. Every year, the book and the movie grow closer to becoming part of American mythology. The two versions of the story are remarkably alike in tone and spirit, and the movie reinforces key themes of the book about the importance of home and the true power of humanity. The book and the movie do differ, however; the movie provides a slightly more concrete view of reality than the perception-based world of the book, and the book contains a satire of populism ignored by teachers for decades after its release and not present in the movie.

Both versions of The Wizard of Oz were created primarily for the purpose of entertainment. Baum says it “aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out” (1). The title screen of the movie says, “For nearly forty years this story has given faithful service to the Young in Heart; and (sic) Time has been powerless to put its kindly philosophy out of fashion. To those of you who have been faithful to it in return…and to the Young in Heart — we dedicate this picture.” This purpose is reflected in the atmosphere and tone of the story. Almost everyone in the tale is good, even the Flying Monkeys, whose curse binds them to servitude, the Hammer-Heads, who are only trying to defend their people from invaders, and the Yellow Winkies, who initially oppose Dorothy but immediately thank her when she frees them of the Wicked Witch of the West. The antagonists of the story are the malignant forces that are beyond man’s control, such as the tornado and the witches. This touch of Realism only contributes to the optimism of the book. All the true humans become protagonists and support the implied theme: everyone has some good in them. This commitment to joyful and pure entertainment is the main reason people so dearly love the book and the movie.

The book and the movie have some strong themes in common. Both emphasize the importance of home; Dorothy’s “there’s no place like home” is a refrain of the story, though the line itself is only in the movie. The girl likes Oz, but she loves Kansas, a place whose only local color is its desolate, black and white existence. Baum says that every person has a place where they truly belong. Another theme of both the book and the movie is that humans always have the power to achieve what they desire at their fingertips. The Scarecrow always had brains, and the Tin Man had a heart; they just didn’t realize it. The Cowardly Lion, whose, very name is a paradox, had courage inside him all along. Dorothy could have come home at any time with three taps of her slippers and a few quick words. All these people needed were people to reveal the truth to them; these people were Oz in the Emerald City and the Good Witch, Glinda. Dorothy and her three friends are dynamic characters, even if they attribute all their development to the Wizard of Oz. These themes were left in the movie to increase its value as family entertainment and a teaching tool for children. As a result, young people still watch the movie today.

The book and the movie share important themes, but they also differ slightly in their takes on the conflict between perception and reality. Both say that perception of reality is often more important than reality itself, but the movie is more grounded in the real world than the book is. In Baum’s book, the setting of Oz is a fantastic place that Dorothy may have actually visited; the movie instead shifts the setting inside Dorothy’s mind. During the denouement, the movie is clear that Dorothy was only dreaming, and the real crisis she faced was not a physical conflict against the Wicked Witch of the West but a psychological crisis regarding her feelings about home. “But I did leave you, Uncle Henry — that’s just the trouble. And I tried to get back for days and days,” Dorothy says when she wakes up. Aunt Em replies, “There, there, lie quiet now. You just had a bad dream.” The Emerald City provides reality questions of its own. The reality-coloring goggles in the book are not present in the movie, where the city really is green and shiny.
The points of epiphany for the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman, and the Cowardly Lion are different in the book than in the movie. Oz tells them that they have had what they desired all along, but none of the men believe him. Instead of giving the three physical signs of their traits, as in the movie, Oz must supply them with “bran-new brains” (166), a silk heart filled with sawdust (168), and a bottle of liquid courage. The characters in the book and the movie are both subject to their perceptions of reality, but the people in the book are especially dependent. The screenwriters probably changed the movie in part for expedience and faster pacing of the plot, but they probably also did it to make the movie easier to swallow for the most unimaginative and reality-dependent portion of the human population: adults.

Another element of the book that is missing from the movie is the satire that permeates The Wizard of Oz’s pages. The educational establishment was not aware that The Wizard of Oz was a satire of populism until Henry Littlefield’s 1963 essay “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism,” and the general public is still ignorant of the book’s second meaning. Given the intricacies of this part of the story, the satire would not have fit in the movie even if the creators knew about it. In the book, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman, and the Cowardly Lion are symbols of the farmers, the industrial workers, and William Jennings Bryan; in the movie, they are simply Hunk, Hickory, and Zeke. The absence of satire does not detract from the movie; it merely augments its purpose as pure entertainment with positive, child-friendly themes.

The Wizard of Oz’s movie adaptation is slightly different from the book, but the story remains the same. The movie creators kept and strengthened the charm and the positive messages of the book, and that devotion to heart and soul overrides any differences in perceptions of reality or hidden satire. Sixty-three years after its release, the movie remains one of the greatest movie adaptations of a book ever filmed. The differences in details in an adaptation are immaterial as long as the movie keeps the spirit of the book alive.

Has U2 forgotten its countrymen?

U2 isn’t a very Irish band anymore. Hmm.

It’s cold, and I’m taking high school hook-up tests

Today we took the esteemed CHS Hook-up Test. One of the questions was “What do you value most in a date?” I was stuck between caring and intelligence. So I thought about all the intelligent people I know……and I chose Caring.

---

As for my character traits, I was stuck between intelligence and honesty. I chose honesty. I don’t think intelligence is really a character trait. It is something that is wrapped into the person like good looks is. Other traits take work. Also, the last couple girls I’ve gone out with sometimes made me feel like I was an idiot. It wasn’t their fault. I just felt rather slow around them. Intelligence varies.

---

Clowning around with Ilya, Charlie Yang, and Luobei in the power corner is the most fun I have ever had in English class. The second-most fun I ever had was clowning around with Bucky Wharton in Mrs. Groth’s class my freshman year. That was a lot of fun. It would have been even more fun if I hadn’t always felt like I was competing with Bucky, though, especially over the person who sat between us. I also had lots of fun singing my Lord of the Flies songs, but that was 10 minutes of extreme fun instead of 6 weeks of moderate fun.

---

Today I fooled Anthony is hang-man by using “Flava Flav.” That was awesome.

---

Tonight I took out the trash in the man-eating cold with no hat or gloves. -3 degrees actually isn’t very cold weather. My body obviously disagreed with me, though, because when I started walking back to the house, I took off and ran instead. If the mind ignores a problem with the body, it doesn’t mean the problem is going to go away. Ho ho ho, I found that one out the hard way yesterday, but that’s a story I’d rather not relate here, ho ho ho!

Life, the Universe, Everything

Well. If material possessions and the comforts of the world don’t make people happy, then who convinced us that they did? It wasn’t the churches: organized religion has been preaching about the pitfalls of prosperity since day one (“but as long as you have extra money, could you please give us some?”) It wasn’t the philosophers or the writers: Socrates declined money for his teachings, and everyone here has probably read some book about the great cage that wealth is. “Money is empty” is one of Hollywood’s pet themes; they keep it in a cage with “a person can only be happy by living life to the fullest.” Yes, it is safe to say that every church I’ve heard of and every English class I’ve attended have told me that money is not an important part of being happy.

It doesn’t matter. The lesson passes through men’s ears, and they continue running on their little wheel and eating little pellets from a plastic dropper. Then one day, since they are men and not beasts (and this point is EXTREMELY important – if men were the same as animals, they would never ask why), they look outside their cage and wonder, “My God, what have I done?” Immediately afterwards, they experience a midlife crisis or, even worse, an end-of-life crisis, which most people prefer to call “death.” Then the master sees them dead, or more likely smells them dead. He calls his mother, who cleans out the cage, then flushes the venerable rodent down the toilet or buries it in the yard or throws it in the trash can and sets it out by the mailbox. Mom goes out and buys a fresh new hamster, just like the old one, and introduces it to its new home…

People are not meant to live like this. Why do they? Who told them to? The blame must be spread, and everywhere men are responsible. There is no bogeyman that manipulates society. Everything that society does to people is really what people do to themselves.

People have measured their value by their material prosperity since the beginning of time. Since the effect that a person has on his contemporaries is often difficult to measure (from time to time, everyone wonders if their friends really care about them or if they’ve ever really helped anyone), people used physical success as a measure of a good life. Even easier to measure than great wealth was the number of descendants a man had, a pure human sign of his legacy. Even God knew this, so he promised to make Abraham the father of many nations, with descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, and there were a lot of stars then because light pollution didn’t exist. Abraham couldn’t pass this up, so he slaughtered a ram as a sign of his covenant with God. God certainly held up his end of the bargain. Abraham’s people have made covenants with God ever since, and so the idea that success in life was a sign of fidelity to God has persisted all the way up to the present day.

On a more immediate level, though, people want to be materially successful because salesmen convince them that their wares will truly improve their lives, and because bosses want to squeeze every last dollar of productivity from their workers. We are still suffering the aftershocks of the Industrial Revolution and the invention of television. The modern business is a lot like a machine. People work hard because if they don’t, someone else will. They work hard so they can get a little bit bigger house or a little bit better boat. They work hard to send their children to a better school, so their kids can make more money and live more comfortably than they do, and thus inevitably work harder. Many people buy things, watch things, and care about things because the Great Gods of Television tell them to.

Television, television is a strange thing. Appearing regularly on television is like being dipped into the Styx. Never mind that the people on “Friends” are exactly like the people down the street; anyone who has met a famous person is instantaneously more interesting, and whenever they tell the story of meeting Howie from the Backstreet Boys they act like they’ve witnessed the Resurrection of Christ. I think it is a really good experience to meet extremely talented people, but I think that if I walked over to someone at Subway and sat down to talk with them, many of them would be just as interesting, if not moreso. In fact, if I met Howie from the Backstreet Boys, I would probably ask him what he thought of the weather here. Almost everyone has been outside at some time in their life. Therefore, almost everyone has an opinion about the weather. If they don’t, they make one up to sound thoughtful. Celebrities are nice people, but they are also normal people who just happen to have the kind of talents that get someone on television. I guess there’s no other way to understand this than to experience it yourself.

People can’t just blame everyone else for their hard work, though. I think, in the end, people work too hard to throw a curtain over the vast emptiness inside their souls. Working hard is all right, it even makes one feel good sometimes. Working too hard, though, is an escape. People don’t want to face the truly empty nature of their existence, so they create constant work so they never have to think about it. I know that I have been feeling somewhat tired and frustrated lately, even when I haven’t been working. I also know that I have not spent five minutes sitting and doing absolutely nothing for a long, long time. Whenever I think about that, I feel the compulsion to do more work because I am afraid to stop; I cannot let go; there is always more work that I must do. If I stop doing things and simply sit, I will have to face up to myself and my identity. I will really have to find out who I am and what I am called to do. It will be extremely difficult, even if in the end I choose to do what I wanted to do all along. I am sitting at a red light and hoping that it never, ever turns green, because then I would have to decide if I am turning right or turning left.

I work too hard to avoid having to face up to who I really am. It’s not a matter of not having enough time, really; sometimes people don’t have time to do something simply because they don’t want to create the time. The matter at hand, the problem I am struggling with, is purely a matter of attitude. It doesn’t matter if I have spring break or even summer vacation; as long as I focus purely on the work that needs to be done later, I will never ever relax, and then I will never have to make any hard personal decisions.

Eventually I will get sick of all this procrastination. That will come at a time that is not recorded in this journal, when I decide to stop talking and talking about this problem and decide to really do something. That day should be soon, because I am truly growing weary of the stress that I am putting myself through.

What I have to do takes courage, and it takes faith. I have to have faith that if I cross my arms and fall backwards, God will catch me. This means believing that God exists. I do, I really do, deep down inside. My faith has had some rough patches lately; I have heard scores of people tell me they don’t need anyone at all and can survive without God carrying them all the time. I believed them. It wouldn’t surprise me, though, if I never heard anyone say that, and all these doubting voices really came from deep inside of me. The devil is like that.

Sometimes it’s harder to believe that Satan exists than it is to believe that God exists, because it seems like the idea of Satan is something churches drew up to increase their tithing and their attendance. Actually, Mr. Shoop mentioned that idea to me in private 2nd semester of freshman year. He was quite the fellow. He was very much a conspiracy theorist. I do think evil exists, if not in some people than certainly in the spiritual world. Evil and the absence of good, sins and sins of omission, go hand in hand. The absence of good is often more frightening than evil; it is more deceptive and seems more like something friendly. So yes, I do think the devil exists. I don’t think, though, that he makes people do anything, and thus should not be given the responsibility for a person’s actions. The diabolism of the Salem Witch Trials is simply idiotic. God and his rival give people suggestions. People make the decisions themselves.

So. I have to get down to who I really am. Now it is very late. I must retire.

Good night.

Thinking about the public school system

If school teaches me how to work, who will teach me how to learn? To live? To love? Too many in my generation will die without ever having lived. Our fathers have raised us in their image, their ideal: efficient and vapid. Over 50% of Americans admit to being depressed, but what do they have to complain about? They are the richest and most comfortable people in the history of the world. The American juggernaut is really a simple one; with each breath of life it takes from us, it grows more and more powerful.

It is like the Poe story of the painter who begins to paint a beautiful woman, his newlywed wife. She is not much for art, but she poses to please him. As he grows more obsessed with his work, however, she becomes weaker and weaker…every brush stroke seems to suck a bit of life out of her…but the man, the great man, cannot see it. Only when he finishes the portrait does he realize there is something different about it. “This…is life!” he exclaims. Then he looks at his beautiful wife and sees that she is dead.

I know that work is necessary for a man. I highly value it. Still, I am not sure this is the right way to go about raising healthy individuals. People thought computers would help them work less to do more. People are certainly doing more these days, but they are working more, also. The personal computer was not the savior men thought it would be.

Life is cyclical. Things will be corrected some day and perhaps even over-corrected. A happy and cruel day it will be, too, when people decide they have had enough of working and not enough of living. It probably will not happen as I envision it happening – perhaps because I have no clear image of what will happen – but, mark my words, people will not stand up to this forever. Eventually they will look for something else to make them happy. Many already are.

Someone is not doing their job correctly. Is it the teachers? The parents? Us? It is probably a bit of each.

For now, though, I will continue to work. I have no choice. I have grown very used to it. This does not mean, though, that there is nothing I can do. I cannot escape the social treasure hunt outside of me, but I can do my best to end the conflict and the emptiness inside of me. No businessman is good enough to take my will away from me. Things will look up some day.

I like my life here, but it is not the end of my existence. There is much for me to do. I must find out what it is and then do it.

God will know. He always knows these things. My allegiance is with Him.

Now. Time to go to bed and see what I can do tomorrow.

It will be a good day.

Environmentalism

A lot of environmentalists seem to think that the world would be a better place if humans were not on it. I’m not so sure about that. It would certainly look better on photographs (though no one would be around to take them or appreciate them), and there would probably be more plant and animal life because we wouldn’t be knocking down their habitats, but nevertheless, I think there is a reason we are here. If there wasn’t, if humans were a virus, nature would have found a way to get rid of us long ago. We’re still here, though. Humans may have dominion over nature, but they are also its steward. This is important to remember, and I think it is important to look out for the environment. Nevertheless, I still love humanity and think it has its place here, and no, I do not think electricity is evil.