Although much of the buzz around ‘Wicked’ has focused on ‘queering,’ it is the concepts of propaganda and tyranny that drive the film. //

Not everything is hunky-dory in Oz. Here, animals are persecuted for their differences and put in cages to prevent them from learning to speak. Elphaba has a strong sense of justice to speak for the voiceless and decides to visit the one and only Wizard of Oz to fix the problem.

To her dismay, the Wizard (played brilliantly by Jeff Goldblum) is a fraud. Elphaba is invited to his castle to create flying monkeys that will be perfect “spies in the sky.” Scheming together with Morrible, the Wizard tells Elphaba that dissent will not be tolerated.

“When I first got here,” says the Wizard, “there was discord. There was discontent. And back where I come from, everybody knows that the best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy.”

“We’re doing this to keep people safe,” Morrible says, in turn. We’ve heard that one before. Many things have been done “for the security of the state,” and they are never good.

Although slightly bumbling (in a very Jeff Goldblum way), the Wizard is nevertheless manipulative. Goldblum’s Wizard oscillates between a P.T. Barnum figure and a dictator with Morrible at his side. It is Morrible who is responsible for spreading lies about Elphaba. It is Morrible who names her the Wicked Witch and says she must be destroyed. Morrible effectively begins the propaganda campaign against Elphaba, exploiting her physical differences with the intent of crushing her free will.

The people of Oz accept it because they’ve already been living in a society that has kept them artificially happy, as long as they don’t ask questions. They are living in an illusion, in Plato’s cave, and the shadows are their reality. They are weak and would rather blame an external factor for their problems rather than take responsibility for their actions (or lack thereof). In other words, they have made themselves into slaves and require a dictator to exist.

Propaganda is a powerful tool, and we have seen this phenomenon throughout many totalitarian systems, even in soft, shape-shifting totalitarian impulses in the United States. In some ways, the ideological lie becomes worse in nations that fundamentally and foundationally resist tyranny. But it is precisely this contrast between freedom and small acts of tyranny that are insidious. People can be “asleep” through many different means, but it always includes a refusal to see the truth because then one must act. In “Wicked,” Glinda opts for an existential blindfold. The alleged goodness she embodies is nothing more than an affectation.

“Wicked” is not an excellent film. At times, it meanders and is sensory overload by virtue of being a musical. But in the final moments of the film, the larger idea is revealed: What is reality? Do we possess free will to choose truth over a lie?

In the final song, “Defying Gravity,” Elphaba sings that if she’s “flying solo,” then “at least, [she’s] flying free.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has identified “the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation” as “a personal nonparticipation in lies!” Elphaba could have chosen to be part of the Wizard’s machine, but that means she would be living by lies.

"Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. …As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your [human] patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.". //

At some point, this age will also come to an end. It's unclear how or why, but what we fought so hard to escape will call itself by a different name, and it will have fresh new causes that take advantage of the people's needs and desires of the time. Those leading that movement will cause the people to turn away from the lessons they learned previously, as the new age will seemingly render them obsolete, and the pendulum will swing back.

We are currently moving toward a peak. We will reach it. Then we will descend.

You cannot stop this, but what you can do is make sure that when the descent starts, that it's not one that will plunge as deeply as this previous age did. The key is to destroy government control over society to the greatest extent possible, put laws in place that will severely restrict it going forward, localize politics as much as possible, and then continue to be prosperous until the age ends.

We will hit a new valley, but in our diligence, we won't have as deep of one as last time.

We have a great opportunity to do this now. We shouldn't waste it, because bad times are coming, but if we're prepared enough, and the framework is in place to help, those bad times could be less of an issue than before. While the law of undulation is absolute, like any universal law, it can be used to your advantage. //

frylock234
10 hours ago edited
The other key to preventing as deep a descent is to not overreach as badly as the left did. The harder and farther the pendulum pushes, the worse the inevitable swing back will be. That does not mean we cannot push back and make considerable progress, but we need to push slowly and relentlessly, by increments rather than radically and suddenly. Heat the frogs slowly over time so they are more inclined to stay in the pot. //

C. S. P. Schofield
10 hours ago
This is one of the reasons I hope to see a shift toward sanity in the Democrat party. The mess we are in now is a consequence of a long period when both parties were Big Government Prigressive, and we only started to come back with the election of Reagan. The absence of an opposition isn’t good for ANY movement. Our system is built around two parties keeping each-other’s extremes in check.

I don’t know what excesses the Populist movement now ascendant will lean towards, but there will be some. If the self-destruction of the Democrats goes on too long, we’re likely to find out.

Much has been made here at RedState about the growing progressive rot permeating various film franchises, most noticeably comic book-based ones such as the MCU and Justice League. While the incessant preaching and corresponding drops in box office revenue are well worth covering, another omnipresent yet overlooked element warrants further examination. Filling this gap, Ladd Ehlinger Jr.’s (FilmLadd on Twitter) latest installment of his excellent video series dissecting both pop culture and political grifters compares Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 Western “The Wild Bunch,” one of the first films made taking full advantage of the Hays Code’s discontinuation, with Joss Wheldon’s 2012 “The Avengers.” The latter comes out decidedly second best on multiple fronts. //

Ehlinger Jr.’s video focuses on how violence is depicted in each film, comparing “The Avengers” outlandish cartoon stylization to “The Wild Bunch” and its utilization of slow motion and quick cuts not solely for cinematic effect but also to depict as accurately as possible violence’s horrific consequences, the suffering and death that come with the real thing. As he comments:

There’s no violence in movies, video games, and the rest; only depictions of violence. It then becomes a matter of depicting violence in a moral or immoral way.

Ehlinger Jr. explains that while “The Wild Bunch” has vast quantities of spilled blood, it does so not to shock or titillate but to emphasize violence’s graphic, messy nature. There are no bloodless bullet holes or immunity to gunfire based on gender or age. Women and children bleed and die just as agonizingly as men. Ehlinger Jr. compares this to the cartoonish ways the humans in “The Avengers” pull off stunts that would, in real life, mean certain death without getting so much as a glorified paper cut. //

Peckinpah’s life was hardly a quiet one centered on Bible study and prayer. Yet ironically, his films are laced with a strong moral code straight from Scripture. What a person plants, they will always harvest. The Old Testament prophet Hosea said it best: They have planted the wind and will harvest the whirlwind. As Ladd Ehlinger Jr. shows us, noting that which was done better in bygone days is not the sole prerogative of previous dusty generations railing against the wind. It is the raw truth. Ignore it at your peril. //

INTJ
2 years ago edited
So, Sergeant York or The Longest Day, both Hays-era films, never inspired violence? What's the difference? What about Psycho? The issue is much more complex and nuanced than is suggested. I would argue that the lack of societal consequences for acts of violence - think Soros D.A.'s - has a far greater impact. //

Cafeblue32 Real GOP 690
2 years ago edited
The avengers isn’t a moral tale? Of course it is.

Shakespeare I believe pointed out long ago there are basically only six stories that are told to describe the human condition. I can’t remember what they all are now, but one is starcrossed lovers who find each other, or they almost find each other. There is the rescuing of the maiden, the slaying of the dragons, the fulfilling of the hero’s quest. All of it is based in morality or to otherwise reenforce values and ideas we used to commonly hold.

There is no neutral input to humans. Whatever we see and hear is internalized and filed away by the subconscious mind. We present tales of murder and violence to others and punishment for it so that we don’t do it in real life. Hollywood is doing its best to strip entertainment of moral considerations, and that is one big reason it sucks. If there is no overall stakes of losing right, wrong, justice and freedom, then there is no conflict, only bitchy people whining about not getting what they want. And the violence becomes a glorified street fight we aren’t invested in because it isn’t about us.

Hollywood removes the consequences of violence and produces movies where people are bloodfilled meat bags to be killed in various ways while we cheer the heroes carnage. They are seldom ever about a larger societal benefit. It is usually personal revenge, or restoration, or some other McGuffin that is their reason.

Violence in superhero movies is sanitized. What happened to all those people in those city buildings they so casually demolish? Or all the cars they smash, or bridges they destroy, etc? People play such a minimal role in the superhero genre anymore that the new Flash movie had him racing around city streets without a single car or person on them. We are just CGI representations of NPCs, bodies incidental to the action.

What’s more difficult to understand and accept is how all of this is the inevitable consequence of a liberal worldview that the GOP has already accepted, which means what we’re seeing this week at the DNC we will eventually see at the RNC.

I don’t just mean that the Trump campaign and the Republican Party have softened their opposition to abortion in the post-Dobbs era. It’s not merely that abortion was all but removed from the GOP platform and the party’s previous position in favor of federal abortion limits was abandoned. It’s that Trump and his Republican Party would like very much to stop talking about abortion altogether now, as if the matter is settled and we can move on to more important matters, like the border and inflation.

That’s the same attitude they have about gay marriage, which, like abortion once was, is supposed to be a settled debate, not up for discussion anymore. The choice to take these issues off the table, or try to, is usually framed as pragmatic. We want a big tent, Democrats are radical, Republicans can present their side as reasonable.

But it doesn’t work like that. There’s a reason the Democrats went from talking about how abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” in the 1990s to celebrating it with free abortions from the back of an RV in 2024. Once you cede the principle of the thing, once you accept the premise that it’s justifiable to kill the unborn under certain circumstances, the list of allowable circumstances will continuously expand.

This is of course true of any moral principle, which is why the left moved with alarming speed from arguing that gay marriage wouldn’t hurt or affect anyone to demanding that everyone actively endorse and celebrate it or face ruin. There is no limiting principle to the argument that consenting adults have a right to have their sexual arrangements officially recognized by the state. That’s why the rationale used in the gay marriage debates of the 2010s is exactly the rationale deployed today in the transgender debate, which will in turn eventually be successfully deployed on behalf of plural marriage, polyamory, and even pedophilia.

The point here is not to sow discord on the right or decry a big tent strategy for the GOP, but merely to point out that when you violate the moral principles on which a social order is based, you don’t get to say when enough is enough. The slippery slope does not cease to be slippery when you think you’ve had enough. You will go all the way down it.

Put another way, the time to say “no” was before the moral principle was violated, not after. Having accepted, for example, that abortion is morally licit in cases where the child is conceived through rape or incest, or that it should be allowed in the first trimester because that seems a reasonable compromise with the left, today’s Republican Party has lost the ability to object to abortion on any grounds whatsoever.

Either an unborn child is a human being, with the same right to life as an infant or a toddler, or it has no rights and can be killed with impunity. Compromising on this is incoherent. It is to admit defeat.

J.R.R. Tolkien did not write a story about why power is evil but about why domination is evil. //

For example, at the end of the story, Aragorn does not renounce power and wander off into the wilderness to smoke pipeweed. He claims the throne and with it the power that is rightfully his — and he does so with none of the reluctance that Peter Jackson added to the film adaptation. Likewise, characters such as Gandalf and Galadriel do not renounce power as such — indeed, they have and use great power — but they do renounce a certain sort and use of power.

What they reject is the domination that makes people into thralls and slaves. //

But French misunderstands Tolkien. Indeed, if anyone is disqualified on Tolkien’s terms, it is those such as French who reject natural law and the legitimate power of governments to make and enforce laws in accord with it. Unlike French, Tolkien did not urge us to embrace a relativistic legal pluralism that cannot distinguish between good and evil, beautiful and ugly, God and Satan.

Put simply, Aragorn would not have tolerated Uruk-hai story hour.

Humanity is literally in the midst of teaching itself that there is no good or evil through the stories we tell and this is wildly dangerous for our species. We are not animals. We are higher beings that understand what is and isn't evil and what is and isn't good. We base our entire society and civilization around this concept.

Humanity wages wars based on this concept.

Yet, here we are. It's pretty clear that good and evil are being confused. You can see it from the confusion about whether or not criminals should be punished for their crimes because of their identity to literal confusion about whether or not Hamas are terrorists or freedom fighters.

(READ: We've Forgotten What Evil Is)

I'll be the first to stand up and say that there are plenty of gray areas in our society about wrong and right. Nuance is always present in nearly every debate.

But at the end of the day, evil is evil and we need to be okay with calling it out and talking about it. Sometimes, it needs to be highlighted so that the person being tempted and courted by it will not fall into a destructive lifestyle, a backward ideology, or a coffin.

“Canceling” people who disagree with you over ordinary political issues is bad for civil society. Ruining someone’s life because he wore a MAGA cap or tweeted something stupid or supported the wrong initiative creates an oppressive environment for open discourse.

“Canceling” people who sign petitions and hold up signs that openly celebrate or justify the targeted, brutal murders of women and babies, on the other hand, is good for civil society. Stopping malevolent ideas from being normalized is good. Exercising your First Amendment right to free speech and free association to shun and call out people who spread odious ideas in public life is a moral imperative. //

When I say I’m a free-speech absolutist, I mean it. The state should do absolutely nothing to inhibit or censor pro-Hamas Americans from expressing their opinions. Free speech isn’t contingent on your position. Hate speech is free speech. The government has no business prodding or even suggesting limitations on our rhetorical interactions. Even outside state intervention, we should be upholding the values that promote free expression. We can peacefully coexist with colleagues, neighbors and friends who hold contradictory opinions within the normal parameters of political debate.

Likewise, Americans have a right to use their freedom to call out and disassociate themselves from people who take the side with nihilistic murder cults.