A delicious bit of cultural subversion is the idea that director Judd Apatow, despite being an avowed liberal and critic of Republicans, actually makes extremely conservative movies.
Ross Douthat of the New York Times made the original case in 2009, looking at how “Knocked Up” makes a compelling pro-life case, while “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” actually celebrates the abstinence of its main character. In 2015, Apatow made “Trainwreck,” the Amy Schumer vehicle that follows a woman who decides to abandon her boozy promiscuity in favor of monogamy and responsibility. Apatow movies are perhaps subconsciously conservative, despite the will of their creator.
Fast forward to 2024. “Wicked” — the Broadway musical adapted into a two-part film starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo — is a box office hit, already grossing hundreds of millions. For those unfamiliar with the plot, “Wicked” is both a “Wizard of Oz” prequel of sorts and a reframing of the original movie, with a focus on the early life of Glinda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West, known as Elphaba in this version. It’s not spoiling the movie to reveal that “Wicked” portrays a world where Elphaba is actually good, and Glinda is, while more nuanced, actually bad.
And the Wizard of Oz himself is the one who leads the charge of shifting the narrative on Elphaba from good and noble to bad…and wicked.
Perhaps inevitably, the 2024 election has been grafted onto this cultural phenomenon. Director Jon M. Chu recently made his political narrative explicit in an interview during the press tour. “A charismatic leader who gaslights a community that this woman is wicked just because she’s standing up for a marginalized group of people in the society, how could that be [political]?” he asked rhetorically.
The implication is obvious — Donald Trump is the Wizard of Oz, and Elphaba is Kamala Harris, who was unfairly maligned by the right during the campaign because she was simply trying to stand up for the less fortunate.
The Wizard “is America governed not by a con man but by a strong man — an authoritarian dictator,” wrote Vox’s Constance Grady last week in making the case for why the Wizard is Trump-like, in a column titled “Why Wicked’s politics feel so bizarrely timely.”
Grady is partially correct, and, like Apatow, Chu seems to have made a movie with a political message that did not come through as intended.
Instead of a critique of Trump, “Wicked” is actually an allegory about how the establishment is fake, nefarious and ultimately a failure. And like in 2024, the audience gets to see the house of cards come tumbling down.
Elphaba’s “Wicked Witch” is ostracized and marginalized, just like Americans who turned to Trump in 2016, and again in 2024. She is first scorned, then labeled “controversial” and “dangerous.” She has a connection with Dr. Dillamond, a talking goat teacher at her school, who is also being targeted by the forces of the establishment. “When people are hungry and angry they look for someone to blame,” he says, before being forcibly removed from the premises.
The Wizard is ultimately exposed as entirely fraudulent, as in the original film. Both Glinda and Elphaba see the truth, but they choose different routes. Glinda aligns with the Wizard in an effort to accrue power and influence — like the left’s continued reliance on supposed “expertise,” despite the establishment demonstrating more than enough reason to abandon it. Elphaba fights back, and is determined to expose Oz to the public as a fraud.
This is how MAGA aligned with a unity coalition in 2024, from RFK Jr. to Tulsi Gabbard to Elon Musk, to bring Trump a sweeping victory.
“The best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy,” says the Wizard near the end. And he successfully does, or attempts to, creating a false narrative about the elements he can’t control. Prince Fiyero, who teases an alignment with Elphaba over Glinda, is thus a Trump-like figure, singing about “dancing through life” and mirroring the way Trump became a turncoat to the elite during his political transformation over the past decade.
On Joe Rogan’s podcast last week, he explained to his comedian friends a central theme of Trump’s place in our culture. “What you’re seeing with Trump, regardless of his flaws, is a massive, concentrated psyop,” he said. “They’ve distorted who he is to the point where most people think that way.”
That distortion is echoed in one of the final lines of “Wicked,” from the Wizard’s companion, Madame Morrible, who puts out the call to Oz that Elphaba is evil: “Believe nothing she says. This distortion! This repulsion!”
It was all gaslighting and scapegoating, a total inversion of the truth — that the establishment should not be believed, was actually evil and was distorting reality.
Will Elphaba convince the people of Oz of the fallacy of the supposed elite, so they can achieve a 2024-like moment where the people defeat the gatekeepers? We know what happens in “The Wizard of Oz,” so it’s unlikely. But we’ll find out in part two, out next year.
Until then, audiences can enjoy a film that secretly mirrors our political moment, in a way they may not want to admit.
Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.
