The Many Layers of The Wizard of Oz

I really enjoyed reading the author's thoughts and theories on the Wizard of Oz because they are ideas that I had not previously considered. “There’s no place like home” is one of the most infamous quotes in Hollywood history. Perhaps that is what makes Rushdie’s analysis so interesting to me. He makes the bold statement of saying that that highly quoted and beloved slogan from the Wizard of Oz is the least convincing idea in the film. It was one thing for Dorothy to want to get home back to where things are normal, but it is true that Kansas and the life Dorothy had at home was not the ideal state that that statement implied. Dorothy did not feel fully understood or appreciated at home, and her family was lower income. It was clear that Kansas was made to look like a ‘bleak world’- even the filter of the picture was colored gray to represent its depressing nature. In Oz, a land very different from home, Dorothy found courage, friends, adventure and her best self, thus making the statement “there’s no place like home” very contradictory. Why would Dorothy want to go back to a world of gray after experiencing a world of color? It was an argument that I had not really considered until now.

I also liked Rushdie’s thinking about the way gender and “growing up”. Regarding gender, the powerful roles of the Good Witch and the Bad Witch are played by women, and the cowardly roles of Oz, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow are not the typical roles of leading Hollywood men. It is a revolutionary change in Hollywood, where a film takes on a feminist position that was not typical of the time. Regarding growing up, this film serves as a rite of passage for Dorothy. It was the “inadequacy” of Auntie Em and Uncle Henry that forced Dorothy to take control of her life and grow up into an adult.