"There is no longer any such place as home"

Salman Rushdie's analysis of the Wizard of Oz was unique and thought-provoking. I'd never thought about the film in contradiction to its famous slogan: "there's no place like home," but while reading Rushdie's argument, the complicated idea of "home" really resonated with me. In the opening scenes, Kansas is depicted as gray upon gray upon even more gray. It's gloomy and one dimensional and doesn't seem like the kind of place Dorothy would want to return back to after discovering the wonderful technicolor world of Oz, and when she does at the end of the film it's hard to understand why she was so desperate to get home in the first place. I think it's really interesting the way Rushdie hypothesizes that Dorothy's trip through Oz is more of a coming of age tale than anything else. In the beginning she and her "childish" worries are pushed aside by the adults on the farm and it is only when she lands down in Oz that she is treated like an adult-- Rushdie even claims she is treated not only as an adult, but hailed as a heroine. The more we follow Dorothy through Oz, the more we understand the complicated and intricately woven definitions of "home." This is the first time Dorothy has left her childhood home and much like Salman Rushdie wrote, "the truth is once we have left our childhood places and started out to make up our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that 'there's not place like home' but rather that there is no longer any such places as home: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began." As fantastical as the world of Oz is, we all have been to Oz, and walked down our own version of the yellow brick road uncertain of our future. While there may be no place like our very first home, there is always a place to call home.