Why don’t we have black “Casablanca”?
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I guess it would be “Casanoira”. Point is, I could rattle off every classic movie, and we don’t have a remake of it with an all-black cast. Except one. “The Wizard of Oz”. I’m not saying it *shouldn’t* happen. If you wanted to pitch an all-black “Star Wars” I’d be down. It’d certainly be better than the sequel trilogy. But, the black remake that we *did* get was “The Wiz”, a “Wizard of Oz” remake from 1978, written and directed by a couple of white guys. Granted, one of those white guys is Sidney Lumet, who is actually pretty awesome #dogdayafternoon. The other is Joel Schumacher, who is... Aight? I guess?
So, I’m going through “The Wiz” chronologically, because really, the nutso starts from the beginning. We have 24 year old Dorothy, played by 83092182009 year old Diana Ross, who lives with her Auntie Em, singing about how everybody at this party is in a stable monogamous relationship except for her. I didn’t see an altar to the nuclear family in the background, but it must be around somewhere based on how much Dorothy apparently wants to be “normal”. Why isn’t she normal? You’re telling me Diana Ross wants a piece and can’t get none? I mean, she’s 24 and lives with her aunt, is she a millennial femcel? The fact is WE HAVE NO IDEA, because we don’t know a damn thing about Dorothy other than her circumstances. It’s hard to empathize with her desire for normalcy when I have no clue what’s preventing her from attaining it, other than “that’s just how it is”. Plus, I tend not to empathize with desires for normalcy anyway. Normal is way, way overrated.
After the party wraps up, Dorothy is talking with Em, and her aunt is encouraging her to take that new high school teaching job she’s been offered, and Dorothy says she’s fine teaching kindergarten. WHAT?!? I know some teachers, and it is a rare breed of completely insane person that would rather teach kindergarten than high school (bless those people, we need them, but they’re crazy). High schoolers might not have read “The Great Gatsby” the night before, but at least they’re sitting down. Kindergarteners are screaming, falling on their face, and peeing their pants. Even if Billy Madison is correct, and peeing your pants is the coolest, it’s still messy. We’re to believe Dorothy isn’t fleeing kindergarten at 100mph because... She’s stuck? Stuck being not normal? Again, WHY??
So, obviously, it’s time to go to Oz. Dorothy crushes the wicked witch of the east and takes her shoes (which are silver, instead of the iconic ruby slippers of the original 1939 “Wizard of Oz”. They kept the bricks on the road yellow, so why change the slippers from ruby to silver? *shrug*). The good witch tells her that, to go home, she needs to find the wizard of oz, and Dorothy is off to meet the scarecrow, who is none other than the king of pop himself, Michael Jackson.
I am assuming the resurgence of interest in MJ is why this movie was floating around my ‘recommended’ queue. Make no mistake, Michael Jackson was an icon while I was growing up, and I still think he’s one of the best on stage performers ever. Killer voice, insane dance moves, and wrote a bunch of his own songs. MJ is to pop music what Jackie Chan is to martial arts movies: He changed the game, and has arguably never been surpassed at his craft. I have to say, his performance as the scarecrow is terrific fun. He has this bowlegged gait that seems really goofy yet still has this great rhythm to it, and his singing voice... Well, I mean, we’re talking about MJ and Diana Ross, probably the two most iconic motown singers. Obviously the voice is there (and frequently, so are the songs). There is a big problem with the scarecrow, however.
He looks like trash.
Literally. The scarecrow in “The Wiz” was designed to look like a trash pile. The makeup, especially that weird, droopy face makeup, is just off-putting and, to be honest, kind of disgusting. I almost couldn’t look at him. Then, during the closing credits, I found out the makeup was done by legendary makeup and effects man Stan Winston? Are you kidding me? Why would you hide Michael Jackson behind retch-inducing garbage makeup? As far as I can tell, Stan Winston must have come from the future, and he was warning children: “This man is gross. Stay away from him”. I get it, but for those of us currently IN the future who are aware of MJ’s proclivities and just want to watch him perform, it’s a complete disaster.
Next we go pick up the tin man, Nipsey Russell. In the 80s, I only knew Nipsey Russell as the game show poetry guy. I watched a LOT of game shows in the 80s. Too many. I can’t tell you how much of my current worldview was shaped by “Card Sharks”, but it’s probably a lot. “We surveyed 100 housewives and asked, is your husband fucking his secretary? How many housewives answered yes, my husband is fucking his secretary?” It was always fascinating to watch the divide between the answer if the housewives told the truth, which would be 100, or if they are lying to either themselves or the survey team, in which case the answer will be 0. It’s an anthropological goldmine! But, Nipsey would appear on game shows, say a funny little 3-5 line poem, and then proceed to get his ass handed to him by Betty White, Richard Kline, or any of the celebrities who were *really good* at game shows (not handing Nipsey a burn notice, those people would school you and me as well at $25000 Pyramid). Well, of course Nipsey Russell isn’t just a ‘poetry guy’, he’s a song and dance man in the classic vaudeville tradition, and here he gets to show off those chops. He’s my favorite thing in the movie. Slick dancing, and unlike the scarecrow, the tin man looks dope. He just... Has it, you know? Charisma. Nipsey’s got The Riz while doin’ “The Wiz”. Although, his song about how he needs oil made me wonder if Exxon was funding the movie.
So, they “Ease on Down the Road”, pick up the cowardly lion, fight off some living garbage can that make 1970s daleks look state of the art, and end up in the red light district with the hos.
Of course, the hos are evil and work for the wicked witch of the west. They’re also scantily clad (as you might imagine hos would be). This movie is rated G, and while I don’t have a problem exposing my fake daughter, Cap’n Karen, to hos, I might think twice about letting her watch these evil hos. Hollywood, can we please portray sex workers as normal folks who have normal problems? Do they always have to be underhanded hustlers, hookers with hearts of gold, or wretched drug addicts? Oh, I guess they do, because sex work is illegal. That needs to end. These women (and a few men, but mostly women) provide a non violent service that is in demand, and they deserve dignity, civil rights, and recourse when violence is committed against them, and they have NONE of those because we still have puritan laws put down thousands of years ago. It’s a fucking travesty.
Time to fast forward to the final two scenes of the movie, starting with the “sweat shop scene”. Here, Evillene, the wicked witch of the west (played by legendary actress Mabel King, oversees a bunch of factory workers manufacturing sweat (as far as I can tell, they do this just to validate the pun, because we have no other exposure to the sweat market in Oz). These workers are also in some pretty... Problematic makeup. They kind of look of terrible racial caricatures straight out of minstrel shows you might find at the turn of the 20th century. However, after Evillene is vanquished (by pulling the lever to the sprinkler system... Which was sitting there. Out in the open. And could have presumably been pulled by anybody in the last number of decades), the workers pull off these costumes, and reveal the true black people underneath. It is a stunningly beautiful moment. Both in terms of the spiritual beauty of shedding the grotesque mantle of caricature and stereotype, but also beautiful in the Donald Sterling sense of these are a bunch of professional dancers, who are keeping it tight, and dancing in their underwear (again, this film is rated G, why are they in they underwear? *shrug*).
I loved the moment, but for it to make any sense, Evillene had to be white.
Now, I get it. You want an all-black cast. But... Those costumes the sweat shop workers were forced to wear that represented the distorted view of black people? Those stereotypes were created by “the man”. The white man. Whitey. If evil is manifested in Oz as witches, then that sweat shop should have been run by the Wicked Witch of the White. If you’re going to have your characters literally shed a racist view of them, then they should also be able to defeat the source of that racism. 70s blaxspoitation films had a long history of “the man” being the ultimate villain, and just ignoring it here seems... More cowardly than the lion.
After the factory workers start dancing, the crows, the hos, and the flying monkeys that formerly worked for the wicked witch join in and start dancing. Wait, what? These weren’t sweat shop workers that were forced into labor, these were folks that went out into Oz and did the wicked witch’s bidding, and seemed to enjoy it. We’re supposed to forgive them? Why? Because they were just following orders? You know who else was following orders? Adolf Eichmann. We didn’t let eichmann off the hook, so I’m not sure we should let the flying monkeys off either.
So, the witch is dead, the wizard of oz (Richard Pryor, in an oddly non comedic role) is revealed as fake, the good witch of the south shows up, tells Dorothy she’s had the power to go home the whole time, and Dorothy can’t wait to go back to harlem.
My question is: WHY? Why does she want to go back? In that opening scene she was singing about how she how she isn’t in a stable monogamous relationship, she teaches kindergarten, she lives with her aunt. Why exactly is she so eager to return? In Oz, she has adventure, she has friends, and if she wants that relationship, there are candidates. The idea that she wants to go back “because it’s the real world” is short sighted, lazy writing. She should at least be THINKING about it, but nope, she needs to return to “normal” earth and resume her quest for a normal nuclear family without a second thought. It makes ZERO sense.
Until... The final song of the film, where Dorothy reveals that she made everything, and instead of black “Wizard of Oz”, we’ve been watching black “The Usual Suspects”. She doesn’t go into her bedroom, where we see a Michael Jackson album and have $25000 Pyramid with Nipsey Russell playing in the background, but we might as well have. What, exactly, is supposed to be the takeaway here? She made up the movie, to what end? To make friends and then leave? I guess we’re to believe that her journey to a made up universe, which she engineered in a microsecond, gave her the ability to “get out of her rut” and be normal? I’m not sure what skills she acquired in Oz that would help her with that. Revealing that Dorothy just made up the movie didn’t really add anything other than dissatisfaction.
I guess Dorothy’s reluctance to examine whether or not ‘normalcy’ is worth pursuing mirrors the movie’s reluctance to be truly “dark and edgy”. Even if the cast is all black, the actual story is a whiter shade of puce.
9/10