Fin: 'Wicked' is not radical

Also: Vivek Ramaswamy vs. pop culture, George Clooney's not-stupid op-ed, a truly outrageous movie bowdlerization, and more in this week's notes column.

Ever since Wicked burst on the scene last month and it was clear that it was a box office colossus and box office phenomenon, there’s been an idea floating out there in the discourse: That Wicked amounted to a sharp rebuke of tyrannical leadership — in the form of its duplicitous Wizard figure — and that in the light of Donald Trump’s election victory, Hollywood might respond by awarding Wicked with a Best Picture Oscar.

The New York Times weighed in with “What ‘Wicked’ Has to Say About Our Current Political Moment.” Vox’s version was “Why Wicked’s politics feel so bizarrely timely.” Teen Vogue went with “The Politics of Wicked: The Musical’s George W Bush Era Vibes Hit Hard in the Trump Years.” The Hill went the other way, finding in the film “a hidden, subversively pro-Trump message” (the film, per the op-ed writer, is “an allegory about how the establishment is fake, nefarious and ultimately a failure.”

This is all wrong. And a hint that when it comes to the intersections between politics and pop culture analysis, it’s going to be a long four years.

I think what I dislike most about this is how lazy it is. It’s Maureen Dowd-caliber political analysis, simply mixing and matching this week’s #1 movie or TV show with this week’s #1 political story, which is how we got half-assed Dowd columns comparing, like, Obama/Boehner budget negotiations with Game of Thrones.

Should Hollywood “make a statement” against Trump by giving Wicked a bunch of Oscars? It’s hard to imagine what good that would accomplish.

Yes, Wicked has a bad guy in it who shares some negative qualities with Donald Trump. Do you know who else does? Almost every movie that’s about good and evil, or that has a villain at all. Guy Pearce’s evil industrialist in The Brutalist, for one example, has a lot more common with Trump than Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard does. Although I’m sure we’ll get a bunch of versions of that column when the movie opens in more markets

But one person had an even more unhinged take on Wicked than every critic: A filmmaker, Adam McKay. The guy who made classic comedies like Anchorman, incisive social issue movies like The Big Short, and whatever the opposite is of that with Don’t Look Up, weighed in this week, calling Wicked “radical,” while also predicting it could ultimately be banned.

“On a pure storytelling level Wicked Part 1 is right up there as one of the most radical big studio Hollywood movies ever made. I know Part 2 swings back to the center a bit but Part 1 is nakedly about radicalization in the face of careerism, fascism, propaganda.”

“Bridge on the River Kwai, The Sound of Music, the Searchers & obviously Citizen Kane are others that come to mind… What’s really striking about Wicked Part 1 is that it’s coming out NOW when America has never been more right wing and propagandized.”

“I think you’ll be shocked. If America keeps going on the track it is I wouldn’t be surprised to see the movie banned in 3-5 years.”

I’m reasonably fond of Wicked, and I think it accomplished most of what it set out to do. But it’s really not all that radical. Sure, it subverts certain expectations, especially when it comes to making a historic villain into a heroine. But the political allegory isn’t exactly shocking. The Wizard is, in the end, a pretty conventional villain.

And no, I don’t think it’s going to be “banned.” If Trump II goes in the direction of banning movies, I kind of doubt Wicked would find itself in much danger. The Apprentice, maybe, but not Wicked.

Vivek Ramaswamy speaks up for Screech

Another story this week combined two of my favorite personal hobbyhorses: Inevitable clashes between the different, irreconcilable factions of the Trump coalition, and conservative misunderstanding of popular culture.

Every time I opened social media during my vacation this week, there was an ugly debate going on among two different factions of MAGA world: The Elon Musk/David Sacks Big Tech types, who want expanded visa programs to allow foreign workers to go to work for Silicon Valley, and the more nativist side of the MAGA coalition, who are at best skeptical of increased immigration, and are at worst viciously, disgustingly racist, willing to say the most vile and bigoted things about Indian people in particular.

Into this stepped Vivek Ramaswamy, the former presidential candidate-turned DOGE co-head, who is himself Indian-American. Vivek decided to weigh in on X, arguing that native-born Americans are losing out on tech and engineering jobs because… American popular culture favors jocks over nerds: