Wicked: For Good

The Goodness Machine: On the Performative Politics of Wicked: For Good

There is a moment, late in Wicked: For Good, when Glinda the Good descends in her bubble for what feels like the hundredth time, smiling that calibrated smile, and you realize the film has been quietly making an argument it cannot quite bring itself to name. Goodness, here, is not a quality. It is a job. It is a series of gestures—wave, sparkle, reassure—that must be performed again and again to remain legible as goodness at all. Slip the routine, and the whole edifice trembles.

This is the secret subject of Jon M. Chu's bloated, glittering second act: identity as labor. Glinda is not good because she is good; she is good because Oz requires someone to occupy that position, and she has been trained, costumed, and lit to fill it. Every pink gown, every breathy vowel, every wave of the wand is a citation of an earlier wave, an earlier vowel, drawn from a script written long before her. The film keeps showing us the apparatus—Madame Morrible coaching her speeches, the press corps arranging her appearances, the Wizard tutoring her in the art of plausible benevolence—and then asks us to believe that beneath all this stage-managing there sits a real Glinda who is simply learning who she is. But the apparatus is the self. There is nothing under the dress except the discipline of wearing the dress.

Elphaba, the film's nominal villain-hero, is the necessary shadow this regime casts. A society organized around the relentless performance of Goodness needs a Wicked to define itself against; if she did not exist, Oz would have to invent her, and indeed Oz does invent her, with newspapers and posters and chants. Her green skin—a body marked from birth as outside the order of acceptable appearance—does the symbolic work that all such markings do: it concentrates collective anxiety into a single recognizable figure who can be hunted, blamed, and, crucially, enjoyed in her hunting. The pleasure Oz takes in fearing her is the pleasure of cohering as Oz. She is the constitutive outside, the abjected body whose exclusion produces the inside as inside.

What's striking about For Good is how often it gestures toward this insight without quite trusting itself to commit. The Animals subplot, which haunted the first film, here recedes into a kind of moral wallpaper—mentioned, gestured at, occasionally weeping in cages—but the film rarely lets us linger long enough to ask the question its own logic demands: whose lives, in Oz, are grievable? When Doctor Dillamond appears, broken and silenced, the camera treats him as a station of Elphaba's cross rather than as a life with its own weight. He exists to be witnessed by her, to deepen her arc, to motivate her sacrifice. The film mourns Elphaba's pain at the Animals' suffering more thoroughly than it mourns the Animals themselves. This is the architecture of selective recognition that organizes most political imaginaries, and the musical reproduces it with uncomfortable fidelity even as it pretends to critique it.

Then there is Fiyero, whose transformation into the Scarecrow ought to be the film's most radical gesture—a body unmade, refigured, removed from the matrix of heterosexual romantic legibility—and which the film instead treats as a tragic inconvenience to be sentimentalized away. The straw body could have been a queer body, a precarious body, a body that refuses the closure of the original couple-form. Instead it becomes another costume, another performance of devotion, his interiority preserved intact beneath the burlap as though selfhood were a soul a wizard could decant. The film cannot quite think the body as anything other than a vessel for a pre-given identity, which is why its politics keep stalling at the level of metaphor.

And yet. The closing duet, "For Good," does something more honest than the rest of the film deserves. The two women sing about being changed by one another, and the song's grammar is interesting: not I love you, not I will remember you, but because I knew you, I have been changed. This is a confession that the self is constituted by its relations, that we are made and unmade by who we are permitted to encounter. It is also, beneath its tearful surface, a confession of loss that cannot be openly grieved. Glinda must go on being Good, which means she must go on publicly affirming that Elphaba was Wicked and is dead. The friendship becomes a melancholic secret, a love folded inside the very lie that erases it. She will live the rest of her career as Oz's mascot of benevolence by daily disavowing the person who made her capable of benevolence in the first place. That is not a happy ending. That is the structure of every ideologically successful subject: cheerful on the surface, hollowed out by an unmournable attachment underneath.

The film is unable, finally, to ask whether Glinda should refuse the bubble. It treats her remaining in Oz as a form of inside-the-system resistance—she'll do good from within, she promises—but the film's own evidence suggests this is exactly what the system needs from her. The Wizard's regime survives precisely because it has produced a Glinda who will sell its image while privately disagreeing with its policies. Her dissent is metabolized into her brand. The faked death of Elphaba becomes a kind of founding myth they can both live with: he who needed a villain gets one, she who needed an exit gets one, and the public, taught to grieve the right body and celebrate the right body, never has to ask what was actually done to the Animals, to the green-skinned girl, to anyone whose face did not fit the frame.

What Wicked: For Good finally illustrates—against itself, in the gaps between its set pieces—is that the categories of good and wicked do not describe people. They distribute people. They assign positions in an economy of recognition, and the costumes follow. To be made Good is to be made useful to a regime that needs a smiling face. To be made Wicked is to be made disposable so that the regime's violences can be projected outward and discharged. The tragedy the film cannot quite name is that its heroine, in choosing to remain Good, is choosing to remain the instrument of the machine that killed her friend—or rather, the machine for which her friend had to be made to seem killed. The bubble is not a vehicle. It is a cell with very good lighting.