From Oz to Outer Space -- Dorothy is still The One

According to the Wachowskis' WSJ interview, the heroine of Jupiter Ascending is supposed to be a new, improved version of Dorothy Gale:

“And then ‘The Wizard of Oz’ was on television,” continues Lana. “I remember having a conversation with Andy about how there’s something missing from my experience in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ Dorothy is pretty much the same at the end as she is at the beginning. Whereas Odysseus goes through such an epic shift in his identity.”

So Jupiter Jones (Ms. Kunis’ character) has a few things in common with Dorothy Gale from “Wizard of Oz.”

“That’s why she has the blue and white gingham on when [Jupiter and Mr. Tatum’s character, Caine] first meet,” Lana says. Together they go on a wild, otherworldly adventure. Jupiter Jones returns not only with a new appreciation of her life at home but with greater confidence and power.

The Wachowskis even set up Mr. Tatum’s part-canine role as a sort of Toto-like traveling companion.

Their claim that Jupiter Ascending is a sort of feminist, empowered remake of The Wizard of Oz is a very curious one, because one consistent complaint about this movie is that Mila Kunis' character is simply a passive vessel, the conitinuous recipient of infodumps, rescues, and grand destinies without having her choices affect the outcome of the plot -- or many choices at all, really. Whereas Dorothy sets everything in motion by being willing to risk everything and run away to save the life of her dog Toto from a malicious neighbor, and to use this occasion as the stepping stone to the new life she's always dreamed of, in the childish faith that a new location will magically solve all her problems -- the Myth of the Frontier, subverted.

And while she has no control over the tornado that transports her or the way that a tyrant is killed in the process, she quickly steps up to the challenges presented by this new place, and at every step of the way her choices forward the action of the story -- she rescues the Scarecrow and then the Tin Man from their own circumstantial traps, and finally the Cowardly Lion by making the latter face the consequences of his bullying bluster, in the course of her quest.

 

Jupiter dreams of riches and waits for rescue, while Dorothy dreamed of freedom,
sought her fortune, gave voice to the voiceless and stood up for the small --
just like that other young witch in white and blue, Tiffany Aching...

 

So it's only turnabout as in fair play, or karma manifesting exceedingly quickly, when her companions are later able to rescue her from the Wicked Witch's vengeance -- and even there, it's her quick-thinking action to save her friend's live that saves the day, even if it's only coincidence that she simultaneously slays her nemesis, a mirroring of her completely-accidental deed at the beginning that shows how Dorothy has leveled-up as a hero, while still keeping her soul as an essentially kind-hearted and non-violent protector of the helpless intact.

And the final choices are also hers -- to continue to demand justice from a "benevolent dictator" who turns out to be a living embodiment of the Peter Principle, promoted infinitely far beyond his ability, both unable and unwilling to dismount the tiger of government (although it isn't explicitly stated, there is a strong hint that the Wizard's facade of magical power is what kept the Bad Guys at bay before Dorothy's arrival, and equally implicit that Glinda was perfectly well aware it was only illusion all along!)

And her role as protector -- first of Toto, then the Scarecrow, and by extension of the entire magical realm -- is matched by her role as liberator -- again, first of her own pet, in a confused and half-deliberate way as the little dog escapes back to her and they run away together, then of Munchkinland in a completely accidental way, and then with increasing volition of others, strangers who ask for her help -- or don't, because they can't, either physically or otherwise prevented from appealing for rescue from their situations by disability, or the social conventions that insist that men Lions must be violent and aggressive, or world leaders all-knowing and all-competent, and certainly never asking for help from a ragtag bunch of kids and creatures!

So, too, the Wizard is freed from the trap of his throne, and literally takes flight to a new life, by the help of Dorothy and her dog-daemon, while she in turn rejects any temptation to take over herself, to become the new ruler and all the risks thereof -- Dorothy as Galadriel! -- which were implicit in that first question, "Are you a Good Witch, or a Bad Witch?" (And yet, even the Winged Monkeys and the army of the West weren't evil, just -- quite literally -- misguided!)

Her quest remains the same -- and yet, by the end, even that choice to return to her loved ones is no longer simple and involves desperate heartbreak, tearing her between her old world and the new one she did not choose to enter, but did choose to help, all the same. (And isn't this the choice we all have to make? None of us chooses to be born, or how we are made, but we can either choose to help others, or to control them, in so far as we are able.)

So Dorothy was, for her time, a shockingly empowered heroine -- the Hero of her own story, with her own Journey, just as she was in the original books by L. Frank Baum, although the 1939 film undercut their fantastical reality with the "all just a dream" coda, even as the Tin Man's truly Grimm-dark pre-transhumanist tragedy was left out. (Although changing him from a cyborg yearning for lost human emotion to a robot yearning like Star Trek's Data for feelings he doesn't think himself capable of, was also dramatically very effective.)

But sadly, she seems to be a shockingly-empowered heroine for our time as well, with passive MacGuffin girls offered as substitutes today, whether they are "strong female characters" who wield swords like Mia Wasikowska's Alice in the recent Tim Burton-and-Johnny-Depp remake -- but are still the Pawns of Destiny, mere Chosen Ones who have no say in their own choosing -- or screaming, flailing traditionalists like Mila Kunis doing her best Fay Wray impersonation as Jupiter Jones, a passive vessel for others to pour information into, carry about, and try to impregnate or shatter as though she were only a pretty but fragile pitcher.

It's classic Campbellian nonsense, in which the "heroine" is simply a living, breathing, trophy cup for the real hero of the story -- even if she's given a bit of sassy banter or a moment of badass against sufficiently low-level baddies, she will always be trumped by the Generic Young(ish) White Guy and cannot be allowed to either kick his ass (physically or intellectually) or do any rescuing of her own, before surrendering to his charms.

It is particularly sad that the Wachowskis of all directors have fallen to such reactionary gender roles, when one of the particularly charming aspects of their breakout hit was the way that Trinity held her own as a force to be reckoned with, as heroines heretofore had not been shown to do on the big screen in Hollywood movies -- and the role-reversed Sleeping Beauty moment at the end where she played The Price, to bookend her role-reversed White Rabbit personification at the beginning.

(Alas, those of us who hoped for even more and better subversion of old tropes --  were rewarded for our long wait by a Trinity repeatedly damseled and then fridged instead, while the fate of the world came down as always to two ordinary white guys angsting athletically at each other.)

And they certainly deserve full marks for ripping out the egregious, exploitative, Frank Miller-esque conventionially-bourgeois sexism in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, by giving Evey both a job beyond "whore" and a backstory that tied neatly into her on-screen choices, and replacing the antihero's slut-shaming monologue portraying Justice as a cheating girlfriend with a far superior speech mourning her as an absent goddess-in-exile -- for all its multiple issues including but not limited to a facile treatment of violence and political oppression (problems present in the source material), their adaptation had a stronger moral centre and lacked the sick-making equation of villainy with unconventional sexual activity between consenting adults as much as with sexual abuse in Moore's original story, along with a generally dim editorial view of female sexuality and a creepy male-gaze voyeurism in David Lloyd's art to go with the contempt for feminine males and BDSM -- all of which undercut Evey as the central character in the story. These changes made for a far less alienating experience that did not reinforce the unthinking patriarchal conventions of pop culture, and even the long-dead narrator of the flashback sequence was given a role of greater autonomy and influence, before the Orwellian takeover.

But Dorothy, in both 1900 novel and 1939 movie, changes the strange new place she finds herself in, for the better, by her own deliberate deeds, after having made the choice to change her own life back in our dimension, and before being swept away by the tornado -- a perfect metaphor for this reality in which our own decisions are often overturned or made meaningless by events in the wider world around us, be they natural disasters or acts of warfare or the small personal catastrophes of family tragedies from disease or car accident or some combination of external and internal forces such as the recent Depression, Prohibition, Dust Bowl and resultant job losses, all mirrored by similar events elsewhere in the world, exacerbated in Europe by the greater impact of WWI.

She doesn't get forced into a new setting she had no desire to see -- she specifically gets, in the movie, her wish-come-true -- to see the "Other Side of the Rainbow" she had longed for in the famous song -- and learns by experience that merely travelling to a glamourous new setting doesn't of itself magically fix your life, that the same old problems of lack of autonomy and hostility and an uncaring society too busy dealing with all their own worries and issues to take time for yours will still afflict you, until you choose to put yourself forward and make yourself heard! And so she does, and in saving herself, saves the Land of Oz as well.

It seems, on the surface, silly to call Dorothy Gale as embodied by Judy Garland a feminist icon, particularly given Garland's own unhappy fate in reality -- but the question of how many Hero's Journey stories with a heroine at their centre there were in pop culture in 1939 is sadly not irrelevant in 2015, when Jupiter Jones' sole power is Extreme Good Luck, not Wisdom ("a Brain") or Empathy ("a Heart") or Courage ("the Nerve") -- and that includes the luck to be born Disney-Princess-pretty.

But the chronic "PPP" or "passive protagonist problem" is only exacerbated in stories about princesses. The destined "Chosen One" narrative takes away autonomy, sacrifices the specialness of people doing their own choosing, whether boy or girl, man or woman. The only way to deal with it is to subvert it, by putting a twist in it so that the protagonist must earn that unreasonable elevation over everyone else -- as Dorothy must grow into the Ruby Slippers she won by coincidence and chance, by walking every step of the Spiral Path she starts out so uncertainly, and meeting every challenge head-on no matter how frightened, reluctant, or unworthy she feels.

She embodies "Imposter Syndrome" perfectly in the beginning, but by the end of the story a spiteful neighbor holds no terror for her, because she's faced much worse on the other side -- and according to the older spiritual traditions of shamanism, the fact that it takes place in a dream-world takes nothing from its "reality" as an adventure, for such other planes can only be accessed by dreaming. Whether one believes such things literally or not, it is certainly legitimate to interpret the story of The Wizard of Oz in such light, and overcome the "only a dream" disappointment factor that way.

But Jupiter Jones only wants a better life, without being willing to take any risks or chances to make it happen -- she doesn't run away, she is captured, then rescued, recaptured, re-rescued, on and on and on, with all her own choices being bad ones that the virile wolf-man must save her from yet again.

Contrast that with the way that Dorothy saves Toto, over and over, protecting him from a harsh outside world that doesn't treat small creatures well, no matter how brave they may be -- there's no comparison! Stonewalled by uncaring impersonal rules at first, she talks her way in, awakening empathy in the gatekeeper with her sad story like a latter-day Orpheus -- though in this tale she is also Euridice rescuing herself, and her backwards-looking at the end doesn't trap her in the Underworld. No such Gordian solution is employed by Jupiter in the face of Kafkaesque bureacracy, just tame obedience to the rules -- a fitting state of compliance for a passive protagonist, pushed about by greater forces, but not a patch on Dorothy Gale!

It's signficant that the principle imagery that the directors and studio have chosen to represent their film centres, not Kunis, but Channing Tatum -- a clear sign that whatever the title and the ostensible plot, this is a story about male heroism, and that of the most conventional sort.

For Tatum's Cane Wise isn't a Fragile Trickster like Toto -- who, despite being an actual dog in the original story, advances the plot by his own intelligence and actions, imprudent as they may sometimes prove when he attempts to defend his home and mistress against an aggressive neighbor.

He sneakily escapes being taken to the pound all by himself making his own way back to Dorothy, leads her into danger after danger by his curiosity and courage, and in the end solves the mystery and saves the day by having no more reverence for political power or supernatural authority than a cat looking at a king -- or an archbishop!

 "Though (s)he be but little, (s)he is fierce" and it isn't really a stretch to see "your little dog too" not simply as Dorothy's familiar, showing her a true witch if as yet unaware of her nature -- I don't know if Baum was familiar himself enough with classical mythology to know that black dogs, not cats, were the animals originally associated with witchcraft as the creatures most sacred to Hekate, but if not it was a singular coincidence -- but, retroactively, as her "daemon," the spirit-animals given physical in Phillip Pullman's Golden Compass series.

It is entirely possible that consciously or not, Pullman was himself influenced by The Wizard of Oz, since it's a minor plot point in those books that one's daemon is usually of the opposite sex, which in turn indicates one's orientation, as well as reflecting humans' inner selves. So in this Jungian-influenced interpretation, Toto as a small-but-courageous male dog who consistently rushes ahead and boldly confronts hazards known and unknown would be the literal embodiment of Dorothy's anima, the part of her that yearns for adventure and wants to resist unjust authority, but which her conscious self, seeing herself as "small and meek," doesn't dare to take.

When we first meet her, that is.

By the end of the story, she boldly confronts the Wizard, no longer restrains Toto -- from whom she has been separated, in a significant twist, and in this interpretation of Toto as familiar and spirit animal (and a familiar was always traditionally understood as carrying in some mystical sense the witch or wizard's consciousness far afield) the imagery is not so much Dorothy damselled in the power of the wicked queen, waiting for the menfolk to rescue her, but Dorothy divided against herself, her conscious self, conditioned by society to be a Good Girl and obey authority, helpless against the larger-than-life embodiment of said social authority in her "real" life -- until her subconscious and instinctive side, now truly empowered by the Virtues of Intellect, Empathy, and Courage that she has unlocked, one by one, in her Quest, comes to release her from the shackles of convention and challenge her to her greatest deed yet -- fighting to defend herself at last, but not simply herself!

Remember, in the 1939 movie, all of this adventure is taking place inside her mind! So this is not an unreasonable interpretation, retroactively imposed on the film, to see it as part of the then-newly-resurgent tradition of allegorical, symbolist Mystery and Miracle plays, most notably Everyman, which gave its name to the famous early 20th-century "library" of reprinted affordable international classics, and evoked by T.S. Eliot in 1935's Murder in the Cathedral.

(Remember that The Wizard of Oz, as an instant intergenerational literary hit -- long before Harry Potter! -- went through decades of successful presentations on stage across America, before ever being adapted for the screen, and as such could not help but be influenced by contemporary theatrical movements -- and note that contemporary performances of Everyman were genderswapped, casting a woman in the role of Universal Human struggling with the effects of a lifetime of apathy and self-indulgence now called upon to face the universal human condition of Mortality. The time was ripe for a Heroine's Journey, in other words, even if it would be many years before universal suffrage was achieved and true equality still a distant dream.)

So when Toto is left behind with the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion after Dorothy is carried off to the Witch's castle, it is the little dog who galvanizes them into action as they dither, paralyzed by the greater number of enemies in front of them -- it is his brash attempt to rush into battle, unable to be shushed by the other, more rational personas, that attracts the attention of hostile forces and compells them to rise in turn to the occasion.

And, of course, the secret of their character arcs is that they, too, like Dorothy, possessed their longed-for qualities all along, but couldn't recognize them until others also saw them for who they are -- a sort of fractal, even kaleidescopic mirroring of the main storyline.

Which makes perfect sense, in light of their roles as embodiments of her own good qualities, here envisioned as the strong, good, yet flawed men in her own extended family, who are not as competent as her Aunt, though clever enough to invent useful things, nor brave enough to defend her from Authority, though courageous enough to defend her from purely physical hazards. (Remember, too, that we first meet Dorothy doing something daring and stupid of the sort that is usually the province of little boys in fiction -- trying a circus act around big fierce animals that she doesn't respect enough for her own safety!) Thus they must first be freed by her and instructed by her as the adventuring party's leader, before they can assist her -- logically enough.

But Jupiter Jones is only allowed to be pushed about by the men in her world -- and there is something unspeakably icky in the choice of circumstances that replaces the whirlwind which sweeps her from her Midwestern daily life, both in the fact that she is reduced to her body as her greatest value (and no, you cannot just walk in and sell your eggs like that, as if you were hocking a guitar!) not simply in her own mind (76 years after Dorothy ran away to seek her fortune!) or her brutish cousin's, but by the narrative itself, where it is her genes that make her a potential challenger to the established authorities, not the fact that her home was accidentally weaponized in such a way that the credit seemed to be legitimately hers (and in the context of fairy-tales, a Baba Yaga being crushed by a flying house steered by the questing Orphan Girl makes perfect sense) and thus her real value consists in her being married off for her inheritance, an interstellar Sansa Stark with better luck in paladins.

Indeed, I wonder if Baum himself wasn't influenced by the Russian fairy tale "Vasilisa the Beautiful and Baba Yaga," in which the Cinderella-like heroine is sent off on an impossible quest by her wicked Stepmother -- ordered to bring back fire from the infamous Witch's own hearth -- receives help from a Good Witch (for in this story the Crone though dangerous and frightening is not the Bad Guy) and after passing the tests of her apprenticeship, returns home with the exact thing she was sent to bring back -- which, like Medusa's head, destroys the tyrants who sent her to an intended doom.

And that mythological parallel isn't a stretch, because Baba Yaga sends her home with coals in a skull -- there had already been remixing of stories across international and cultural boundaries, by the time the "traditional" tales were collected and published in the 19th century by the likes of Andrew Lang and Ivan Bilibin and Joseph Jacobs.

The honest, innocent girl oppressed by bullies with greater social stature, her older male relative unable or unwilling to protect her from them, protected only by the memories of her dead mother, sent by the local legal authority to retrieve something from a powerful sorceress, a helpful witch, the element of fire and the symbolism of the broom-turned-torch, and especially the inadvertent slaying of her oppressor by a karmic blow -- all of these fit so well when the two stories are superimposed that I would be more surprised if it wasn't the case that Baum was familiar with the Russian tale, and likewise at least some of the screenwriters for the movie.

So no, I don't accept Jupiter Jones as a new-and-improved Dorothy Gale, because a Hero needs to do things, not be a parcel shuttled from one location to another by forces outside her control, a Hero has to walk her own path, make her own friends by saving her own allies, choose things because she has goals of her own -- the Dorothy who mindfully and with sadness refuses to take the Wizard's throne at the end but to return to her kindly-if-imperfect adoptive family is not the same Dorothy who, having tasted a wider, stranger world for the first time, only fearfully longs to scuttle back to safety in the beginning.

And, just as critically, not the naive and reckless youth who rushed off without any thought or foresight into the outside world the same way she tried to tightrope-walk the hog pen fence. She goes back only after having gained knowledge of many kinds in the Otherworld, and so is far better prepared to face the future than she was before her Ordeal -- the essence of the Hero that Campbell insisted on defining as quintessentially male!

Jupiter, on the other hand, is exactly the Campbellian "heroine," the trophy that is the Hero's reward and whose womb symbolizes the "cup of wisdom" -- a far more secondary character than even the Princess of Mars whose erasure from the title of her own story was the first harbinger of a film doomed by its transformation from a story about a man who must save himself and the strange new world he finds himself in by his wits and empathy as much as his physical abilities and courage, adapted by a clueless director convinced that no "geek girls" exist and no male science fiction fans are interested in sexy alien warrior princesses by legendary genre authors, but that he could trick audiences into paying big money to uncover the "mystery" behind the generic John Carter.

(Spoiler: he couldn't. That's another entry in the series of mismanaged "epic" adaptations to consider in light of Exodus: Gods & Kings, Lone Ranger, The Spirit and all the rest.)

It's interesting to think that a "boy's own adventure" novel written more than a century ago, which does very much follow the Campbellian pattern of a male Hero going into a dangerous Otherworld, facing various dangers and trials to win the right of leadership and the hand of the Princess who symbolizes Knowledge, nevertheless had a more proactive heroine than Andrew Stanton was willing to acknowledge.

Heroines, rather, since there are really two Martian princesses in Edgar Rice Burroughs' book -- one red, John Carter's love interest Dejah Thoris -- the environmental scientist who boasts of her descent from the builder of the first aqueduct! -- and one green, the despised "throwback" Sola -- solitary, or solace? both, rather -- a teenager in Martian terms, who rebels against her harsh Spartan upbringing to help strangers and even enemies in need. And although, because the story is told first-person, it cannot technically pass the Bechdel test, it nonetheless hinges upon friendship between women, as well as enmity between women, occasioned by but not dependent on their shared acquaintance with the men of this interplanetary bromance.

For all the swashbuckling and high adventure of A Princess of Mars, it's the protagonist's empathy and kindness towards others that enables him to save the world -- but he is merely the catalyst, and his efforts would all come to nothing, were it not for the sisterhood expressed in these lines!

"Yes," cried Dejah Thoris, "come with us, Sola, you will be better off among the red men of Helium than you are here, and I can promise you not only a home with us, but the love and affection your nature craves and which must always be denied you by the customs of your own race. Come with us, Sola; we might go without you, but your fate would be terrible if they thought you had connived to aid us. I know that even that fear would not tempt you to interfere in our escape, but we want you with us, we want you to come to a land of sunshine and happiness, amongst a people who know the meaning of love, of sympathy, and of gratitude. Say that you will, Sola; tell me that you will."

No women in this tale fight each other over jealousy for a man -- even though John Carter is afraid it will happen, at first! -- there's no love triangle, only interlocking triangles of friendship, kinship and alliegance. The women who do so, are motivated by opposed worldviews and contrasting ideologies of what a superior species looks like, and it's a daughter's love for her lost mother that spurs her to help overthrow her callous social order.

But this wasn't important to a director who thinks that no women love science fiction and no men care about women, regardless of the fact that A Princess of Mars was a classic, homaged in 2010's YA novel A Wizard of Mars by no less than Diane Duane -- who has also written television scripts asl well as respected tie-in novels for Star Trek and Spider-man.

And so Dejah Thoris' original storyline, in which she meets John Carter after her scientific mission is shot down by one of several rival nations, grows to respect, then love him only after much time spent together in which they fumble up against their respective cultural barriers repeatedly, and her own free choice to marry the heir of another enemy city-state against her father's will is made from political expedience and an earnest desire to spare her beloved people further horrors of war -- and this only because she believes her True Love to be dead, and worst of all was never quite sure that he was as serious about her as she was about him, because he never proposed to her properly,  as she had been raised to think of such things -- is thrown out for the tired old "runaway princess trying to escape an arranged marriage forced on her by her father, gets into trouble and has to be rescued."

Edgar Rice Burroughs was able to imagine a royal heir working as a civil servant in a highly technical field, falling afoul of enemy military and ending up a POW in the line of this civilian duty, then going against king and country to make a self-sacrificial choice in order to bring about peace in the strength of individual conscience, who just happens to be a woman, and thus a Princess -- in 1917!

Which brings us back around to the lamentable fact that it's now almost a hundred years later, a hundred and fifteen years after we met the Witches of Oz, and our media trendsetters cannot imagine as much.

It is a lovely bit of poetic justice that Stanton's recasting of A Princess of Mars into the modern macho Campbellian paradigm -- under the supposed reason that this was the only way to make it profitable or attractive to modern audiences! -- failed so heartily at either.

(It probably didn't help that the beloved original was strongly homosocial, and with unmistakeably homoerotic overtones, in its depiction of the growing affection between John Carter and the valiant men of Mars he comes to see as friends, no matter what colour nor how many limbs they have -- while they're all running around "stark bollock naked" except for their regionally-distinctive jewelry and sword belts. I truly think it's unfilmable, so long as we remain as prudish a society as the Victorians he left behind on Terra.)

But while John Carter's quest to first get his two friends out of immediate danger and then marry his beloved once they've found safety with her people is the primary story in the book that spurs all the swashbuckling action, the secondary plot -- which is the major personal conflict, because the meet-cute of the offended princess and the confused stranger is never portrayed as having any real doubt of its resolution -- is whether or not the great chieftain's lost daughter will ever be able to recover her birthright, and avenge her mother, and thus change the customs of their society which make her the equivalent of a bastard, because she knows who her father was.

That's the suspenseful thread, the question of will Sola's story end in tragedy, or triumph; will Tars Tarkas' inner decency win out over the Spartan rigors of his culture, which elected to stamp out all gentler emotions as weakness in the face of looming environmental collapse, to better aid their survival -- or will he continue to be the loyal, dutiful officer of the corrupt king who murdered his secret wife, never learning their child survived?

Far from being a stock hero, John Carter -- by preaching a doctrine of kindness and compassion to people and domesticated animals alike as both compatible with a warrior ethos and the key to species survival, combined with a recognition that all sentient races must work together in the face of inexorable environmental change, instead of fighting over the scraps as their world dies around them -- is the radical outsider who threatens to disrupt Martian society completely. It's a weirdly subversive take on the "boy's own adventure" genre, and if it isn't progressive by the highest ideals of the early 21st century, it's amazingly so for the early 20th -- and a far sight better than most of what genre entertainment is put out by Hollywood today.

A significant part of John Carter's adventures consist of walking around the countryside, meeting people, and talking to them before leaving peacefully to continue on his journey with their generous assistance. These people just happen to be the nation at war with his beloved's homeland -- so what? They're advanced aliens who live for centuries, who look different to him -- so what? And so, when the grand battles come, when characters are at risk, and even when "Redshirts" are killed, the emotional heft of these situations is earned. John Carter grows, learns, and changes, and so is able to help change the new world of his rebirth for the better.

But most pertinent is the fact that both princesses in the 1917 novel -- the acknowledged and the hidden -- had more agency, more intelligence, and more personality than the nominal heroine of this planetary romance from 2015.

And it is also relevant that in both the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie and the 1900 novel it's based on, Dorothy's choice is not between being a "good girl" or a woman of power, but what sort of witch she chooses to be -- how she will wield that power, if she is not to be merely a pawn.

All too often in modern media, the alternatives are framed as women wielding power is automatically bad, while men wielding power may be good or bad -- and the more traditionally "manly" they are, the better, with Jupiter Ascending being no different, the villainous Abrasax princes depicted as fey, glamorous and effete in a homophobia reviewers tiptoe around with words like "campy" and "outrageous" -- in stark contrast to the unadorned honest muscularity of the warrior heroes who protect Jupiter. Prettiness is (perhaps) appropriate for women, never for men -- and I acknowledge how strange this apparent embrace of strict traditional gender roles is given the directors' own experiences, but people are full of internalized contradictions.

So there's something else terribly subversive in the original Oz stories having a traditional ugly and wicked Witch straight from the gloomy Grimm forests of fairy tale, confronted by a beautiful and sparkly magical woman who is not a Fairy Godmother as one would expect but also a Witch -- declaring, again, that the crucial difference between them is not what they are, but what they do with their abilities.

(Jupiter Ascending notably reverses this, with Kunis' Dorothy-substitute being told that it's her innate, unchosen Chosen One status that matters, not her actions.)

Thus, while on the surface it seems very conventional to show the wicked Witch as green and ugly, the Good one as pink and pretty, it is a little more complex than that, and highly symbolic -- cruelty, greed and oppression as hideous and not at all glamourous, while gentleness, kindness, and refusal to control others as shiningly beautiful and, paradoxically, stronger. It was a radical statement in 1939, and it remains such today.

Almost as radical, and equally sad to say so, as depicting the contest between good and evil inclinations with two older women, and a younger woman the soul pulled between them.

As an externalizing of the personal journey of an individual of good will from immaturity to awakened adulthood, from uninformed naivete and impulsiveness to self-aware competence and autonomy, Glinda's frustrating refusal to solve Dorothy's problems for her "by magic" but insisting that she learn to stand up for herself and others first (while keeping her from getting into serious trouble behind the scenes) is contrasted with the Witch of the West's demands that Dorothy simply give up her new-found powers and submit to her authority -- which she does, or tries to, but it is not so easy to give up one's will, fortunately!

Really quite grim imagery for a kids' movie -- but not so grim as the real 1930's

And as a social fable, The Wizard of Oz expresses the dream that the pomp, circumstance and bombast of oppressive regimes is both ugly and empty, a brittle shell that crumbles when resisted by concerted efforts of people all very different as individuals but united in good will, which was a message timely but too late in 1939 -- and yet, never too late, always timely, and blending seamlessly into the theme of Dorothy's personal growth.

Because there are always people in positions of power trying to convince the younger, the "small and meek" to give up control of their life's journey to tyrants, and it's always been the easy path -- you can be a Munchkin, living in relative prosperity so long as you keep your head down, or you can be a soldier guarding the castle, or even an elite Winged Monkey, and no one will dare bother you -- and no one will come to your rescue from on high, except yourself.

For Hekate's other chief symbol after her black dog, is the blazing torch -- if it's a coincidence and not a deliberate classical mythical reference that the heroine of Wizard of Oz must take the extinguished torch of her nemesis to prove her victory, it's an astonishing one -- and the climate in 1939 was not hospitable to the idea of feminine power or individual autonomy combined with an empathic care for others, whether they were part of your own group or strangers.

A worldview celebrating a particular definition of strength as masculine, violent, miliatristic and intolerant of difference and physical weakness or disability was then ascendant, and the choice to release a silly, light-hearted, family movie based on a childrens' book, showing a young girl triumphing over worldly power with the help of a motley band of outcasts even more damaged and vulnerable than she, was a statement that struck a chord deeper than we have ever been able to explain, then or since.

Was there a deliberate intention to make the familiar heroine -- beloved for almost forty years already -- into an anti-Imperialist symbol, a sort of rebel young Liberty, putting out the torch whose promises the elder generation had failed to uphold in a time of increased misery and repression? Hard to say, if the apparent challenge to an America then flirting hard with fascism is only sharp in the mirror of hindsight.

But the symbolism is there, layer upon layer added by the generations of our encounter with it, even as the 1939 film added the resonance of WWI and Flanders Field to Baum's original image of the Poppies that had signified in 1900 only the same sort of dangerously-benign-seeming distractions as Odysseus encountered in the land of the Lotos-Eaters -- the Odyssey being the other influence the Wachowskis cite, as a superior protagonist to Dorothy.

 

But Odysseus though he does not change much if at all in his wanderings, returned home to do battle and take up his old role as king of Ithaca, and Jupiter Jones -- though framed and lit to look like Katniss awaiting her turn in the arena -- does not return from her journey either the warrior or the rightful sovereign taking battle to the usurping foe.

It seems a smirking joke, to proclaim her superior to Dorothy and equal to Odysseus, when she spends so much of her time falling, screaming, and being rescued like a luckier Gwen Stacy by a high-tech Peter Parker -- or Perseus, with rocket boots in place of winged sandals, and the allusion is made clearly deliberate by the shot of a spaceship with Cellini's famous statue as its figurehead.

 

But the old fairy tale made the poor stepdaughter into a Perseus in her own right, and the new one carried on that theme with its own twists -- but there is a reason that the promotional materials showcase Channing Tatum, and not Mila Kunis, and that is because they only reflect the truth. The old Dorothy won her magic shoes in battle, first by accident and then earning them in actuality -- the new, 21st century Dorothy gets them as a present for surviving a series of ex machina rescues and keeping her mouth shut, instead of bringing back her new insights to tell her people, as the old one did.

 

The old story might have been named The Wizard of Oz -- but it was about Dorothy the heroine's quest to discover him in more than once sense, and though this new fantasy is titled Jupiter Ascending, it's just as misleading and twice as reactionary in its gender politics. But I suppose it wouldn't have made a difference if it was called Caine Wise Flies To Her Rescue, in the end.

Not "Someday My Prince Will Come"