Issue #86: Power Grab 🧮
Wicked + Dune
Because we’re geniuses who deeply understand literary themes, this week we’re bringing you reviews of two Best Picture nominees that tackle the issue of white men’s misguided pursuit of power. First, Cate on Wicked and our social moral center. Then, Zosha on Dune: Part Two, fables, and who our stories serve.
Cate on Wicked
It may seem like too harsh a pronouncement, but we get the movies we deserve. A crass society produces crass films, and creeping social progress slowly makes itself known in the stories that we tell each other. It’s why filmic eras can seem both distinct and distinctive; we’re laundering our values through mass media. As those changes, so do the narratives that surface to the mainstream.
So it follows then that our films also tell us when we’re in danger, and Wicked is the most prominent in a recent string of similarly themed films that remind us that we understand right from wrong just fine.
Wicked’s life as a Broadway musical has made it one of the best known properties of all time. In the two decades since it premiered onstage, hundreds of thousands of patrons have sat through the fable of a marginalized young witch who is demonized for her opposition to institutional oppression. Like The Hunger Games before it, there’s no doubt about where our sympathies should lie. In this endlessly popular retelling of a classic American story, it’s those who are different who have the courage to do the right thing. Which is why it’s so interesting that this fantastically rendered version of the story only made it to our screens in 2024.
There’s no need to expound on the current political climate to make the film’s thematic similarities clear. In the Land of Oz, fascism is on the rise — the Wizard himself has orchestrated a social crisis that demonizes its animal residents (who speak and participate in Ozian society just as any human). They’ve become literal scapegoats who have regressed in their development, such that humans have decided they should be put in cages “for their own safety”; no one said it was subtle. When Elphaba – ostracized all her life for her green skin – discovers that the Wizard has no real power, she rejects his offer to use hers to continue his genocidal project.
Seeing the very same ideas play out in the news everyday has a sobering effect. But it’s impressive that in this rendition of the story, frequent movie musical director John M. Chu still manages to reveal a beautiful world that can be escaped into, even as it so resembles our own.
First, the criticism of the film’s lighting and colour-grading are valid, but so is the rebuttal. Wicked is not a sequel to The Wizard of Oz and has no obligation to mimic its visual language. That said, it’s a little washed out. What does sing however is the production design. Chu builds a massive, immersive world that audiences can easily step into. The magic of Oz is clear and legible, and so are its apparent politics. From the costuming to the performances to the musical numbers themselves, the film is a spectacular example of a movie’s potential to transport you to a new world.
Ariana Grande (who plays co-lead Glinda) and Cynthia Erivo (who plays Elphaba) have a dazzling chemistry onscreen that’s hard to miss. You could recommend the movie on the strength of their performances alone. Vocally they’re both at their best, riffing off each other and harmonizing so sweetly you can feel it settle into your belly. But it’s Cynthia Erivo who really runs away with the movie. She is the star, so that isn’t saying much. But her presence is something to behold.
The choice to cast Elphaba as a Black woman adds a layer to the story that brings it closer to our own world. Though Elphaba is traditionally cast as a white actress, here Cynthia brings her Blackness and her queerness into focus to drive home the metaphor. Those who are different are equally deserving of love and care. In an especially moving scene at a school dance, Elphaba’s defiant strength gives way to vulnerable grief when she’s finally given the permission to fall apart. Every ripple of feeling is evident in her face, and Cynthia makes it clear why she was so perfect for this role. She’s been where Elphaba is, and it’s generous of her to share that with her audience.
But the real attraction of the film is Cynthia’s voice. What a voice! It cannot be overstated that she is a generational vocal talent. Her rendition of The Colour Purple’s “I’m Here” will reliably bring you to tears, and her first number in the film — The Wizard and I — will likely do the same. And that’s to say nothing of the musical’s most popular song, Defying Gravity. Nothing short of a battle cry, Cynthia unleashes the full power of her instrument to give Elphaba her well-earned moment of revelation: it’s always worth it to battle the forces of evil and stand up for the vulnerable, even if they hate you for it. Not everyone will follow you down the path of righteousness. Even the people you love are capable of betraying their principles if it earns them a modicum of power. But soldier ahead anyway. Even if they call you the Wicked Witch of the West.
Wicked tells a very clear story of good and evil; of a wastrel of a man who tries to consolidate his power to oppress on the back of a marginalized woman, then punishes her when she refuses. In 2023’s Oppenheimer, a brilliant man must contend with the generational horrors he inflicts in service of immoral men, even as he tries to shirk responsibility. And finally, in The Hunger Games: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, an ambitious young man learns just how easy it is to whittle away at your soul to justify heinous deeds in the name of your own self-interest. The movies echo and follow each other in quick succession. It’s almost as if there’s something in the air.
It’s almost as if we understand right from wrong just fine.
Zosha on Dune: Part Two
I will always respect a story that refuses to slow down and explain itself. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies are such stories. Very quickly in Dune 2 we are thrust into new halls, with new rules. It’s a distinctive structure; meandering as it does through Paul’s rise through the Fremen power structure. In a sense I like the first film more, more because I appreciate palace intrigue and the way that story mounts, compared to this one. But it’s hard to deny the scope of what Dune 2 does, what it is. Dune 2 is an epic, and a fulfillment of grand ambition.
But Dune 2’s story is not one of a polished messiah. For as much as the soundtrack might chant or the Fremen might pray, the movie version of Paul resists simple categorization like that. He has his powers, his natural senses. But also he has to run really fast, muttering a quick “Fuck!” under his breath as he tries to catch a worm. He shares a goofy grin with Gurney when he first reveals his face. And when when he misjudges the distance between arms of an enemy harvester when running for cover, he yells out an “Aw shit!” This is not the messiah of the scriptures. It’s a dude barely making it to the next day.
To me, this humanity is what makes Dune 2 work so well. Too many stories these days are filled with protagonists who just know things — not because of any Bene Gessiret prophecy measured in centuries, but because writers can’t be fussed to think through what a character should know or modulate intelligence across the cast. Contrast that to Paul, a young man who doesn’t seem preternaturally gifted so much as he is lucky. He may know their ways as if they are his own, but Dune 2 never loses sight of him as just… a guy.
There’s a sense that Dune 2 could be weirder; we could hear the plotting fetus talk, or go bigger with the flare. But for as cerebral as Villeneuve can be as a filmmaker, his approach to Dune is, largely, the right kind of grounded for a story with such mythic implications. This is an epic of individual tragedies, fate determined by choices and circumstance. Chani and Paul aren’t a melancholy love story because his Destiny is to lead her people into a holy war. And unlike the books, she isn’t merely tragically committed to him and his vision by nature of the story. (For as many ideas as Dune is stuffed with as a franchise, its portrayal of Chani is weak, to say the least.) Rather it’s because of the way she giggles when she’s in the desert with him, or cheers his successes.
Villeneuve’s direction keeps the story looking stark, be it on the arid hills of Arrakis or the austere structures of Giedi Prime. But his intense, detached focus lets the humanity peek through. Chani and Paul’s time together is sun-kissed and full of lens flair. Feyd-Rautha’s — cold, like a snake. Every battle won by Paul has a different approach, with even shared DNA like the harvester attack and Paul’s reunion with Gurney serving totally different purposes, borne of opposing vantage points. Chani’s blue ribbon moves from her brow to her arm as her feelings for Paul shift. Gurney and Stilgard bother each other about whether the nukes are well hidden.
I love that Paul’s rise and the dueling narratives around him are set against that texture. Dune is a story about stories — the ways they shape who we are, what we believe, what is possible. To paint it as too mythical or beyond our understanding would be to lose the anchor for Frank Herbert’s most ambitious ideas. At the same time Timothée Chalamet’s performance shows how Paul opposes the story his mother pedals around him, Villeneuve frames him in myth. Paul might impress the fremen by walking as if he is one of them, but Villeneuve stalks him along the sand dune as if he is part of the desert. And though I think Dune 2’s structure doesn’t have the same fluid momentum as the first, it undoubtedly builds something more ambitious in its wake.
“Now that — that is power,” Gurney says of the Atreides warheads. He is, of course, correct; even in a world of such casual atomic use, these bombs have the potential to swing a whole planet — and with it, control of the universe — in their favor. And yet, Dune 2 is filled with so many versions of power, so many iterations of control and demand, so many actions that alter the course of history. Paul is a nexus point for them. But his story only works if he feels like a human.
Assorted Internet Detritus
A messy insider look at one couple making themselves an enemy of the state (Disneyland). Looking back on the emptiness of Childish Gambino’s “This is America.” How the State Department let Israel get away with Gaza horrors. What does accountability between friends who fuck up really look like? That gd Salesforce ad is using a delusion to sell AI.
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