Opinion Over the rainbow

Raimi’s Oz,like its MGM forebear,begins in the drab black-and-white reality of the Midwestern flatlands. In “Kansas,1905,” James Franco is introduced as a huckster carnival magician and serial seducer of innocent assistants,Oscar “Oz” Diggs. On the run from the consequences of his own feckless flirtations,Oscar is slurped up by a freak tornado,a portal transporting him to the hallucinatorily-colourful wonderland of Oz — a reprisal of Wizard’s famous transition to Technicolor,to which Raimi adds the effect of simultaneously expanding the Academy Ratio square to Widescreen dimensions. The natives accept Oscar as “Oz”,the prophesied saviour who will rescue them from the tyranny of wicked witches. As reluctant hero Oscar finally accepts his destiny,using flim-flam stagecraft to create the appearance of filling in his outsized legend,Raimi effectively dramatises the old American proverb “Fake it ’til you make it.” Franco’s Oz will grow up to be Frank Morgan’s Wizard,the “man behind the curtain” in the 1939 film.

Raimi’s film is the latest in a long string of Oz adaptations. As early as 1902,The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was being adapted to the stage; more recently,Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz has become a Broadway stalwart. In 1914,Baum even founded his own short-lived Oz Film Manufacturing Company. It should be noted that the franchise has by no means proven foolproof. 1977’s all-African-American Motown musical mega-production The Wiz was a notorious flop,while Oz the Great and Powerful is only the latest,and certainly the most financially successful,chapter in Walt Disney’s long association with Baum’s world. After being beat out by MGM bidding for the rights of the Oz books in the 1930s,Disney finally managed to produce Walter Murch’s Return to Oz in 1985 — a dark,anxious film which has only retrospectively found its audience.

Raimi’s Oz has but one song,a chorus started up by the Munchkins before being cut dead in its tracks,a teasing reference to the wholly musical Wizard of Oz. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is certainly the 1939 film’s most famous number — and very nearly cut by MGM execs after a preview screening. And though “Rainbow” doesn’t have its origins in Baum,it encapsulates the yearning for something beyond the seen and known world,the yearning which the Oz books evidently satisfied.

Escapism alone does not,however,sufficiently explain the resonance of Oz. It must be remembered that Baum was writing in the middle of a period of great migration,during which rural Americans were following their own Yellow Brick Roads into glittering new cities,drawn by the prospect of upward mobility,glamorous transformation — or,if nothing else,a job. Ambition responded to the lure of the Emerald City,the Hotel del Coronado,the Cities of Gold.

If Oz still resonates,it’s for its simultaneous indulgence in and debunking of urbanisation’s promise of metamorphosis,Baum’s tales addressing both sides of polarities that continue to fascinate us: city and country,myth and truth,fame and anonymity,fantastic and prosaic,striving and humble,wicked and the good. By travelling to faraway Oz,Oscar Diggs discovers the innate decency he’d been trying to escape,as Garland’s Dorothy discovers the charm of the Kansas she’d longed to leave. In these quests ending at their beginning,the moral is not far from that of “Simple Gifts,” a Shaker hymn that hearkens to the sylvan pre-Civil War America: “ ’Tis the gift to be simple,’tis the gift to be free/ ’Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be.” Just another way of saying: “There’s no place like home.”

Nick Pinkerton is a New York-based writer express@expressindia.com