The Wizard of Oz (BFI Film Classics)
by Salman Rushdie
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Book Summary Information
Author: Salman RushdieEditor: Melvyn Bragg
Editor: Richard Maltby
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1992-05-27
ISBN: 0851703003
Number of pages: 96
Publisher: British Film Institute
Book Reviews of The Wizard of Oz (BFI Film Classics)
Book Review: Rushdie the essayist and Rushdie the storyteller in one volume...
Summary: 4 Stars
Watching a film armed with a "remote control zapper" can yield insights unknown to the non-stop viewer. After all, freeze frames, with their enviable power to stop time, allow for far more than infinitesimal nanoseconds of reflection. Using the "pause" trigger in this way arguably transforms it into an educational tool.
Salman Rushdie, who usually frolics in literature's realm, applies this method to one of America's most beloved and taken for granted films, 1939's "The Wizard of Oz." Many in the US have let this film sink into their collective cultural unconscious without questioning its presuppositions, implications and logic. Rushdie, wielding his wireless time control device, cuts to the essence. Insights spew from the paragraphs. Almost immediately, he equates the film's story, mood, and themes to the "Bollywood" movies he grew up on in India. One exception to this comparison remains the film's secular sub themes. He summarizes, "nothing is deemed more important than the loves, cares, and needs of human beings." It also had enduring literary influence on his very first and later works.
But he doesn't like the "cloying" ending and asks the almost heretical question: who would want to return to THAT Kansas? Those of us who absorbed the movie as children of course wanted, empathetically, to see Dorothy return to the safety of her parents and home. But, Rushdie argues, Dorothy's gray scale Kansas is no paradise: her parents seem impotent in the face of Miss Gulch's (aka "Wicked Witch of the West") threats against Toto (who annoys Rushdie; and in yet another probable heresy to fans, he writes, "Toto: that little yapping hairpiece of a creature, that meddlesome rug!"). So why would she want to return? Rushdie would have preferred a Dorothy who outgrows Kansas and remains in fully actualized Technicolor splendor. In the film she grows up and... goes back. Obviously, Hollywood did not want to encourage runaway fantasies. And the "there's no place like home" mantra delivers the much disseminated Great Depression message that "everything's okay. What you have is just fine." Still, he has a point about the ending's "mixed message." Longtime "Oz" fans may not appreciate this rumination, but Rushdie has never been one to please for the sake of pleasing (as his work and life more than manifest).
Rushdie includes other revealing tidbits. For one, simple geometric shapes symbolize home and safety, while the shapeless and twisted stands for evil. Not only that, the movie presents, like the "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" of today and the stage melodramas of yesterday, a strict visual and moral dichotomy of good and evil. The Good Witch Glinda's famous quote, "only bad witches are ugly," crystallizes this idea as only sound bites can. A tragedy was also averted: the producers almost removed "Over the Rainbow." Rushdie candidly calls this, "proof positive that Hollywood makes its masterpieces by accident, because it simply does not know what it is doing." In a sad revelation, the cast didn't seem to have any fun during the filming. Margaret Hamilton was injured, as was her double, and felt ostracized. Philandering Munchkins took Hollywood by storm. The film also resembles a postmodern "authorless text" by virtue of its voluminous screenwriters and recuttings. In spite of this, Rushdie heaps praise on the virtues of the film. He even calls it "art." Rushdie's deconstruction somehow makes the film more accessible and poignant. It emerges from this short essay, which also appears in Rushdie's2002 non-fiction collection "Step Across this Line" (though without pictures), as a strong and in no way emasculated masterpiece.
A short story was appended to the essay. Rushdie calls it a fictionalized account of the auction of the ruby slippers (a pair of which sold in 1970 for $15,000). It is much more than that. In near Vonnegut style, the story explores the less than desirable aura and implications of crazed fandom. The setting seems to be the future and the present; part macabre science fiction, part first person narrative description. It also appeared in Rushdie's 1994 short fiction collection "East-West." Like nowhere else, the best of both worlds collide in this tiny British Film Institute book. It showcases both Rushdie the essayist and Rushdie the storyteller. Those looking for a quick glimpse of one of today's most discussed authors may want to start here.
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