Wicked has witches, music, dancing and fascism. It’s a technicolour fairytale, an allegory for United States politics and shows us the mechanics of patriarchal capitalism.
Since its release on Broadway in 2003, and its latest adaptation for the screen in 2024, Wicked’s themes of phoney power, scapegoating and resistance have been slotted into many moral and social agendas. These agendas tend to miss the injustice set in the foundation of US society, which cannot be overcome under capitalism.
Capitalism relies on the labour of women to produce and nurture children until they can become workers. As Silvia Federici outlines in Caliban and the Witch (2004), to maximise population growth in the early days of this system, legal and cultural change across Europe demonised female expressions of freedom. This occurred as the ruling class was destroying the commons and expropriating farming land, robbing ordinary people of their means of survival.
The demonisation of women culminated in the witch trials that took place in Britain between the 15th and 18th centuries, and which continued in the British colonies in North America into the 18th century.
Under oppressive laws, women were defined as either pure, chaste and obedient, or unruly, slutty and demonic. Women could be accused of witchcraft for having messy hair, having mental ill-health, for being old or single, for not going to church, or for going to church too much. Healers and community midwives — in possession of life-giving and life-saving knowledge — were erased.
This was part of the crackdown on women’s autonomy, to maximise their reproductive labour and minimise the threat to male dominance, as capitalism expanded.
The cultural legacy of this foundation still dictates femininity. To be more obedient is to be more desirable and employable, and many women feel that being a good or bad mother is the measure of them.
In Wicked, our protagonist, Elphaba — played by the one-in-a-generation talent Cynthia Arivo — has green skin, for which she is othered, and magical powers (her rage, controlled). She is defiant, courageous, sensitive and just.
Her nemesis, and then friend, and then nemesis again, is Glinda, played by Ariana Grande. She is white, slight and trite, and her character satirises women who wish, above all, to appear good, rather than to do good.
Despite Glinda’s calculated moves to accumulate status, and Elphaba’s drive toward justice, we see a genuine fondness develop between them. Their ultimately different paths reflect how shame within capitalist femininity pits women against each other. In fear of being seen as the bad witch, women — conveniently for the ruling class — shame each other and themselves. Obedience is self-enforced, and patriarchal capitalism grows.
Although the film’s casting is diverse, Arivo’s Elphaba in opposition to Grande’s Glinda forms an explicit racial narrative. Elphaba’s green skin is described by Glinda as “a problem”, while her nails and hair are a deliberate nod to contemporary Black femininity.
Race was constructed at a similar time to the persecution of women as witches. Thousands of ethnicities were reduced to a handful of races and placed in a hierarchy; to dehumanise peoples, justify the slave trade and colonial genocide.
Elphaba’s pride in herself, and her defiance, is celebrated as a story of Black empowerment. Glinda’s fake allyship and hollow, performative goodness, echoes the viral social media support of Black Lives Matter in 2020 by white liberals. For them, posting black squares on Instagram grids substituted for community action and meaningful long-term efforts to end police brutality and racism.
The interdependence of patriarchy, racism and capitalism is summed up by the Wizard’s plan to gentrify Oz, which relies on Elphaba’s magic.
Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard seems kind and charismatic, but, like many charming men, he is ultimately sinister.
We feel Elphaba’s awe at the notion of the Wizard, and her fearful approach to the mechanical face-of-God, until a silly man leaps out from underneath it — reflecting the scam of inherent male power.
Like the 16th century kings who persecuted women as witches, 21st century billionaires, CEOs and political masterminds conspire to maintain a system where their power appears inborn with masculinity and deserved. Power is either given by God, inherited from a patriarch or deserved due to sheer talent. They hold on to power and profit by exploiting the working class, especially ethnic minorities and women.
The Wizard’s bloody determination to capture Elphaba for withholding her power results in a traditional witch hunt. She is denounced as wicked, and outcast.
Unfortunately, narratives of resistance today too often sell the story that freedom lies in self-improvement. The best-selling memoirs of former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg and former US First Lady Michelle Obama encourage women to transcend sexism and/or racism by being tactical and working hard. Follow this Yellow Brick Road, they say, and you too can grow your wealth and join the elite.
However, they ignore the systematic exploitation that enables their status and encourage a “polished-turd” capitalism that relies on the very injustices they claim to have overcome.
Elphaba’s courage slots into this narrative for those who want it to. The film’s director, Jon M Chu, even drew parallels between Elphaba and Kamala Harris, joking in an interview: “A charismatic leader who gaslights a community that this woman is wicked just because she’s standing up for a marginalized group of people in the society, how could that be [political]?”
The idea that Harris is an Elphaba figure who stands up for the discriminated is symptomatic of the rift between those who create culture and struggling Americans. Harris is a famously harsh former prosecutor, and co-conspirator in the genocide-funding Joe Biden administration.
Harris suffers discrimination as a Black and Indian woman, but the idea that her leadership would lead to just outcomes was delusional. Just as the reading of the Wizard as a Donald Trump-like figure misses how racist and patriarchal capitalists are.
Trump’s supporters also like to creatively interpret a resistance story to serve their worldview. Steve Karakauer claimed in conservative journal The Hill that “[i]nstead of a critique of Trump, ‘Wicked’ is actually an allegory about how the establishment is fake, nefarious and ultimately a failure. […] Elphaba’s “Wicked Witch” is ostracized and marginalized, just like Americans who turned to Trump in 2016, and again in 2024”.
Trump successfully spins himself as anti-establishment to gain the support of desperate workers, while being part of the establishment he claims to rail against. He uses anti-feminist and anti-immigrant rhetoric to win the votes of disenfranchised working-class men, who are exploited and fed the lie that their freedom is found in patriarchal domination.
Elphaba does not represent Trump voters, but the film’s love interest — the strapping Fiyero — comes close to offering an alternative path for them in his bond with her. Even a hot, white, cis-het prince can see freedom outside the expectations of masculinity and status.
The problems in Wicked are the problems of capitalism. No hard work or rebrand within it will solve them.