Can Wicked contain genuine seeds of transcendence while simultaneously looking strangely awful? Yes, apparently. Jett and Gareth embrace the contradiction, traveling through Jung, Attack of the Clones, the glorious color of 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, and the possibility that learning to hold opposing truths may actually help us live better lives.
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Now on with the show.
Oh, folks, we're defying gravity in this week's episode.
I am so excited to talk with Professor Dr. Gareth Higgins, but the new blockbuster musical Wicked, Folks, this is a film whose plot is set into motion by a famous con man who targets marginalized groups to gain and maintain political power.
Luckily enough, this plot is the purest fiction. The purest fiction. I'm Jett Loe.
I'm Gareth Higgins.
The conversation never ends.
I don't want to start on a note of Discord with all the love in the world.
I completely disagree.
Please visit our Discord page.
I completely disagree. We don't have one. We could.
Wicked is based on archetypal truth, which one might say is actually the purest kind perhaps.
But that aside, that aside, it is of course, dear listener, a film version of the Broadway show Stage Musical and the novel by Gregory Maguire, which imagines how the Wicked Witch became the Wicked Witch and how the Good Witch became the Good Witch.
That being of course, in the Land of Oz way back when, I don't know, I'm assuming the narrative of The Wizard of Oz takes place at some point in the late 1890s, early 1900s, because that's when the books were written, or perhaps it's been
transplanted into 1939, because that's when the iconic film was made, or maybe it takes place in a totally parallel time frame. What do you think, Jett?
It takes place in a world in which you wish the film had been shot on an iPhone, because at least then you would get some colors. I think we're going to get into it.
We're going to get into it, my friend.
What Jett means is that, like me, it was the best time he had in the cinema all year.
You know, dear listeners, here on The Film Talk, we don't discuss the films ahead of time, so Gareth is not now...
Sometimes we don't even discuss the films during time.
During the show.
We're just airing our grievances about the state of cinema. Gareth, ask me to see this film. I didn't want to see the film.
You know, I love American and Paris and Singing in the Rain is as smarmy as Gene Kelly is, and of course those films played as smarmy as they work. Didn't want to see Wicked. So Gareth does not know how I felt about the film.
We've got a clip coming up, and I will say this before we go to the clip. Dear listeners, Wicked, the musical, Two Hours, Forty Minutes, it's an instant classic. I left the theater cheering.
I asked my good friends over at Apple Music to play the soundtrack. I played Defying Gravity and the original cast recording with, what is her name, Adrena Elba, who is the... It's Adrena Menzel, John Travolta, what did he call her?
Adele Dazeem, I think is what he called her.
We got a clip here of this instant classic.
It is a masterpiece with one major, one caveat, a huge caveat.
We got a clip here. In this clip, there's a clip from Wicked.
Let's listen in.
What is this feeling, so sudden and new?
I felt the moment I laid eyes on you.
My pulse is rushing.
My head is reeling. Yeah, well, my face is flushing.
And that was indeed a clip from Wicked, which Jett has just pronounced to be the greatest film of all time and indeed any time. It's an instant classic.
It is an instant classic.
As I saw it twice in two days, I can't wait to see it again. Do you want to have a movie, movie experience?
If you want to have an experience that's transporting and that brings a smile to your face and not one, not two, but perhaps three tears to your eyes, just the almost overstuffed, joyful experience of Wicked Part 1, directed by John M.
Chu from The Stage Musical by Steven Schwartz and Winnie Holzman.
This was the most fun I'd had at the movies all year.
And it's a film and a story with something genuinely profound to say that's been universally true in all times and places, but is particularly needing of emphasis at this time.
And when I say needing of emphasis, I do indeed mean needing of emphasis.
There's probably a better way of putting that. I think I was probably trying to say it needs to be emphasized. Emphasized.
That's how normal folks can ask.
You do, you do.
Go back to Munchkinland.
Let me say a couple of things that I love about this movie.
Then I'm going to say six brief things that I don't love. And then turn over to you, Jett.
I look forward to hear what you have to say.
We'll talk about it a bit more. So first of all, Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Galinda.
I got to tell you, I got to tell you.
Yes, tell us.
These performances are so immersive.
Yes, not perfect.
They're the perfect kind of performances where people in a fantasy story realize that what they should do is commit 100% to taking these roles absolutely seriously.
And looking at Cynthia Erivo, Emmy, Grammy, Tony, when they're very likely about to win an Oscar and be in that rarefied company of Egot's.
Amazing in the role.
You laugh with her, you feel her pain. And Ariana Grande, all I can say about her, she's not an actress that I've been aware of before. Haven't seen her in movies, but I have a feeling Ariana Grande is going to be a star.
Do you feel like she's going to be a star?
I think she's going to be a star.
She's been famous since she's been about two and a half.
She's famous like baby Huey is in the Who Framed Roger Rabbit universe.
That's one of the two things I love. I love those performances and I will go back to see the film, just to see the two of them.
I also have been listening to the soundtrack and singing the soundtrack, and frankly, sometimes crying at some of the soundtrack because this is the second thing.
Actually, you know what, I'm going to say three things.
I'm going to say three things you love.
Six nitpicks.
Three huge things, six small things.
Sure.
Am I should I be writing this down?
Should the listeners be writing this down?
Hanging on every word. You're recording it, Jett.
You can go back and take notes.
Fair enough.
Second thing, point of the story is about how scapegoating creates enemies, and that the only way forward for human beings is to pay attention to how we project on to other people, frankly, our own darkness, our own shadows.
Jung said that the possibility of avoiding the destruction of the human race depended on how many people could hold the tension of opposites.
Another way of putting that would be how many people can learn to live with uncertainty and be willing to put aside the fear-based need for absolutism and live with the sometimes terrifying nature of none of us knows what's going to happen next.
Let's look at the electoral votes and the percentages.
This might tell us how many people can hold together.
Can hold the tension of opposites as well.
Yes.
48 percent.
So that's part of the second piece that's allied to how it does something really rare for a prequel, is that it makes the meaning of the original story upon which it's based even richer.
So my future viewings of The Wizard of Oz will all be illuminated by my viewings of Wicked.
Then the third thing is the way this film represents the experience of marginalized people, carrying the burden of other people's projections, and having a moment of waking up or something breaking inside them where they realize that if the alleged
so-called love of the community upon which they're depending in order to feel safe within a community requires them to deny who they really are, then it's not really love. This is dramatized in the last 15 minutes of the film in a way that is both
There's a swoosh moment with a cape.
There's a dramatic moment of the swooshing.
You didn't see the stage show, right?
I did see the stage show.
So you saw the stage show when the cape came out in your version.
I saw the stage show probably 15 years ago.
Was that like a high school production?
No, I saw it.
Wasn't that good?
Sometimes community theater is fantastic.
Sometimes.
But I saw it in the London West End.
Frankly, with all respect, the cast seemed tired, so I have very little memory of it. That's nice for me. I don't remember what happens in the second act of Wicked, so I don't remember what's going to happen in the second part of the film next year.
I don't want to remember. But there is this moment of the swooshing of the cape, which is an echo of earlier in the film where Glinda is teaching Elphaba how to swoosh her hair in order to kind of track guys.
Brilliant. It's brilliant.
It took my body back to the feeling I had when I first watched Superman and the Empire Strikes Back. It was an utterly thrilling cinematic spectacle.
It's worth, if you can afford it, paying to see it on the biggest screen you possibly can just for that moment. There's lots of other moments in it and there's six things wrong with the film. Okay.
I just want to say I agree with you.
The best cinema can use visuals to externalize or explicate, that's a word, complex emotional situations.
So what Gareth says, again, just such a simple thing where you've got the, she's not quite the good witch yet, you got Galinda or Galinda depending on how you want to virtue signal. We can talk about that.
Does the swoop of the hair.
What a beautiful joke.
What a beautiful joke about virtue signal.
We're going to get into it.
We're going to get into it. And then doing that callback is absolutely brilliant. I just want to say to your point about prequels, the greatest art makes other art better, I think.
And while watching it, I thought of something, a similar vein that didn't work in the way this works. When I was a kid and saw Star Wars, what was the one thing that fueled my imagination?
You know, a lot of kids, oh, they played with the toys and all.
I never got in, I never did that.
I never bought Star Wars toys, whatever. Because to me, I have always felt like, why would you, I don't want to live in somebody else's narratives.
I don't want to do that.
Why are you paying this guy money? Maybe I was a bit of a jerk as a kid, as a seven-year-old, what have you.
But there was one line in that film that stood out to me because it created mystery and it created a doorway to imagination because it did not explain.
It was Alec Guinness saying something like, yeah, I knew your dad or whatever, or we fought together in the Clone Wars. That's never explained, it's never referenced.
Just a couple of simple words like, wow, that sounds so strange, especially in the 70s, the Clone Wars, what is that? Then of course, years later, a film was made called Attack of the Clones, and it's just clones fighting each other.
It's the most boring, dull, obvious. I mean, it's appalling at some very basic level, because all the mysteries take it.
If it stood alone, it's technically interesting film to look at, but it destroys the mystery.
Yes, it destroys it.
It's very similar to Duval's character in Apocalypse Now, in the extra long versions, the three-ply version of Apocalypse Now, where there's more Duval that diminishes his character.
Because in the original release, first of that film, his last lines are, someday, this war is going to end, then you never see him again, but in the newer versions, you've got...
Not only that, I'm sorry, but when he says this war is going to end, the camera is locked down, and Martin Sheen is the foreground, and Duval is slightly behind Martin Sheen.
He then gets up, and he leaves the frame. He leaves the film, and he's never seen again.
He literally... It's brilliant, but in the longer versions, he leaves the frame, and then it cuts to him walking on the beach. It's an astonishing misstep.
I'm just having a thought about that.
You know that Dylan's people release six CD box sets that give you all the annotations of this is how he made this album.
Here's the demos.
Here's different versions.
I didn't know he had people.
People started doing that lately.
I'm realizing that I like what we have in the newer versions of Apocalypse Now, but not all of it.
I like the French plantation sequence, but I wish what we had was original Apocalypse Now and then these annotations with Coppola commenting on them rather than them being woven into the film.
Not for any ideological purity, just because the film is better without spelling more things out. Back to you.
To your point, this film illuminates, it's a prequel, I guess, in some way, illuminates Wizard of Oz and makes Wizard of Oz better. That way it succeeds as all great art does, that it makes other things better.
The things that it reveals, how did this get this way, it's not obvious, it's clever. It's incredibly clever and inverts the meaning of things while still keeping the original meaning in a very, very brilliant, sophisticated way.
It's a sophisticated film. I can only imagine a generation of Harry Potter fans, they're tweens or whatever, and they're really into Harry Potter. And then they see this movie and they're like, oh, yeah, back to Star Wars.
It's a gateway into a wider world. They're like, oh, the world is far richer and more interesting and more complex than you would imagine. Okay, you got the six nitpicks.
The six nitpicks are, it's too glossy and I wish they had attempted to, I was going to say without doing this in a garish way, but maybe the point of Technicolor is indeed garish, if that's the noun.
I literally have written in my notes, Technicolor underscored.
It's too glossy and it doesn't look Technicolor and I wish they had tried to make it look like that.
I think, I'm not going to name any names. I think a couple of the supporting roles are a bit flat.
Bowen Yang, Bowen Yang.
Bowen Yang is fine.
He's a comic relief role.
He does great.
It may be that in the second film, you get more in a sense.
Dear listener, this is a film.
We'll have to review it again in a year's time as part of the whole.
My dear friend, Suzanne Ross, who founded an organization with her husband Keith, founded an organization called the Raven Foundation and another organization called Unrival Network, which are both based on the theories of the French philosopher Rene
Girard, who came up with the idea of mimesis and mimetic rivalry. This is the idea that human beings want what we want, not because we want it, but because we think somebody else wants it. It's keeping up with the Joneses.
It's not actually sitting and discerning, what do I really want for myself that would be good for me? You can't get away from imitating other people.
What you can do is choose consciously who you're going to imitate based on what the outcomes in their lives are and a sense of values around, yeah, I'd like to be like that person because of what this produces in their life.
Not because they're rich and famous or more glamorous than other people, but because they're kinder and more at peace.
Apparently, there's a line, I don't know if it's in the book or in the show, where the Goat Professor, wonderfully voiced by Peter Dinklage and Wicked, asks, I believe asks the students perhaps, what makes a scapegoat a scapegoat?
And that line is not present in this film, and it's an important piece of discourse. Maybe it'll show up in the second film. That's the third of six nitpicks.
The fourth is that even despite being two hours and 40 minutes long, there's some parts of it that move too fast.
But the trip on the train.
The train journey to the Emerald City.
When they got on the train.
It makes the Emerald City look like it's run the next corner.
When they got on the train, I'm wondering, what are they going to do here?
Because you think this is going to be a big journey.
Therefore, there's got to be a musical number, or there has to be some revelation about character during the train.
And that was just it. So it's a subway stop away.
Yeah.
And maybe there's something up their sleeve there around.
The point is that the wizard a little bit like the bad guy in True Detective has managed to create this psychic energy field of imagination where people are living in a kind of terror of someone who's ultimately not very powerful at all.
Or their power depends on a vibe that he's created. Maybe he is right next door and he's managed to make everybody...
No, they probably had scenes and there's like, this thing, we gotta cut something.
Yeah, we gotta cut it out.
And the last two things, Don't Hate Me, Don't Hate Me. Oh no. I think Dancing Through Life is one song too many or maybe like a one and a half minute version of Dancing Through Life would have been enough to say what that song is trying to say.
And some songs, apologies, apologies. I don't understand music.
I love listening to music.
I've heard you sing.
Hi. Yes, is there a value judgment there? No, no, no.
Okay, good.
Some of the songs, particularly at the start, are a wee bit screechy.
And more importantly than that, I don't know whether you call it the instrumentation or simply the range of instruments or the orchestration here.
When you're making a film version of a stage musical, you have to decide, am I simply going to batten down the hatches and film a stage musical and keep it feeling like a stage musical, which could be a fine choice, or am I going to open it up in
every way that would serve the material best cinematically and Wicked pulls out all the stops, almost. Part of the problem for me is the orchestration still feels a bit like a stage band.
So there's instruments like, it's not like electric guitars, maybe drum machines, and for a film, a story that takes place in this other classical, mythical land, I'd love to hear from musicians about this. I'm sure I'm not using the right language.
And frankly, one of the points of moving beyond scapegoating is to create a culture in which people can say, I don't know the answer. I'm not actually sure. I'm curious.
Can you help me understand? But for me, listening to it, it's every time I heard those electric guitars or what's kind of like drum machines.
It seems dated.
It's weird. It dates it in the present day and the film is not set in the present day. It put me back into a live theater environment, which is not where I wanted to be.
I just wanted to be transported.
Forgive me if you're a musician or an orchestrator.
Like the point of this film, like the point of the story, I don't want to scapegoat you. I'd actually like to call forth your magnificence and learn more from you about it.
But maybe somebody could do something with AI and get rid of the parts of the music that feel less than, I guess, the word would be classical.
Did you just say with this magnificent work of art, I wish they'd use some more AI.
Could they use AI to get rid of?
Maybe there's some kind of, who knows if there's a different score waiting.
Maybe Alex North wrote an original score for Wicked that he didn't know was going to be removed from the film.
Anyway, those are small nitpicks and they actually come from a place of love because it's, you know, I often say I loved it.
That's when I ever have an argument with my wife. This comes from a place of love.
This is a nitpick from a place of love.
If only we could use AI.
The overall experience of this film is just so rich and so delightful and so moving.
It did call forth love in me and I'm looking forward to hear more of what you have to say about what you've now described as the most significant work of art of the last 500 years.
Well, that's like an anti-straw man, kind of.
To your also point about the music, to me it did come across as data and I listened to the soundtrack driving home up into the mountains here in beautiful, beautiful New Mexico and when the film started the first 30 minutes, I had a real hard problem
with the sound mix in the theater, understanding what the people were saying, what these big crowds were. When I listened to the recording on Apple Music, it was much clearer.
Now, of course, it's clear because my brain is already starting to process what they're saying in the background without my being consciously aware of it.
But the sound mix was much clearer when you listen to it on a streaming service rather than in the theater. The thing about this movie, you've touched it.
I'm going to go into a little more detail because of my background in video production, and what happened in television and stuff.
Because of your superior intellect.
Did you understand things better than I do?
Superior intellect.
This is not Wrath of Khan here.
Are you the Galinda or the Elphaba in this partnership?
Am I the Galinda or Elphaba?
I kind of feel that perhaps I'm the young prince. I think I'm the prince.
Dancing through life and too scared to give your heart away.
Yeah, that's me.
How many times have I been married?
Only once. From now on, as I told my wife of the day, forget, well, we're just settling one. And the one vice that I allow myself these days in my old age is books.
And so I'm constantly buying books. We need to buy more bookshelves. So I'm kind of the anti-prince at some level.
Here's the thing. It's a magnificent movie, except for an issue which is present.
In every single frame of the film. And this is such...
And you can go on the Internet. I have since. And people are tearing their hair out.
You go to the various dark corners of the Internet that are frequented by cinematographer forums that I belong to and stuff like that. Because in my day job, when I'm not doing the film talk, even though it is my life, I'm color grading constantly.
And I want to talk about this. Scenematographers, videographers, photojournalists, I'm also a photojournalist, tearing their hair out because the film looks terrible.
Like, I'm watching going, why did they make these choices?
The film looks awful.
And there's three issues here.
There's the way the film is lit, the lighting.
There's the grading of the film. That's how you adjust the colors in post. And I'll talk about that in a second.
And then there's the inherent issues involved with the recording medium, with digital cinematography, that's built into the actual method of shooting. So let's talk about the first one, the lighting in the film.
So one of the first reasons I had issues, especially in the first couple of hours, is it's lit... People are saying flat, and I disagree. It's not flat.
Everything is diffuse. Which means, like, if you're shooting something, let's say you're doing an interview with somebody, you put a light on, well, it's gonna create harsh shadows. That's not flattering.
So you can put a cloth.
You can put, like, a bed sheet.
You can put some sort of fabric that causes the light to sort of spread out and be more even. In this film, everything is diffuse. There's no harsh shadows.
It's as if these huge sets they spent so much money on are lit from above, like a stage. And while I'm watching this, Gareth, dear listeners, I'm thinking to myself, wait a minute, there's a couple obvious reasons why they're doing this.
The first most obvious thing is that if they're blocking the film, and blocking is really important, blocking is like where do you position the actresses as you move the camera around them.
If they're blocking the film, if you light everything from above, and I'm generalizing here as a generalized audience, right?
If you're lighting from above, keeping everything diffuse, then in real time when you're shooting, you can change things on the fly without having to relight everything.
I was like, oh, let's put the camera over here, and it's fine because it's the same light no matter where you are, right? So it makes changing camera setups really easy. Again, I'm simplifying here, but you get the point.
Simplifying for me.
You know, Gareth, you are a complex man, and sometimes you're so complex.
Sometimes you got to cut that gordian knot rather than trying to untie it.
You know what I'm saying? The other thing that came to mind.
You need to cut seven minutes of dancing through life.
That's what you need to cut.
It went on a bit long.
So the other thing that came to me, and this probably occurred to you as well. It's like, oh, they're doing this, especially in the first 30 minutes.
The reason why they're making this diffuse look to it is because as the story gets darker or more dramatic, then we're going to get darker shadows, then it's going to become more colorful. In fact, this does happen.
When you get to Oz, it is a lot darker.
There's a lot more colors that pop out, but it takes us two hours to get there. Before that, the film almost has a gray look, almost sludgy. That brings out to the second of my three points here, the grading.
Normally folks, this is how you deal with the color and the lights and the darks in a digital film.
Normally when you shoot digital for production, you shoot what's called flat, meaning you shoot in some sort of what's called a raw format, kind of a pseudo raw format. And still photographers out there would know what I'm talking about here.
So when you look at the raw unprocessed image, raw is just a term, it's not actually raw, but it's flat in terms of it looks kind of gray. There's not much color, there's not much difference in the lights and darks.
And then you can go in there in your post-production process and you can adjust how much white, how bright the white is, how dark the black is, how the colors look, not just the luminance of the colors, how saturated they are, their color values, how
sharp it is. So you do this all to the taste or whatever it is you're trying to get across in the film.
Let's say you have a murder scene that's kind of, and you want it to be kind of black and white because the characters are typal, but you want the red to stand out.
So you would bring up the saturation of the red, the blunt, for instance, or someone's red cloak to emphasize that might be a murder coming up, whatever, that kind of thing.
And in this movie, regardless of how it's lit, the film's colors are dialed way down, so there's this grayness, a dullness, which I found incredibly distracting. And here's the thing, and other people pointed this out, so I'm not the first one.
After the movie, I went to look at some of the featurettes of how they shot it, and the behind-the-scenes footage looks great. The behind-the-scenes footage of the sets, the costumes, they're popping with color.
And the reason that is is whoever's grading the behind-the-scenes footage wants it to look quote unquote good or realistic, or they're shooting on an iPhone. Because when you shoot on an iPhone, the iPhone by default is making the decisions for you.
You know, when you point a camera, when you point an iPhone at a landscape with its clouds, before you even hit record, it's processing the image, and it knows, quote unquote, it goes, oh, that's a cloud, or that's a face, so I'm gonna make these
changes in real time to make it look a certain way that Apple thinks people will find pleasing, which you can all disagree with. But the footage, the behind the scene footage looks great, which the real film does not.
The real film looks cheap, and the way the behind the scenes footage, the film looks expensive. And why does the film look cheap? Not just because of the even lighting that contributes, not just because of the color grading.
It's part of it.
I know I'm going on, Gareth.
So please excuse me.
I can see your expression.
We're going to pivot from this back to what's wonderful about it.
Okay, we are. But here's the thing.
And I am sure that the lovely people who made this film will hear this podcast, go back and completely regrade the entire Wicked Part 1.
Again, if we get to Wicked Part 2. Wicked Part 2 is going to be graded completely differently.
I mean, possibly.
Again, because when they get to Oz and things get dark, then it does get darker in colors.
Yes.
So in retrospect, everything I'm saying will be like, well, it's okay. These are decisions.
It wasn't happenstance.
It wasn't just, oh, we're going to do this. These are very thought out, sitting around a table, sketching, painting, drawing, having creative conversations. And this is what they came up with.
And a lot of people, myself included, think it was too, it was just a sincere mistake.
It's a mistake.
But part of it has to do also the inherent properties of recording, meaning the digital camera.
What we realize now, so clearly, the one of the most obvious things we realize is that in our digital age, how much the analog process hid issues in old films and TV. In the films of the past, they were shot on film. They had what we call gateweave.
I don't think maybe we mentioned this on the show before. Maybe we talked about the holdovers. Film is running through a camera at high speed, and that means that things are not exact.
It's always going to weave a little bit as the picture is exposed. Then when you project it, it's going to weave as well. That hides the artificiality of the sets.
When they did the holdovers, they kind of came out at the gate, no pun intended, thinking, we're going to shoot this on film. We want it to look like a 70s film. When they experimented, it's probably too expensive.
They had other production issues with shooting on film. They digitally added gateweave afterwards, like a slight shake. They gave it more of a 70s feel.
And Ching Wicket reminded me of those Peter Jackson Hobbit movies. So he's shooting on digital and he's shooting in 40s.
They were called The Hobbit.
Is that what they were called? Yes. Let me tell you about The Hobbit.
God bless them.
Be nice. Hold on.
About two-thirds through of the first Hobbit movie, I'm like, hey, this is pretty good. I hope all this. I will sit and see how they wrap it up.
And then I realized, oh no, this is the rest of three.
But anyway, in the Hobbit, he's shooting at 48 frames per second and he's shooting, there's no gateway, everything is rock solid, so you're getting this very crisp, clear image.
And it made everything look like a set. If they had shot the Hobbit on 16 millimeter, it would have looked great. Instead, you could literally see how cheap, not cheap, it's not cheap, but how fake the beards looked and the fake noses.
Whereas if you shot on 16 millimeter or even 35 or even the Super 8, it would have looked so much more real, not like I'm watching a stage show.
And when you're looking at Wicked, it feels artificial in a way that took me out of the picture the whole time. And you can't think of Wicked without thinking of The Wizard of Oz, which was released in 39.
And their incredible color of The Wizard of Oz, which is this, they had, forget about Gateway, they had three strips of film running through the camera at the same time, each registering a different color, which created this incredible what they call
Technicolor. Later Technicolor was different, but they were the Technicolor from the 30s. It's incredible. And two other films from that same period, Gone with the Wind and The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn, used this process.
And the colors are incredible. You know, folks, you may not be in, oh, Robin Hood, 1938. Yeah, what, Errol Flynn, wasn't he kind of a little bit fascist adjacent?
Okay. Go watch The Adventures of Robin Hood. It is a great rousing adventure with some of the greatest action scenes and movies.
And the color, the greens of Sherwood Forest, let's face it, were shot like, you know, where are they?
Pacific Palisades somewhere.
They're like in LA, right?
They're in Encino or something.
Wherever they shot, I'm sure they had Robin Hood sets.
I think basically, you were legally required, if you were making a film between 1937 and 1959, you needed to be at the Griffith Park Observatory for part of it.
Well, you got to be a close drive, right? You got to be within an hour. It's only basically, you take a map of Southern California, wherever your studio is, and you just draw, you draw a circle.
It's got to be an hour, yeah.
It's like Vasquez Rocks, right?
You got to be about, you know, within an hour away.
But the greens, the reds are incredible, they pop.
In a way that was almost kind of beyond our imagination for films today. So it's so strange to have a film, which I'm watching it, and after the first hour, I'm like, this is an instant classic.
This is fantastic.
I'm cheering, I'm applauding, and at the same time, this looks terrible.
Yeah. So one question about that, and that is not understanding the technology, can anything be done retroactively?
Yes. So, okay, two things. One, people have already taken the trailers.
The thing is, it's already, the colors and the look of it are baked in when you do that. So it's like, if you're taking a still photo, you take a JPEG image where all this information is baked in. You can change it in Photoshop or Lightroom.
Find product products from Adobe. Get a little crafty though. Lightroom's get a little, I mean, Photoshop's getting a bit crafty.
But anyway, so it was Premiere, good lord. But anyway, so you want to go to the raw footage? No, of course, absolutely.
They had those things. They could totally change it.
But who's got, no one's got time for that. We're not talking about like, I got a winery.
I got a winery, I want to go back and redo my films.
And I love Megalopolis.
All right, all right.
Well, tangentially, I've decided that I love Megalopolis too.
And it was David Lynch that made me love it. It was David Lynch that made me love it.
Because I realized if I'd gone into Megalopolis thinking that David Lynch had directed it, I wouldn't have had any problems with it because I'm not looking for a linear narrative with Lynch.
That has, well, that does have something to do with Wicked in the sense that I'm trying to think the best of people. Let's go to this issue of making up an enemy, inventing an enemy in order to create a sense of peace.
A few years ago, my friend Brian McLaren introduced me to an idea that he's so humble.
Like he says, I was just sitting at home one day and thinking about this and he described it and I'm like, this is like Archimedean in his Rebel 8 Repower, if it would be talked about.
And the idea was that humans have evolved six broad stories to make sense of our lives, particularly to point us toward peace and security. And I'm gonna run through them really, really quickly. Sure, if I may.
The domination story, which is I'll get peace and security through ruling over you.
The revenge-based revolution story, which is I'll get peace and security by overthrowing you and then I'll rule over you and maybe slightly less authoritarianly than the last time around. But it's still going to be top dog, underdog.
There's the purification story, which is our problems are because of you. And we're going to exile you or we'll execute you. We'll erase you.
The fourth story is the isolation story, which is I've had it with this world, this disgusting, broken world, and I'm going to withdraw from it.
Go out into the desert or the wilderness and build a utopian community, which as we know, unless you have extremely conscious people committed to interdependence, who are constantly leading those communities and everybody commits to those values,
I think they call that the United States.
The fifth story is what we call the victimization story, and that's the story that says, I'll get peace and security out of my wound by making the worst thing that was done to me, the most important thing about my life, and I will devote my life to
making sure that the person or people, or people who remind me of those people, pay for what they did. The sixth story, the last story is the accumulation story, which is I'll get peace and security through getting more things, whether it's a bigger
So Wicked does them all.
Yeah.
The Wicked touches every...
Wicked manifests them all, absolutely.
Every single one of those things.
Well, you want to say, so where do you see the domination story?
In terms of the accumulation?
No, no, no.
Well, I'll go through the six, the domination one, which is...
I'm still stuck on the six nitpicks.
Well, I can see the six nitpicks and six stories. But each of these stories has embedded...
Well, I mean, you talk about going... She literally says, I'm going, look to the west. She's splitting, right?
So she's...
Oh, yes.
That's the isolation story.
But it's also the flip of the purification story.
She's basically being exiled there as well.
So I won't go through them in more detail.
You can actually read more about this at theseventhstory.com. But what's really important is that embedded within each of these six stories are the seeds of its transcendence.
Okay.
There we go. The domination story is an illegitimate answer to the need for leadership. Servant leadership is better than authoritarian leadership.
The vengeance-based revolution story is an illegitimate response to the need for justice. There are oppressive power structures that need to be overthrown, but we don't need to take vengeance on the holders of those power structures.
We just need to maybe protect ourselves from them at times. But as we always say, in peace building work in the North of Ireland, the door is unlocked.
In order to come through that door and sit down at the table, thus the only thing you need to commit to is to not consciously harming anybody.
If you can't make that commitment, you can't sit at the table, but we'll come out and check on you from time to time and see if you're ready to change your mind.
The isolation story is an illegitimate response to the need for quiet contemplation, reflection within, which you can do, and some of the great mystics of history have shown you can do it even under the worst of circumstances.
The purification story is an answer to the need for forming moral judgments, that the best moral judgments begin with judging ourselves, and recognizing the solzhenitsa said that the line between good and evil runs through the center of all human
beings. The last two stories, the victimization story, is a completely natural response to suffering.
Of course, people who have suffered terribly should have their wounds bound and cared for and their needs met by society, but the needs are not going to be healed by vengeance or by confusing vengeance with accountability.
Lastly, the accumulation story is an illegitimate response to the need to steward beautiful things.
It's why I love free museums, it's why I love libraries.
It's why I love the philanthropic culture and the state culture of France that rebuilt the Cathedral in Notre Dame. People were arguing, why would you spend all this money on rebuilding the Cathedral in Notre Dame when there's hungry people?
You don't have to choose between feeding hungry people and rebuilding a beautiful Cathedral. There is actually enough to go around to do both of these things.
So the thing is though, and thank you for those beautiful thoughts, synopsis possibly is some sort of guide towards living. We can just identify whatever the problem is and then find the sea within it that helps transcend that thing.
This is only Wicked Part 1 and I don't know the story.
I know, I'm worried about what's going to happen.
So I don't know, I hope there's a bigger part for a comedian.
I don't think it goes well for Elphaba in the end.
I don't know.
Maybe that's a trap door, she doesn't actually melt down.
I mean, I don't know and of course how this film ends, how they stick the landing if they do it is going to transform everything that Gareth and I are talking about right now, everything that we're thinking about the film. So we don't know.
Again, I was hating the first 40 minutes by the end of this picture. If there had just been five minutes intermissions, I could go pee and come back. I would have been there for part two.
So we don't know. What's amazing to me is the film is so worked on such a, I don't know, during the production process when the book was written, how much was emotionally, sociologically intuitive and how much was thought out.
But how much, the reason it is an instant classic is how much it taps into the things that Gareth just mentioned, the different ways that we do organize, try to dominate, try to live our lives, and how those components are in the film.
That's what I think makes it, again, except for the look of it, maybe almost a masterpiece.
Well, it is almost a masterpiece.
In a sense, you might even go as far to say it's a certain kind of masterpiece because these flaws, which are not insignificant, and maybe they won't be noticed by many people because we're sort of nerdy about this kind of stuff.
But despite these flaws, it's still magnificent. I'll still see it two or three more times in a theatre. I'm taking my mum to see it this week and she would have been the person who showed me The Wizard of Oz when I was a child.
I'm so excited to go with her. And let's just, let me, as we move toward wrapping up, say a little bit about how it speaks to the current moment.
Shocking. Shockingly so for something that was debuted decades ago.
I know.
And let's try to find a way to talk about it that doesn't fall into the trap that it's squarely naming, which is don't scapegoat or perhaps more nuanced.
Two things. One is, if you start to ask yourself what are the stories I'm living by? And are these stories of separation scapegoating selfishness in the form of the domination story, the accumulation story, and so on and so forth.
Ask yourself instead, how could I live this need for leadership or need to see leadership in the world in a way that's liberatory and reconciliatory, by which I mean frees the most people, that brings the most good to the most people.
And how can I play a part in that?
And then if there are times when the culture needs an enemy in order for something worse to be avoided, a question I think that a lot of religious activists ask, and they don't have to be religious, a lot of, I don't know, let's call them ethically
committed activists, people who are willing to go the extra mile for the common good, is sometimes, this is a horrible metaphor, but it's useful. Sometimes I need to be the one who falls on my sword in order to prevent worse harm happening.
Now, highly unlikely I'm ever gonna have to literally do something like that.
Most people won't have to do something like that, but some people have.
They've chosen to allow themselves to be scapegoated in order to make something more peaceful happen in the world, which is kind of what I think Alphaba is doing at the end of this film, too.
Oh, I don't know.
I wish you could see the cheery demeanor with which Jett is creating my soliloquy on scapegoating, which is probably slightly overagged.
No, everything you're saying is valid, and let's not forget the Outer Limits episode of The Architects of Fear with Robert Culk, right?
Two episodes of Outer Limits.
How could I forget it?
Well, I'm being serious here. He was a demon with a glass hand or something like that.
I may be remembering that wrong.
We did Architects of Fear and What's the Premise of Architects of Fear, which was then lifted for Watchmen, the graphic novel, was that, oh, we're in a terrible state. We're going to kill each other with nuclear weapons.
This is from the early 60s, Outer Limits, black and white TV show from the 60s, a little bit before The Twilight Zone, not quite as good, but still interesting. It's like, what if we create an outsider threat?
So we're going to have someone volunteer, we're going to turn them into an alien spacecraft, and we're going to scare everybody so that the world unites against this fear, right?
So yeah, scapegoating.
You know what? I'll tell you what, let's just not scapegoat.
Let's transcend that.
Let's not create the external enemy, deport them or say they don't exist.
Look for the best in every will and protect the vulnerable first.
Yeah, let's do that. Any final thoughts?
Sounds good.
I think we've solved it.
I think we've cracked it.
You said something to me in the last episode that I've been pondering all weekend. It's something I'd never thought about before.
You listen to the show.
I do.
I listen to it as often as you listen to The Wicked Sign track.
I listen to both the Broadway version of The Film Talk and the spectacular though slightly murky looking film adaptation.
Did you prefer Idris Elba's version of-
Cynthia Erivo might be not only my favorite actor, but my favorite person right now.
We didn't say something about the two of them.
Well, okay. I don't know why you're saying she's a favorite person. Maybe that's some other interviews.
I love listening to her interviews.
She's so interesting.
I don't know anything.
She's so vibrant.
No, nothing about her.
Nothing.
I mean, this is the thing we're watching.
I said this earlier on in this episode is, the film doesn't, other than the look of it, set a foot wrong.
Everything is exactly like it hits.
Everything is trying to do like, this is supposed to create this kind of emotion.
This is supposed to create this kind of feeling. Everything hits and Arianna Grande, except for one eye movement, she did about 70 minutes and I thought, oh, they don't go with that thing.
But other than that, a controversial eye movement.
Yeah, the way she looked at it, that looked more like she was remembering something that she had to do rather than being quiet. It was only for about 15 frames. But other than that, her and the-
Cynthia Arrigo. Yeah, thank you. Cynthia Arrigo.
They're perfect. They're fantastic. They imbibe, it's like watching, imagine me and a kid, especially a young man, and you're watching Indiana Jones.
Red is the Lost Ark for the first time, and Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones. I mean, it's 100 percent. He's completely that person.
You believe he is a real person. You believe Galinda slash Galinda, and what is it? Alphabet?
Google? What is the name? Alphaba?
They are fantastic.
I mean, it's perfect.
It's like note. It's absolutely perfect. They're fantastic performances.
I know we are trying to end the show, but I'm really-
I have been for a while.
You wanted to say something about Virtue Signaling.
Oh, there's a great gag where Galinda slash Galinda, she changes her name.
One letter.
She changes one letter in her name.
She changes one letter in the Bowen Yang. In case you don't know Bowen Yang, if you're listening from overseas, he's a comedian who's semi-well-known for being on Saturday Night Live.
He's not famous like the guy that plays Domingo, but he's certainly recognizable facing.
He says, oh, she's so brave for changing his name.
It's what we call the Virtue Signaling.
The thing you said to me last week that I've been pondering, that I haven't thought of before, I've never heard these words written down or spoken in any language, and that is, I think it was, do unto others as you would. To break through.
I don't remember the rest of the thought, but perhaps it'll come back to you.
Don't be a jerk.
At some point.
I love this film. I love you, dear listener, and I love you, Jett.
And how great to talk about a movie, movie that we look forward to, a completely regraded version of it being released, especially for us.
They could.
And we'll get to talk about the second part in a year's time. But dear listener, go see it.
Go see it on the biggest screen you can while it's around.
Wicked. It's great. And you know what else is great?
The show, The Film Talk.
If you want to support our folks, don't forget to go to patreon.com/thefilm.
Hold on. Can we, this scapegoating thing?
Yes.
Like I'm with you on the don't scapegoat anybody except for the enemies of The Film Talk.
We have enemies.
And if we did have enemies, if we did have enemies, the door would be unlocked, the door would be ajar and we'd invite them to come in as long as they promise not to harm The Film Talk.
But it's a broad church. I'm concerned you're kind of spiraling, you're going somewhere.
Me, I'm going to head out to the West. That's where you can look for me out here in the mountains of Mexico, folks.
Do a swish, a swish or a swish, a swish, swish.
I'm doing it virtually. Folks, don't forget to go to patreon.com, slash The Film Talk, you can sign up.
We're going to release an archive episode probably the next couple of days because you get the bonus episodes and the archive episodes, or you can get the bonus ones on Apple Podcasts, and we're also on Facebook at facebook.com/thefilmtalk.
This has been a great show.
I can't wait to see this film again.
Look for me in the West. I've been Jett Loe.
I've been Gareth Higgins. If a certain number of people sign up at Patreon, I undertake a certain number.
I undertake to go back and hand paint every frame of Wicked Part 1 to our liking.
You can be among that certain number if you sign up there. But whether you sign up or not, we're grateful to you for listening.
I've been Gareth Higgins. We'll keep talking next time.