Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
-Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”
I’ve never been to Kansas. Perhaps one day I’ll see it for myself, perhaps on vacation. The Kansas in my mind is a rare, intimate monochrome; more intimate and homelier than black-and-white, which loves contrast. Sepia—originally a cuttlefish, then its ink, then the color of the ink (that single color describing the dark parts of every person, tree, bicycle, cruller, wagon wheel, terrier, tornado…)—suggests to me a secret correspondence, an affinity revealed among different kinds of being. Even in 1939, when The Wizard of Oz first pictured Kansas in sepia, it might’ve been the color of nostalgia—the color of old photographs, a certain shade of dirt. The film was toned, which just means it involved a secondary chemical process applied to the exposed and developed print. But the auditory meaning of tone bleeds into the chromatic—the sepia voices of Dorothy singing and Auntie Em worrying; the engulfing sepia silence of the house thudding where the tornado drops it, in the dream-space between Kansas and Oz. The Kansas in my mind smells of lilacs. In childhood, lilac trees touched my bedroom window. They grow there still. In spring I’d catch their scent through the screen, go outside to get closer. When the blossoms bruise and begin to wither, they tinge and turn a warm brown. The color of Kansas, in memory, is of lilacs turning.
*
It would’ve been the 1989 commemorative 50th anniversary VHS edition. My parents gave away all their VHS tapes when DVDs came around, but a brief search of all those available on the vintage media market online confirms it. There’s no forgetting the sky-blue background of that illustrated front cover, a rainbow shooting through the title in gold letters.
As a young child, mercifully, I had no idea of the sordid things happening on the MGM set to that other, older child, Judy Garland. To know of them would’ve surely disturbed me, but also confused me—the very idea of unseen things happening behind this manifest world. The film wasn’t the heterogeneous, time-bound, made thing I can see now. I’m not sure I even had a notion of our VHS tape being only a copy, mass-produced. The videotape in its sky-blue illustrated box was the magical object—whole, unmediated. Nor were there any actors. Only Dorothy and Toto, the Tin Man, Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, Wizard, Witches…tiny creatures sleeping inside the tape, reanimated each time we put it into the VCR. The correspondence between Oz and Kansas was alive for me not because the Tin Man was played by the same actor (Jack Haley) who played Hickory on the farm, or because Margaret Hamilton, brilliantly, played Almira Gulch as well as the Wicked Witch of the West. No, it was because of an enigmatic doubling I accepted immediately, not questioning its mechanics. Now this misconception, this incomplete knowledge, comes back to me as a way of seeing.
*
I never read the classic book by L. Frank Baum. My obsession with the film predates my reading life. For a period around ages three to five, I would answer only to Dorothy. I don’t know how far or how deep I imagined the name extended, what it wrought in me. It wasn’t a deliberate assertion of identity—more of a passionate involvement with a figure clearer, sharper, and freer, more beautiful to me than myself. A vacation from—a vacating of—my growing but constraining, narrowing self.
Interchangeably, I assigned the roles of Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion to my mother, father and brother. We named the quiet, serious terrier mutt we adopted from the pound Toto. I loved her terribly, and she tolerated my attention (in a photo, I’m examining her with a toy stethoscope, frowning in concentration; her expression is of priceless long-suffering). She had a habit of biding her time. She would never whine or scratch at the door, but she’d bolt whenever she got the chance; a chronic runaway, she broke my heart. She exposed me to some of love’s mysteries. We always brought her back, but I wondered where she so desperately wanted to go without me. It got into me that she harbored a dream of escape, even from comfort and affection; that she had an elsewhere.
*
Dorothy in Kansas, singing: it’s said that the scene almost got cut. Watching the “Over the Rainbow” film as an adult after a long hiatus through high school, college, and graduate school, this scene and song somehow drop through the years. If it seems briefer than I remember, it’s like something I bundled up and hid away for my older self so I wouldn’t forget. So little to it: Dorothy mooning around the farmyard, some chickens, a wagon wheel, Toto. Dorothy leans against and sits on the bales of hay, her gaze moving fluidly as she sings—inclining skyward, arcing. All the while, her big gentle eyes and her strong mouth open in sepia; her gingham pinafore, sepia; the wonderful hair I envied, gathered into generous curling low pigtails, sepia.
It’s often said Judy Garland wasn’t a great beauty. As a child, I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She was spectacular in Technicolor, but it was there in sepia that she mesmerized me. In the film, Technicolor Oz is supposed to be the fantastic, outlandish elsewhere. How is it that, despite its otherworldliness, Oz comes out feeling more like worldly life than the sepia dream of home? Oz bristles. It’s full of happenings. Kansas is bathed in that old-timey color of certain root beers held up to the light: suspended, as in amber.
It’s also the one song in the film anyone sings by herself, to herself. Toto wags his tail and raises his paw, but his form of companionship comports with Dorothy’s solitude. All the other songs are socially driven, self-expressive, self-defining (“If I only had a brain/a heart/the nerve,” “If I were king of the forest”), or communal and celebratory (“Ding dong, the witch is dead,” “Follow the yellow brick road,” “The merry old land of Oz”). “Over the rainbow” is naked reverie.
Garland’s voice at 16 was already a tremendous instrument, at once immense and weightless, warm, never straining after effect. When she sings, her voice becomes a place searching for a place. That voice, behind or before the words, describes a space. As an adult, seeing an adult Garland for the first time in A Star is Born (1954): by now I know about her unhappy life, and this melodrama salts the wound of it. There’s something raw and excruciating in her presence. But, how to put it: she has this force, almost in spite of herself—something in her that is also too much for her. For all its longueurs, A Star is Born gives space to that overwhelming presence of hers—overwhelming because it feels untethered, not concentrated into the solid weight of an ego (it’s James Mason who channels the ego in that picture, painfully and with stateliness). Dorothy’s epithet, “the small and meek,” still lingers with Garland here. Yet the strength and expanse of her singing voice are enough to set one shaking, trembling—as the voice of the mighty Wizard of Oz (before the elaborate ruse is exposed) had set Dorothy and her companions trembling.
At sixteen, that voice was lighter than it would be fifteen years on—its wondering sounded buoyant, unwounded—but already it had a way of opening a space where there hadn’t been one before. Auntie Em has told Dorothy to go somewhere “where you won’t get yourself into any trouble.” Before she sings, she holds her one-way wise-child’s conversation with Toto. “Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto?” Wide-eyed, she ventures: “There must be. It’s not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It’s far, far away. Behind the moon, beyond the rain.” Just like that she begins to sing, the song following without stopping from her clear speech—only deeper, vaster, pellucid:
Somewhere over the rainbow,
Way up high,
There’s a land that I heard of
once in a lullaby.
That lullaby is a song within a song, and a brief origin story for the adventure to come. Perhaps it’s not meant to be dwelt upon literally, but it’s hard not to hear this lullaby as the authority on the place called Oz, the place that would spiral out from the yellow brick road through the poppy fields, Emerald City, spooky woods, and witch’s castle—and would short-circuit, with three clicks of the ruby slippers, back home to Kansas. Of course, Oz is and isn’t a place “where there isn’t any trouble.”
There’s one verse with a riddling, hide-and-seek mischief to it:
Where troubles melt like lemon drops,
Away above the chimney tops,
That’s where you’ll find me
I didn’t think I’d ever had one, but I was sure that a lemon drop must be the most delightful confection in existence—a simile, but the senses have a way of stealing the show. I always pictured the mouth-watering lemon drops when I heard that verse; they would be a deep, creamy yellow, with little whipped tops, like meringues.
*
Dorothy sings a dream of elsewhere. Going over the rainbow sounds something like going on vacation. I can see the tourism brochures: Come where troubles melt like lemon drops! At the same time, the site of her singing, right there in the sepia farmyard, is to be longed for. I thrilled at Oz, but longed for Kansas. Dorothy might yearn for this place all along, in a way that gets missed by the nauseating moral she’s made to recite before clicking her heels and returning home: “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look further than my own back yard. And if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.” What drivel. Yet we might salvage a sense of homely transfiguration. If one side of vacation is the dream of a destination, the other is its photographic negative—the dream of vacating. Kansas in sepia has this feeling of a place already vacated, an old photograph in movement. On the shores of Technicolor, you might spot a sepia ship getting tossed about, and yearn for it. When Dorothy is locked up in the Witch’s tower, she sees Auntie Em, hears her calling out from the little round cinema of the crystal ball—in sepia.
Like childhood, cinema is a formidable elsewhere. It’s another world composed of elements from this one, and tinted. The Wizard of Oz worked its way into my introduction to the world. I saw this film, again and again, while rapidly acquiring language and experience—when every day brought perceptions, possibilities, words: this is in the world, and this, and this (a home video of me from around that age, pointing to and naming all the flowers I knew—bleeding heart, purple iris and yellow iris and red iris, del-phi-ni-um). Along with this expansive newness would come a series of contractions, noticing and imperceptibly revising my sense of what bound all these things together—what things and people, bodies and spaces were like. And Oz is a land of correspondences.
One way the imagination works in Oz is by literalizing. The “horse of a different color” in the Emerald City is an idiom come to life. The figures of Cowardly Lion, brainless Scarecrow and heartless Tin Man spring up, fully fleshed, from idiomatic words spoken by the farmhands Zeke, Hunk and Hickory. And the Wicked Witch of the West materializes from the insult Dorothy hurls at Miss Gulch when that “wicked old witch” comes to confiscate Toto. While in that period of childhood I wasn’t aware that the same actors played the corresponding characters in Oz and Kansas—having no notion of actors—I was impressed that the words spoken in Kansas had mysterious and fantastic repercussions. Those words brought things and creatures into being, in the land of Oz.
In the BFI Film Classics guide to The Wizard of Oz, Salman Rushdie points to a telling difference between the film and its source-text: “in the book there is no question that Oz is real, that it is a place of the same order, though not of the same type, as Kansas.” The film risks giving in to a trope, smoothing everything over with the reassurance that ‘it was all a dream.’ It’s a trope by which very good films can lose their nerve, a way of getting rid of moral consequences, of having cake and eating it too. In The Wizard of Oz, this trope functions as a shortcut, to solve a problem of transportation and to lessen the demands it makes on the viewer’s credulity—or is it imagination?—to shift between two worlds. Which may also be a moral problem, if you accept the platitude about never running away again. Yet at the end of the film, when it most risks compromising its vision, Dorothy introduces a saving ambiguity in the force of her appeal: “But it wasn’t a dream, it was a place. […] a real, truly live place! […] Doesn’t anybody believe me?” The reality of imagination presses. Even if the adults back in Kansas, who live and breathe in sepia, cannot conceive of that other place and its Technicolor spectrum, we have seen it.
Then, of the two worlds, sepia Kansas still feels more dreamlike than Technicolor Oz. After all, the waking world we live in is full of color. If it isn’t full of talking trees and flying monkeys and green-skinned witches, there are infinite forms of strangeness. For a young child, hardly a day goes by in which something unprecedented does not take place. Why should a land like Oz be harder to credit than, say, a black box inserted into a larger black box, opening onto a larger black box, in which miniature creatures come to life and have adventures?
As a child, I don’t think the heavy hint that it was all a dream even registered. Perhaps I was less prone to draw a hard line between waking and dreaming perceptions. Or perhaps it’s an indication that the movie couldn’t discount the reality of what it conjured just by saying so. A fact of the medium of cinema, which is founded on illusions: the convincing power of an illusion can’t be undone except by an equally convincing illusion. I agree with Rushdie that we’re on the side of Dorothy in that last scene. When a place has appeared vividly, it is real. It even occurred to me that Hickory, Zeke, and Hunk knew perfectly well that they were the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and Scarecrow, and that Professor Marvel knew he was the Wizard (and several other figures in the Emerald City). They were too good-natured, all of them, to gaslight Dorothy. So why would they let on as if they didn’t know? Perhaps they were just about to burst out laughing, after the end of the movie; they’d tell her of course they remembered, of course there was such a place and such things had happened.
The reality of Oz that the movie conjures is also thoroughly “humbug,” as the Wizard himself proves to be when Toto pulls back the curtain. Knowing full well that memory plays tricks, this is one scene I swear I always ‘got,’ even as a small child, though it seems impossible. It is one of the most poignant expressions of disenchantment I know. There’s a psychological explanation at the ready: here Dorothy discovers that adults lie and dissemble, that the father has no magical powers (for he is perhaps more of a father to her than her spineless uncle). But it’s also the discovery of the bumbling physical realities on which the most fantastic imaginary worlds are built. At the heart of Oz, its beating heart, is a Kansas man, a drifter. That the film presents a sympathetic view of this man, a charlatan in Kansas as in Oz, should give pause once more to the didactic impulse. Better to be a benign imposter than a cruel dog-hater like Miss Gulch (a stickler for “the law”).
For instance: when Dorothy first encounters the charlatan, she doesn’t seem to suspect in the least that he is faking his wizardry. In fact, she displays an impressive credulity. It takes him three guesses to get that she’s running away from home, and still she exclaims in wonder, “How did you know?” Yet Professor Marvel’s kindliness is greater than his treachery. He’s generous with his sausages, which he’s roasting over a fire when Dorothy and Toto come along. He doesn’t ask for money, sends Dorothy back to Auntie Em. He practices a homely sort of wizardry, for he can see that Dorothy is loved.
In Oz, in that scene of disenchantment, Dorothy sees his treachery in a flash. She knows and doesn’t know. She sees what he’s hidden. “You’re a very bad man,” she accuses him, baldly, in that brutal way of disenchanted children. For a moment he is the child, the bewildered and vulnerable one. Until he responds wearily, and as though he’s just coming to the realization: “Oh, no, my dear. I’m…I’m a very good man. I’m…just a…a very bad Wizard.”
The Wicked Witch has a grandeur lacking in her Kansas avatar Miss Gulch, a delicious wickedness needing no justification. Her legal pretexts evaporate, and Oz distills her, reveals her in her ravishing true color: livid green—not the greenish pallor of the invalid, but vibrant, like a healthy plant. And here, the imagination, loving this color, distributes it with surprising profligacy. For the Wizard’s apparition, in his elaborate private theater at the heart of the Emerald City, has just that cast of livid green. When “The Great and Powerful Oz” has a tantrum, he emits puffs of red smoke suspiciously like the cloud in which the Wicked Witch arrives and departs. The imagination discovers a kinship between these forces, not so much good and evil as dubiously helpful and harmful—cutting them from the same cloth.
The voice of Almira Gulch, too, fills out its witchiness in Oz. It had been grating, and now becomes piercing in a way almost pleasurable, spicy to the ears. There’s no denying her mighty death scene, as she shrieks, “You cursed brat! Look what you’ve done!” Richly, she describes the rapid and astonishing changes she goes through. The legendary announcement: “I’m melting! Melting!” gives way to the philosophical, as her voice diminishes in volume, growing croakier: “Oh, what a world, what a world! Who would’ve thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?” She takes her place beside the charismatic villains of the imagination, and now seems to me like the bride of Milton’s Satan.
I find it haunting, and have never known who the Witch addresses, or warns, when she then cries, “Look out! Look out!” before bidding her last farewell, nobly facing the fact: “I’m going.” Look out for what? Is she somewhere else? Does she see what we do not? Is she a prophet? Perhaps she refers to something no longer present, as in the bizarre bit of dialogue preserving the trace of an abandoned musical number (“The Jitter Bug”), when she tells her flying monkeys as she sends them after Dorothy, “I’ve sent a little insect on ahead to take the fight out of them.” The lack of a referent is accidental, but chilling—you might forget all about it. Then later it might come back to you, that unconsummated detail. That hideous little insect hovers out there, somewhere. The Witch lingers through the strange glory of her death throes. The awed reaction shot of Dorothy and her companions has a kind of reverence, in excess of relief.
These days I suppose it is nothing transgressive—it’s even fashionable—to hold the Wicked Witch in high esteem. I may be in the minority when I say that I also still love the Good Witch of the North, Glinda, in her abundant cotton candy pink gown. As a child I thought she was magically beautiful. Now I appreciate the way Billie Burke makes herself into a figment, with her fluty voice and beatific countenance. This is apt for her, because she has no corresponding figure in Kansas. Unlike the Wicked Witch, the Wizard, or Dorothy’s companions, her existence is entirely figurative. She floats…in a bubblegum bubble, or so I once thought. Her saccharine and rather conservative moral platitudes for good little girls are off-putting, I don’t disagree. I suppose I just never took them to heart. The Glinda I love is a beguiling comedian. In her first exchange with Dorothy, her bubble has gone poof, and she asks with refreshing directness—without seeming to mind one way or the other—“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” Dorothy of course is no kind of witch, which doesn’t faze Glinda. She points her wand down at Toto and asks the next logical question, “Is that the witch?” Which provokes another of Dorothy’s outbursts of vehement innocence: “Witches are old and ugly!” I always heard Glinda’s blithe, serene (and amusing) correction—“Only bad witches are ugly”—as I might hear a lesson on how to tell a poisonous from a non-poisonous snake. There is something detached and inscrutable in Glinda’s demeanor. After all, even bad, ugly witches might be good in their way. If the Wicked Witch is unaccountably winning, the Good Witch is not merely benevolent. The words good and bad (or good and wicked) are somehow released from their deadlock in Oz, their supposed opposition growing more obscure, the more explicitly they are invoked.
The revelations of Oz do not alter the figures from Kansas so much as they amplify them, rendering them explicit. In their explicitness they remain resolutely ambiguous: the charm of the Witch, the very good man who is a very bad wizard. Glinda, without a drop of sepia in her, is a Technicolor emanation of alien goodness. I don’t know what to do with her, but there she is, brazenly existing. In part, the longing for Kansas is to restore to these beings some of their obscurity. Not to know the world so glaringly, to let it hide.
*
One of those years on my birthday, I was given a pair of sequined ruby Mary Janes, which I recall refusing to take off. I must have, sometimes. My parents were always affectionate, but would not have indulged me that far. Inevitably, I outgrew them. What I recall of them, more than wearing them, is giving them up. I put them in a paper bag to be donated to Goodwill. Nor do I suppose it was mere infatuation, not wanting to take off those ‘slippers.’ Sometimes when I mention to people my passion for this film in childhood, they express surprise—but didn’t it scare you (flying monkeys, eerie munchkins)? If it did, it must’ve been a happy fear, for me to continue seeking it out. If I learned anything watching the film over and over, it wasn’t a fear any child could be protected from. For only one thing really terrified me. It comes in the moment when Dorothy has tried to bargain with the slippers for Toto’s life. The Wicked Witch is delighted, and tries to magic them off of Dorothy’s feet. Sparks fly, and suddenly the Witch recalls the ruby slippers can never be taken off as long as Dorothy remains alive.
No wonder, as an adult, seeing The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger, 1948) for the first time: a flicker of recognition. Another film irradiated by Technicolor, the correspondence concentrates in the red shoes/ruby slippers. Except The Red Shoes, following Hans Andersen’s fairy tale, holds out no cure for the wearer. No benevolent magic intervenes on her behalf. It holds the fatal line. In childhood, the image of the hourglass with the red sand, which the witch turns over when she tells Dorothy about the protective and fatal power of the ruby slippers, became a vessel for fear—containing and focusing it. Its exact function has never been quite clear to me. If there’s some reason why the witch can’t kill Dorothy on the spot, if the slippers protect her, and yet the only way for the witch to get the slippers is for Dorothy to die… The Witch makes an ominous allusion to “protecting the spell.”
What, exactly, is going to happen when the hourglass runs out? I believed: if her friends hadn’t broken in at just that moment when the last grains of red sand slipped through the neck of the hourglass, Dorothy would’ve dropped dead. The hourglass is neutralized just in time, a defused bomb, then cast aside as the adventure hurtles onward. In the imagination, objects have just such fluid convenience. Like the objects in certain action films. Now I see shades of Jason Bourne in the resourceful Dorothy—how that bucket of water happens to be within her reach when the Witch lights the Scarecrow on fire. She saves her friend and “liquidates” her enemy (the pun belongs to the Wizard) in one elegant, economical gesture. The grace—and the force—of the imagination lies in that insouciance with which it takes up and lets go of its objects.
On the other hand, there really is an hourglass, which turns over and over until it stops—with that silent thud of the tornado dropping the house. The Wizard in his balloon, kindly and incompetent, means to transport Dorothy back to Kansas, but when she lingers in Oz and the balloon takes off without her—a seemingly fixable problem—he can’t come back; as he drifts away, up and out of the frame, he confesses: “I don’t know how it works.” There is something wonderful in the admission, resonant with much of life as I have so far known it. Only a part, and not the best part, is subject to know-how. Returning to the cinema of childhood in living sepia, I recognize and do not recognize what I see. I don’t know how it works. It is home, and it is far, far away.