Why should anyone care about The Wizard of Oz when there's a war on? Not for the sake of escapism, no. The Wizard of Oz is about war. Didn't you know? The Wizard of Oz doesn't "escape" anything and is relevant to war, peace, love, religion, almost any topic you can name. How does it achieve this? Through the wizardry of allegory.

It's hardly unprecedented for me to call The Wizard of Oz an allegory, but it's not completely accurate, either. After all, very few things meet a strict definition of allegory these days, nor would they want to. No one gets off on Pilgrim's Progress anymore.

If your character is named "Christian" and he's sinking in a mire called "Despond" because he has a large burden on his back which eventually will be explained as Original Sin, well dang, what's the point of dramatizing it? Just step up to the altar and start preaching, why don't you?

Whatever fun can be squeezed from allegory comes from its imperfections, from the needs of drama complicating the original principles. Maybe this is why, in the centuries between Bunyan and Baum, the ropes of allegory slackened, and by the time you get to Hollywood you don't know what your characters stand for any more. Dorothy? What does that mean? The Scarecrow? Where's Gluttony?

So why am I even calling it allegory? Well, because it feels like allegory. You still have these unreal characters in an unreal place. There is no attempt to "flesh out" the Tin Man. The closest they come is to oil his hinges. Where is the complexity of a "real" character? The most complex creature is the Cowardly Lion. He's a lion... but he's cowardly! But he's a lion! But he's cowardly!

Characters who don't stand for anything definite, but aren't realistic either. Most aren't even human. Where does that leave us? Well, picture Mr. Christian talking to his buddy Gluttony. If you see them only as symbols, then you can say to yourself "Oh, that's how a Christian behaves," and "Oh that's what it's like to be Gluttonous." But this is only the most superficial interpretation of allegory. The truest interpretation comes from observing how these characters interact. "Oh, here is what happens when a Christian gives in to Gluttony. Oh, here is what happens when he resists." Therefore, the action of the allegory is itself symbolic.

And this is the wonder of the Wizard of Oz. We skip the symbolism of the characters (or change their symbolisms as applicable) and go straight to symbolic action. Everything the characters do resonates. I relate to it in a direct way. It seems to mean something beyond the limited scope of this movie -- which is, after all, merely the dream of a little girl living in near-poverty in Kansas.

One of the most obvious and powerful sources of this resonance occurs in dialog. "There is no place like home" careens through our brains for all time. Even if we don't know these characters from our own lives, even if they aren't real to us, "following the yellow brick road" is real to us. I just saw a woman at a poetry reading talk about how she didn't have a yellow brick road to follow. This just proves my point. In her case, it has come to symbolize something -- a direction? a privilege? -- that she doesn't have.

When Dorothy says to the Scarecrow, "I think I'll miss you most of all," our eyes well with tears. We don't know Dorothy. We don't know the Scarecrow. But we know that good-bye.

Reality vs. Dream
Just like in Pilgrim's Progress, the allegory of The Wizard of Oz takes place in a dream. But, unlike Progress, the reality around the dream is also a part of the story. In fact, I would say Reality and Dreams are themselves players in the ultimate allegory of this movie.

Mr. Reality is black and white. Mr. Dream is full color. What's wrong with this picture? It is the reverse of our own experience. The only "reality" of black-and-white is the reality of old movies. To this day, we think of the Wizard of Oz as an old movie that just magically turns color in the middle, but the implication should not be ignored: in some way, the dream is more real than reality.

How can that be? Well, let's assume that we see both worlds through the eyes of our central character, Dorothy. If that is the case, then we can say that her dream gives us a much more realistic view of her mind.

"Realistic" may be the wrong word here. What's so real about Munchkins with flowers on their heads? "True" is what I mean, "true" the way feelings are true, whether we like them or not. In Kansas, Dorothy walks on the fence, compelled by her oppressive sense of guilt and obligation to stay above her feelings and their potentially ugly and/or selfish consequences... but for her it is an untenable position. She falls among the pigs and lets loose the movie's first raw emotion: fear, felt by the man who will become the Cowardly Lion. But his fear has nothing to do with cowardice, it is his fear for the safety of Dorothy. And that's really about love, isn't it, the vulnerability that love subjects us to? So how does the black-and-white world respond to this display of love? With derision and scolding by the other farmhands and Auntie Em. Before the dream, he has already been cast as the coward.

This is because in Reality the truth of feelings is hidden or subverted. Maybe out of necessity. After all, the truth of Dorothy's situation is not a pleasant one. She is an orphan (why else would she be living with her aunt and uncle?). Her caretakers first betray her (by giving away her dog) and then abandon her (by locking her out of the cellar). And thus, her one motivation during her time in Oz, the desire to go home, is a sick irony. Glinda, the Oz version of betrayal, waits until the end of the movie to tell her the awful truth: there is no place like home. Not in Oz, not in Kansas.

Glinda's excuse is that Dorothy wasn't ready to hear that yet. We can only pray she is ready when she does hear it. But what could have prepared her? The answer is Oz, the place where the truths of feeling and base instinct are laid bare.

It all started with the premature deus ex machina, the twister. A more horrifying special effect I have never seen. It is a pulsing pillar of black dirt, a giant worm eating the earth. Dorothy runs inside to escape it. You know the place: "home." But as we know, home is a flimsy structure for protecting Dorothy, and we can only flinch at her attempt to relegate the storm to her bedroom window.

As sure as her fall into the writhing mass of swine, her home will fail her. The window itself betrays its own role as distancer. Rewatching the movie recently, I was expecting to see it fly open -- but no, the entire window leaps straight out at Dorothy. She thus loses her sense of perspective, her mode of perception, inside and outside are no longer separate. Then, when she has been done in by the window, we see a close-up on her head, to forever imply that this is where the movie happens.

No Place Like Home
Inside the twister, it's not so bad. Perhaps that is the only way to survive it. When Dorothy sits up and looks out her window again, which is now just a hole, the terrible storm is revealed to be a stew pot. We see the ingredients of her Kansas existence being stirred into something new. Before there is an Oz, there is a witch. The perfect antagonist, she propels all the action of the movie. When feelings are repressed, one becomes vulnerable to such a catalyst. And to fight back, she must restore her raw emotional world. Oz (the realm of Dream, the realm of Truth) is just the sort of place where that can happen.

What is the very first thing Dorothy does when she gets there, before she even opens the door? She kills the Wicked Witch of the East. And how does she manage it? With her "home!" The destructiveness and chaos of her home are finally revealed. And those legs sticking out from beneath it, with their ruby slippers, seem to be the home's own legs (the importance of a home with legs will be seen later).

"Home" finally has power: here in Oz, where love and fear are openly expressed. The Munchkins do not stand above base emotions and base human nature. They are immersed in nature. In fact, they start out bent down in a flower patch. In fact, they are the flower patch, wearing the flowers on their heads!

So... what do the Munchkins symbolize? Nature? No, they are a reaction to nature, or a relationship with nature. They do not directly symbolize anything. Remember, this is our new definition of allegory. It is their actions that have symbolic weight. Ah, the creativity this allows the viewer! Without the use of names, we must be creative about making connections, and it allows for multiple connections as well. The Tin Man has no heart. He's also made of tin. He's also a woodsman with an axe. All of these attributes allow for their own connections. But I'm not up to him yet.

The Wicked Witch of the East is a goner... and now the Wicked Witch of the West wants revenge, or at least, she wants her shoes. You see, here in Oz we don't make a big show of emotions if we don't feel them. Just give me the shoes.

The shoes are powerful, and this being an allegory and all, the shoes are Power. Dorothy wears the shoes, but when in the movie does she kick the shit out of anyone? The shoes seem nothing more than a problem for Dorothy. Get it? (Actions and interactions are the symbols here, remember?) Dorothy hates her power. She feels guilty not just for her feelings, but for her power, the spirit that you can see within her from the very beginning of the movie. So you could say that the shoes don't represent power so much as the obviousness of power, and the futility of denying it.

Yes, Dorothy, you had the power all along. Before you wore the shoes... because it's your dream, my pretty! Dorothy has absolute power in this world. Everything here, from Witch to Wizard, is here because she wants it here, because she is trying to figure something out: namely, how to overcome the troubles of life when she is too ashamed of her own power to use it.

The answer is obvious enough: don't be ashamed. But for Dorothy, the path to that answer is twisted and treacherous, because her shame is part of her morality, part of her Christianity. She must reconcile her need for power with her need for virtue.

She begins the task by creating three friends. They represent the qualities anyone would need for an adventure: brain, heart, courage. But, in a wonderful twist, they represent them through absence. Odd that, except it's not really absence, is it? Smells more like... Denial. The Scarecrow solves just about every problem, the Tin Man is constantly in tears, and the Lion, for all his blubbering, does everything required of him. Their denial is symbolic of her own, but in Oz, denial is powerless. This is Dorothy's ultimate fantasy, her wish fulfillment.

But it is not the solution to her problem. For that, she must redefine virtue. She begins with murder. Just an accident, you say? The accidental nature of it is symbolic of her denial. In Oz, the deed is declared murder, officially certified, and joyously praised. There are no Commandments in Oz, there is no inherent evil. Good and evil are decisions you make every day: "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" Preconceptions do not apply here. Your fate is not decided by your role. You decide for yourself. The Wizard of Oz is "good," says Glinda, but what she neglects to mention is that he is merely the preconceived notion of "good" or "virtue" that is trapping her. It is not the Witch that must be destroyed, it is the Wizard! He is destroyed simply by being questioned, destroyed by not ignoring the man behind the curtain.

By the same token, the Witch is a preconception of evil. Dorothy does not destroy the Witches, she re-integrates them. The first Witch is in the foundation of her "home." The second Witch melts into Dorothy's dream... and Dorothy takes her broom. Symbolically, she's gone from walking (slippers) to flying (broom). When the movie starts she's "not a witch at all." By the end she's got slippers and a broom, a full-fledged witch. Bad or good is up to her.

In the destruction of "good" and "evil," the characters are redeemed. Not by getting a brain, a heart or courage, but by realizing that they never needed them. Intelligence, love and courage are acts of will. And for Dorothy, home is an act of will. Because you see, there is no place like home. (Remember what I said earlier about the home having legs? Damned clever little allegory, isn't it?) Home is to be created.

And yet, for all this, Dorothy ends up back where she began: a whimpering child whom no one listens to and no one believes. The world is black-and-white again. But when she grabs Toto and says everything's going to be all right, we can allow ourselves the luxury of believing her. We can believe that this square black-and-white Kansas is limited by our own perceptions and expectations and that Dorothy, smiling on the bed, is still seeing Technicolor.