Let's psychoanalyze the hell out of "The Wizard of Oz"

Cafe Society
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Brought to you by the Campaign to Get Skald to Post About Something Other Than Tolkien in CS

Please note that I wrote “The Wizard of Oz,” with quotes and everything. I am, in other words, referring to the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland; if I’d meant the book, I’d have written The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and if I’d meant the characters there’d have been no quotation marks.

TNT played the movie several times over the horror-days, and though ordinarily I might not have bothered with it, I learned that my son’s sister, “Liz,” who is living with us now, has never seen it, which gave me an excuse to indulge. So as Liz, Mrs. Rhymer, and I sat down to watch the whole thing through, I noticed something about the Cowardly Lion: his behavior is only a more extreme version of Dorothy’s. Several times during the movie, Dorothy cowers in the face of danger, only to forget her fear when Toto or one of her friends is in danger. Since the whole Oz experience is but a dream, it seems likely that Dorothy was working through her own feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy in imagining the Lion’s behavior.

That’s just my thought, of course. Anybody else want to take a swing at it?

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If we view the Wizard as a paternal figure, and the Witch of the West as a maternal figure, we must conclude that Dorothy wanted to kill her mother and have sex with her father. :smiley:

Oh, and the balloon is a phallic metaphor. It goes off prematurely.

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The delivery of the broomstick is clearly an attempt to restore potency to the father figure, rescued from the emascualting mother figure.

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Been a long time since I saw the film. If I remember right, there was a sequence in which the Wicked Witch causes poppies to bloom along the Yellow Brick Road, which puts them to sleep. The Good Witch then kills the poppies with a snowstorm.

Clearly, Dorothy recognized that her dependence on opiates might prevent her from reaching her goals. Unfortunately, she merely replaced a heroin addiction with a cocaine addiction.

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We have to view Glinda as a meddlesome old passive agressive bitch. First of all she puts the shoes on Dorothy, who doesn’t want them. This only ensures the witch will “off” Dorothy to get them.

Sure the West Witch was a bit miffed about her sister dying but that was only a trivial feeling.

Glinda “Could’ve” told Dorothy about going home ASAP, but chose not to do so hoping she’d get killed.

With the East Witch and West Witch gone and Glinda already assuming control of the North and South and amalgamating them into one, and the Wizard gone you can only assume what hell Glinda would wreck digused in the name of good.

Dorothy was a classic moron. When Glinda told her that the shoes had great power, Dorothy never asks nor makes any attempt to figure them out. When the West Witch is shocked by them, Dorothy never seemed to make the connection she could have hopped at the West Witch charging her while shocking her with her foot.

The racist Lion, remember him saying “I do believe in spooks,” when black people obviously exist is nothing more than a weak attempt at humour. Instead of dealing with the situation he is trying to deflect from his danger by telling racist jokes. The flying monkeys are also clearly a racist joke, at the expense of African Americans.

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Um…that’s a POLITICAL reading, not a PSYCHOLOGICAL reading. You seem to be missing the central idea of the thread. Since everything between Dorothy getting knocked out by the cyclone and waking up to find Auntie Em looking down on her is a dream, Glinda can hardly be called “passive-aggressive” towards Dorothy; she’s PART of Dorothy. Why does Dorothy’s subconscious set up the situation to prevent herself from going home? Why is Glinda the only major Oz character without a real-world analogue? For that matter, why doesn’t Uncle Henry have an Oz analogue?

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The Scarecrow, Tinman, and Cowardly Lion never existed at all, but were Dorothy’s manifestations of her id, ego, and superego.

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Which was which, or is the word “respectively” meant to be implied? :smiley:

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Respectively. The Scarecrow wants what it wants and doesn’t think about it, the Tinman comes up with a way to get it ignoring all feelings, and the Cowardly Lion is the perfect representation of the idea that “Conscious doth make cowards of us all.” It’s only with courage that we overcome the superego.

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As soon as Dorothy gets to Oz, the first thing that happens is that she kills the Wicked Witch of the East. This is clearly a reference to her mother, who died in childbirth bearing Dorothy. For further proof of that, note that she first lands in Munchkintown…the Munchkins, with their diminutive stature, clearly represent infants. Further, after the witch is killed, her slippers wind up on Dorothy’s feet…this is Dorothy’s “inheritance”, so to speak. Her protests to Glinda and the Munchkins that “I didn’t mean to kill her”, shows her residual guilt at her mother’s death.

Glinda, who appears at this point, is Dorothy’s idealized version of her mother, glimmering and beautiful, but ultimately, unable to help her. At the same time Glinda appears, so appears the Wicked Witch of the West, upset that Dorothy “killed my sister”, and demanding the slippers the Wicked Witch of the East had. The Wicked Witch of the West is, of course, no one other than Aunt Em (or at least Dorothy’s image of Aunt Em), whose sternness Dorothy fears (Aunt Em was the disciplinarian, compared to her more laid back Uncle Henry), and who she feels resents her for, as Dorothy sees it, "killing her sister (Dorothy’s mother).

Glinda being dead, is unable to help her “get home” (i.e., reenter into the loving family structure that Dorothy feels she misses out on due to her absent mother), so Dorothy has to go to the Emerald City and see the Wizard (Uncle Henry, as will be explained later).

So, Dorothy sets off, and along the way meets her personal insecurities (the scarecrow, tin man, and lion, representing Dorothy’s own feelings of stupidity, fear of inability to love, and cowardice.) These images are so well known that I don’t really have to go into much detail, I’m sure, although I will point out that feelings of inadequacy, emotional abandonment and timidness aren’t uncommon among orphans).

So, after meeting her companions (although, of course, her neuroses really are with her always), she manages to get to the Emerald City, where she meets the Wizard, who seems at first to be a terrifying figure, but, as we will learn, is really less impressive in fact (much like Uncle Henry, who as the head of a rural Kansas family, should be the paterfamilias, but in fact, has turned over the leadership role to Aunt Em.). The Wizard will help her get home, but only if she kills the Witch and brings back her broomstick. (Dorothy has externalized all her negative feelings at her situation…her orphanhood, the poverty in which she lives, etc., and placed it all on Aunt Em. Aunt Em has become, for Dorothy, the source of all her misery. How much better it would be, she thinks, how possible it would be for me to have a home, a real home, if Aunt Em were out of the picture and it were just Uncle Henry and me. We could have a happy home together. There’s no doubt here’s a strong Electra Complex going on here as well.)

So, after leaving the Emerald City, Dorothy is captured by the Witch, who wants her slippers, and is willing to kill her to get them (We’re seeing here, again, Dorothy’s fear of her aunt, who, as was mentioned, she believes resents Dorothy and wants her dead). She accidentally kills the witch by splashing her with water (This, on the one hand repesents Dorothy’s prayers for water, which was on the minds of every Kansan in the depression, but on the other, more personally to her, it represents Dorothy’s supplanting of Aunt Em’s role…pouring water to “keep down the dust” was a common household chore, and by doing it, Dorothy has become “the lady of the house”.

Her mission successful, Dorothy returns to Oz, only to find out that the wizard is a fraud, that her companions possessed all the traits they were seeking all along, and to be informed by Ginda that she can get home by herself. This is a kind of breakthrough for Dorothy…she’s done what she’s prayed for…Aunt Em is dead, and it’s just her and Uncle Henry, but she’s still not happy, she still can’t feel “at home”. But what she comes to realize, indeed by this very failure, is that her insecurities are baseless…she is smart, she is loved and capable of loving, she is brave, and that the cause of her misery was never Aunt Em at all…it was her…she chose to be unhappy, she chose to be alienated, and she can now choose to reverse that.

So her voyage of self discovery over, she now awakes, a wiser and more psychologically integrated young woman, to the loving embrace of her family…her uncle, and yes, her aunt, who she now knows doesn’t resent her for her mother’s death, and who, in fact, loves her (and who, now healed, Dorothy is capable of loving back).

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Captain Amazing… wow.

That was excellent!

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Captain Amazing, you are AWESOME!

Best line. Brilliant!

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Huh. I always thought the Wicked Witch was the neighbor lady who wanted Toto be put down. (And the Oz experience was a shared dream - so neighbor lady is now inexplicably drowned in her bathtub, or something.)

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I took Captain Amazing’s utterly brilliant post to mean that Dorothy–who does not want to admit that she’s angry at her aunt and disappointed in her uncle–substitutes the cruel neighbor and charming psychic for them in her dream. If she had put Em and Henry’s faces on the Witch and Wizard, she’d have had to admit to herself that she thought Em was a bitchy tyrant and Henry a feckless charlatan. But the neighbor and the psychic are safe; one is obviously mean, and she hardly knows the other. By visualizing them, she can work her problems out n a safe way.

By the way: Captain Amazing is, like, Elrond.

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Skald the Rhymer writes:

> Why is Glinda the only major Oz character without a real-world analogue? For
> that matter, why doesn’t Uncle Henry have an Oz analogue?

Uncle Henry is a secret transvestite who occasionally goes to the big city and dresses up as a woman in certain bars there. The costume he wears looks just like the way that Glinda dresses. In her dream, Dorothy includes Uncle Henry by imagining him the way that he sees himself in his mind.

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Dare we say… amazing?

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We dare! We dare!

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It’s all about the shoes. Shoes with POWER. :smiley:

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Aww, shucks. 'Twern’t nothin.

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Does Auntie Em, though? The farmhands are the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and Scarecrow. The traveling fortune teller was the Wizard, Miss Gulch was the Wicked Witch. No Auntie Em or Uncle Henry analogues that I can recall.