Wednesday, March 01, 2006
The Yellow Brick Road
My wish to all of my wordly compatriots is to review, one last time, the movie "The Wizard of Oz."
The cinematic children's tale functions as a climactic moral streak into what we may also call the human condition. As you watch the scene near the end of the film when Toto pulls back the curtain and reveals an anomaly of what should have been a great, towering figure as the Wizard, you see instead a disheveled, "barely there" character with rosy red cheeks reminiscent of a boy-child's, scraggly hair pointing in every cosmic direction, and two buggy eyes frantically searching for the nearest door of escape.
Sadly, there are no doors of escape; what lay behind each door through which the Wizard existed had, instead, been opened, accosted, ridiculed, and morally subjugated. He stands there, a simple physique lacking the masculine uproar, and meekly listens to Dorothy as she poutingly enlightens him that he is a "very bad man." However, the tragic and undisturbed emotion that flows from the dialogue peaks in a cacophony of masculine truth from his admittance that, "I am not a bad man, I was only a very bad wizard."
To understand the Wizard, I personally seek to "overstand" what he so innocently, and vacantly explains to her. That "overstanding" in which the crisis in the human condition is the crisis of the identity. The crisis of joining the Man and the Wizard, joining the identity with the mask that wears it, or the mask with the identity that wears it. Is it really what we need to question, or concern our already disturbing lives with? Or will we simply chalk it up to Darwinian epilepsy and sweep the dirt where we will "never" find it again...
The cinematic children's tale functions as a climactic moral streak into what we may also call the human condition. As you watch the scene near the end of the film when Toto pulls back the curtain and reveals an anomaly of what should have been a great, towering figure as the Wizard, you see instead a disheveled, "barely there" character with rosy red cheeks reminiscent of a boy-child's, scraggly hair pointing in every cosmic direction, and two buggy eyes frantically searching for the nearest door of escape.
Sadly, there are no doors of escape; what lay behind each door through which the Wizard existed had, instead, been opened, accosted, ridiculed, and morally subjugated. He stands there, a simple physique lacking the masculine uproar, and meekly listens to Dorothy as she poutingly enlightens him that he is a "very bad man." However, the tragic and undisturbed emotion that flows from the dialogue peaks in a cacophony of masculine truth from his admittance that, "I am not a bad man, I was only a very bad wizard."
To understand the Wizard, I personally seek to "overstand" what he so innocently, and vacantly explains to her. That "overstanding" in which the crisis in the human condition is the crisis of the identity. The crisis of joining the Man and the Wizard, joining the identity with the mask that wears it, or the mask with the identity that wears it. Is it really what we need to question, or concern our already disturbing lives with? Or will we simply chalk it up to Darwinian epilepsy and sweep the dirt where we will "never" find it again...
