Story Spotlight: Wicked

Reinforcing our Collective Blind Spot

Over Christmas break, one of our family goals was to see the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked. Somehow, it ended up being just me and my two daughters at the theater. Asked about their absence, the men in my family gave me perfectly innocent faces—a mystery we’ll likely never solve.

What’s the verdict?

(Note: If you haven’t seen it, there are only mild spoilers ahead—just the basics you likely already know.)

On the positive side, the movie was well done. The cinematography, dialogue, and characterization were mostly top-notch. This wasn’t some low-budget B-movie, though it could have benefited from tighter editing.

One highlight for me was Glinda's character. Portraying a vain, blonde, clichéd popular girl with an entirely pink wardrobe without tripping into tired tropes is no small feat. Her witty, imaginative dialogue and nuanced satire made her both lovable and infuriating reminiscent of Cher from Clueless (inspired by Austen’s Emma).

So much for what worked.

Now, let’s examine the flip side.

The movie opens with the question: “Where does wickedness come from? How does someone become wicked?” The rest of the story can be taken as an answer to that question.

Elphaba, the witch, checks all the classic villain boxes: green skin, black hat, broomstick. But the narrative complicates this trope by exploring a compassionate response to her outer scariness.

According to Wicked, compassion sees beyond appearances and shows love to the shunned outsider. It teaches us that appearances can be deceiving.

As a standalone story — as a standalone message, that’s fine.

But this story operates on two levels.

1. The specific story of the film—a popular blonde girl learning to love a green-skinned outsider.

2. The broader cultural narrative we hold in modern America—a narrative about what compassion fundamentally means.

Every Society has its Own Narratives

One of our cherished beliefs as a society is that compassion looks past outward appearances, social status, or antisocial behaviors to find the good in people. Compassion, as we see it, gets to know the outsider, walks in their shoes, and sees the world through their eyes.

But is this the full picture of compassion, especially from a biblical perspective?

Compassion certainly involves withholding quick judgments and showing kindness to the ostracized. It’s one of the primary messages of the gospel, and some people could stand to hear it. But it’s not the only message…

Does the film also represent yet another case of cultural confirmation bias?

There are three deeper concerns with stories like Wicked:

1. Confirmation Bias

When a narrative is repeated so often, and so predictably, it becomes part of the cultural white noise. These stories confirm biases rather than challenge us, falling into our collective blind spots and offering no real food for thought.

“Every age… is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. . . . Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a mass of common assumptions. . . .

None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is anything magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger.”

—C. S. Lewis

2. One-Sided Thinking

Wicked portrays only one kind of wrongdoing—judging and shunning outsiders—and only one kind of virtue—compassion for those outsiders. This simplicity leaves no room for complexity.

Take Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as a counterexample. It’s also a story about judgment and compassion revolving around appearances and status. But Austen’s world is nuanced. The upper class is often snobby, but not universally so. The lower class can be vulgar but also noble. Both sides have their virtues and flaws, creating a richer, more enduring narrative.

But even that doesn’t quite at the point

Contrast this with the film Titanic, another story with similar themes. In this film, the upper class is almost entirely villainous, and the lower class is virtuous—a simplistic, black-and-white portrayal. Similarly, in Wicked, the bias lies entirely with the outsider. Glinda learns to show compassion for Elphaba, but Elphaba is portrayed as an innocent victim with no lessons to learn.

This reflects a Marxist-like instinct in our cultural narrative: the outsider —the minority, the perceived victim — is always right, and the established class (or those with wealth and beauty, or the white male) is always wrong.

By contrast, in Pride and Prejudice, individuals and classes on both sides had lessons to learn, had blind spots of their own, and both sides had their attendant virtues and vices.

That is a greater, more complex picture of balanced wisdom.

That is why Pride and Prejudice stands the test of time. It is still an evergreen source of constant fascination for moderns, which is saying something, considering that all they do is stand around having lengthy dialogue in period clothing.

3. Absolutized Compassion Creates Cruel Intolerance

The cultural narrative of compassion has grown selectively intolerant. It claims to champion kindness but often does so in a way that excludes dissent. In this framework, the outsider is always innocent, and anyone who questions this is inherently wrong.

We are living in the diminishing age of a retro Marxist snobbery. It peaked and is losing ground. After all, we’ve all seen the brick-throwing, rioting, screaming, intolerant side of our kindness narrative. It has spent itself to the point of exhaustion and is, I believe, waning. Which makes a movie like Wicked feel like an even more tired child of the spent nineties.

Simplistic stories like Wicked claim to challenge small-mindedness but end up reinforcing it. Complex, balanced narratives teach us wisdom and help us see the world more clearly.

And… that’s not all I have to say.

I initially planned to make a different point in this article, but the article got away from me. Next week, I’m hoping to dive into another critical aspect of Wicked: defending archetypal characters. Stay tuned.