Here at Mockingbird we are known to offer you some wonderfully divergent material from time to time, and this is right up that alley;) I just found out that the 70th anniversary of the release of The Wizard of Oz was on Monday! 70 years! Since it is such an iconic part of our culture, I figured it important to recognize it in some way. I stumbled across this video on Newsweek.com of the 5 surviving members of the very large original cast of Munchkins. They are The Last of the Munchkins (not to be confused with Mohicans). Enjoy!
I’d love to hear thoughts on the theology of The Wizard of Oz, if anyone has such thoughts about it of course;) Is it a “seeker” story? Is it actually anti-Christian? Purely Humanistic? Bueller? Anyone?
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7 responses to “The Last of the Munchkins”
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I’ll offer a thought, although a short anecdote is involved. Some months back at my old firm, I went to a weekend managers retreat. The highly paid motivational speakers they got for the event were from this organization centered around a series of books and CDs and the like, all of which extol the copyrighted virtues of something called “The Oz Principle.” Basically, following on the line from that America song, “Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man that he didn’t already have,” they motivate by suggesting to businesses that they have always “had the power to go home all along," i.e. fix their problems with what they’ve already got. Needless to say, with a round of layoffs behind them and maybe some more on the horizon, that self-help message was a bit of downer to folks that weekend, many of them experiencing the beginning of the first major recession of their lives.
Thank you Len! 🙂
Len and others,
Your comment made me wonder what really is different about the message of Oz from what is preached from many pulpits and lecterns around the world today. Are we not essentially being pointed back to ourselves in many ways on Sundays?
Wadda ya think?
Great questions, Sean!
To start with we should probably distinguish between the book and the movie. I am told they are different. But I think Sean is asking about the movie — which is the think almost everyone has seen.
That said it's also important to distinguish the movie as a whole from a tiny 5 minute section of it toward the end. This is the section where the wizard and the witch give us a series of Messages (i.e. the Moral Of The Story). There's a moral for the scarecrow, for the lion, for the tin man, and for Dorothy. These moralistic messages are basically stupid and preposterous and are in fact in contravention of things clearly established in the rest of the storyline.
So one thing to reflect on is this: Is that 5-minute scene essentially a stupid thing that has been pasted onto the end of the story, and we should just consider it an artistic error unconnected with the movie as a whole? If you do that, then to answer Sean's question you spend your time thinking about the big narrative arc of the story, and all the things that happen in it, and so on.
Or do we take Sean's question to be about that brief scene at the end and all the stupid messages we are given?
My feeling is that OZ is a great movie that is marred by a stupid scene at the end. It's following in a tradition of moralistic lecturing in children's fiction that was very widespread in Victorian children's stories. We still hear it in the phrase "And the moral of the story is…."
(Incidentally, Lewis Carroll bitingly mocks that tradition in his ALICE books.)
Thanks Stampdawg! Your points also remind me of many sermons I have heard in recent years. For the most part they are very Gospel centered, but the end "application" time ruins the rest of the message.
I had never really considered the theological parts of the movie. interesting.
dorothy is trying to get home. everyone is giving her advice. the witches are trying to stop her. the general advice is to follow the yellow brick road to see the wizzard who ends up being the sizzle without the steak…
what would one make of all that? The problem is that, as a Lutheran Christian, I would be looking for a Christ-figure in all of this. I don´t see one… so ….
I think you're right, Frank. I don't see a Christ figure either. The movie seems to illustrate a bad theology, which ends up telling us to look inside ourselves instead of outside to an external savior. In fact, the movie sets up the potential for an outside "savior" in the Wizard (as a straw man), and then knocks that notion down. For that reason, the movie almost seems like an attack on the Christian notion of a saving God.
SO, the theological implications of The Wizard of Oz are not good, and I just wanted to explore those a bit more because they give us a picture of where we actually put our faith as a culture.
Anyhow, thanks for all the comments!