Wednesday 15 November 2023
A witch’s bicycle
Can you fact-check a fantasy?
Recently I listened to a lecture on film form which drew extensively from David Bordwell and Kirstin Thompson’s book Film Art: An Introduction. That book uses the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz to demonstrate an approach to analysing film form. Unfortunately the book seems confused about the time setting of the film.
Understanding The Wizard of Oz is incidental to Bordwell and Thompson’s main purpose in Film Art — what they’re about is analysing and systematising ways of thinking, talking, and writing about films. They sort the possible meanings to be found in a film into four categories: referential, explicit, implicit, and symptomatic. Referential meaning is what we see happen in the world of the film before interpretation begins. Where a film is set in a specific time and place, referential meaning can include what we know from other sources about that time and place.
So, under the heading of “referential meaning” they give the following plot summary for The Wizard of Oz: “During the Depression, a tornado takes a girl from her family’s Kansas farm to the mythical land of Oz. After a series of adventures, she returns home.” They continue: “Here the meaning depends on the spectator’s ability to identify specific items: The hard times of America in the 1930s and features of the midwestern climate.” Bordwell and Thompson appear to be referring to the Dust Bowl, the droughts and destruction of agricultural topsoil in the US and Canadian prairies through the 1930s. The year of release for The Wizard of Oz, 1939, was also the year of publication for John Steinbeck’s novel of the Dust Bowl, The Grapes of Wrath.
Why might Bordwell and Thompson be mistaken? While The Wizard of Oz was released in the 1930s, it doesn’t follow that its story is set in that time. The film is based on L Frank Baum’s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900. The opening titles of the film make clear the story’s age. The producer and director credits are followed by these words:
“For nearly forty years this story has given faithful service to the Young in Heart; and Time has been powerless to put its kindly philosophy out of fashion. To those of you who have been faithful to it in return … and to the Young in Heart … we dedicate this picture.”
That the film is set around the time of the original book’s publication is confirmed by other evidence, particularly in the Kansas sequences. There is no motorised form of transport in the film, only horse-drawn vehicles, a hot air balloon, a bicycle, and a rowboat seen inside the storm, and in Oz there is a flying broomstick used by the Wicked Witch of the West, as well as a magical bubble used by the Good Witch of the North. I thought Miss Gulch’s bicycle might be particularly useful in identifying the period in which the story is set, and went searching the internet to identify it. Might it be the appropriately-named 1898 Stormer Ladies Safety Bicycle?
Above: The bicycle used in The Wizard of Oz.
Below: The 1898 Stormer Ladies Safety Bicycle, at the California Automotive Museum.
Photograph by Jack Snell via Flickr. (CC BY-ND 2.0)
My identification is far from certain. For one thing, the company which made Stormer bicycles — Acme Manufacturing in Reading, Pennsylvania — also sold Pennant brand bicycles, and it’s hard to tell the difference between an 1898 Stormer and an 1898 Pennant. Another very possible candidate is the earlier Crescent Ladies Safety Bicycle made by Western Wheel Works of Chicago, Illinois, seen on this auction site, and in this 1896 advertisment, and on an 1897 printed guarantee. The front brake on this 1898 Crescent helps bring it close to a match. But the 1895 Gormully & Jeffery (Chicago) ‘Model D’ Ladies Rambler is close as well. A mongrel made up of various parts has also been suggested.
So the film, like the book, seems to be set around 1900, but it’s not just the time setting which is a bad fit with Bordwell and Thompson’s Dust Bowl suggestion. The depiction of the farm doesn’t show the farmers growing crops or suffering the effects of soil erosion. Instead Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are busy raising poultry and pigs and horses, and while it is hard work they appear to be succeeding. Though the family are not as rich as Miss Almira Gulch, who owns “half the county” according to Aunt Em, they are not the poorest of the poor either — they have the finances to employ three farmhands, Hickory, Hunk, and Zeke, who are later reimagined in Oz as the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion.
Home versus Rainbow
Back to the lecture which had set me off, and there, Bordwell and Thompson’s confused view of the film’s period setting led to things going further astray. The lecturer made an assertion that the film’s refrain of “there’s no place like home,” was reproducing US Government messaging relating to the Dust Bowl — “So it’s reinforcing an ideology because they didn’t want people to leave the Dust Bowl, they wanted farming to continue,” the lecturer said. This seemed doubtful to me, and checking I found to the contrary that the US Government actually tried to help people move from badly affected areas to more viable land, a policy implemented by the Resettlement Administration, later called the Farm Security Administration, as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal package of policies.
It was the Resettlement Administration that was responsible for producing and disseminating famously powerful documentary photographs of the dust bowl by Dorothea Lange and others. The purpose of these photos was to build support for the Resettlement Administration’s work — both for resettlement of farmers, a Roosevelt administration policy that was unpopular in Congress and so deprived of adequate funding, and also for building relief camps in California for migrant farm workers, a policy that also met resistance. So if “there’s no place like home” was intended as an anti-migration message, it would have been to counter the US Government’s New Deal messaging, not to support it.
There is also a question over whether “there’s no place like home” truly expresses the film’s ideology. For novelist Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz was a formative influence, and he has written about the film for the BFI Film Classics series (1992) and made a BBC Radio 4 documentary (Salman Rushdie and the Wizard of Oz, 2008). He argues that the more strongly expressed message of the film is contained in the song, Somewhere over the Rainbow, a yearning for a better life, and a refusal to accept current circumstances as inevitable or permanent. His Radio 4 documentary tells of the pro New Deal politics of Yip Harburg who wrote the song’s lyrics.
And Salman Rushdie notes that even after Dorothy returns to Kansas, she refuses to accept that Oz is a dream, insisting on its reality — another world is possible.
The film had many authors — as well as L Frank Baum who wrote the original book, three Hollywood writers received a screen credit, and as many as ten others had a hand in the script, including lyricist Yip Harburg who also contributed dialogue, and in development the project passed through the hands of three directors. So, intentionally or not, the film contains different ideas in dialogue, or in argument. The tension between these ideas is centred on the character of Dorothy — she wants both to be “good” and also to rebel, and both of these impulses are active right to the end, implying the drama will continue through her life, and allowing the audience to experience the drama as a dynamic that stays alive in the mind even after the film finishes playing.
Dorothy isn’t alone in this, there’s also her dog, Toto. Salman Rushdie writes that he finds the dog unappealing. Mechanically, one can see Toto as a device to move the plot forward, but the dog can also be seen as a manifestation of Dorothy’s rebellious nature, never fully domesticated, risking all to fight cats and their witches. Also, Rushdie notes that Dorothy’s surname is Gale — so is the tornado in the film also a manifestation of her own nature? The storm pulls apart family and home — Gale forcefully resists domestication, until Dorothy fears she has gone too far.
I shared some of these thoughts with a friend, and she warned me against spending too much time in Oz. Both conservative religious organisations and gay rights activists have found confirmation of their values in the film, she pointed out, and so like Toto chasing cats, one could go far astray chasing for meaning. But like Toto, I can’t help myself — it’s in my nature.
The children want the fall of the regime!
The idea that the film’s phrase “there’s no place like home” reproduces a US Government message or ideology doesn’t hold up, but then what ideological interests might The Wizard of Oz represent?
The film was a commercial production by a major studio, so not a state-produced film where one would very much expect a state’s message, nor a low-budget art film where one would expect an individual’s personal expression. For a production by a large studio, the imperative is to find a large audience and make a return on a financial investment. Backing a personal expression by a filmmaker may be an effective way to achieve that, but more often, as with The Wizard of Oz, financial bets will be hedged, well-known stories will be preferred over original ideas, and several creative talents will contribute under the supervision of multiple producers, so that any one personal expression is mixed with others.
While a commercial film is different to a state-produced film, a commercial studio still exists in a political context, and to reach its audience the studio may have to satisfy political demands of gatekeepers in national or local government, and these in turn may be vulnerable to the demands of campaigners on various political issues. Conversely, a commercial film may find its audience by giving expression to a popular political sentiment at odds with the government of the day.
For children’s entertainment, there are two audiences to satisfy — not just the children but also the adults who permit a cinema visit, and who pay the ticket price. Children are ruled by adults, and entertainment for children can be compared to media created under an authoritarian regime. It must appeal to its audience while negotiating its way past the censor.
I have been reading Stefanie Van de peer on cinema and animation under the Assad dictatorship, and she notes that an authoritarian regime may allow a measure of dissent or criticism in the media — within strict limits — as a safety valve to alleviate public pressure. For example, bureaucracy may be criticised, but not the existence of the regime. Film and television drama under such a dictatorship may also displace expressions of dissent into stories set before the time of the regime, or into stories about family life under an authoritarian head of the household. There is an equivalent displacement in children’s literature in the very many stories of authoritarian stepmothers rather than mothers.
L Frank Baum’s original book already had a history of difficulty with censorious adults, so I expect the film’s producers would have been on alert for any risk of adult disapproval, and adult authority could be expected to frown upon any film that suggested running away from home was a good idea. This might be a reason to include the message of “there’s no place like home” as an alibi to shield the film from adult gatekeepers, while at the same time using the story elements of rebellion and escape to appeal to the children in the audience who longed for autonomy, for liberation from the rule of adults.
As further cover, the film’s playing out of a child’s subversive fantasy of rebelling against parental authority is displaced — is actually doubly displaced. Dorothy’s rebellion is firstly displaced to be against her neighbour Miss Gulch, AKA the Wicked Witch of the West, but is then also against the parent figure, Aunt Em, who is at a lesser degree of displacement than Miss Gulch, but is still not the child’s true parent.
Miss Gulch, the Wicked Witch, is an unjust tyrant, acting through violence and the threat of violence, but Aunt Em is also an enforcer of the adult authoritarian regime, ruling through economic control and emotional manipulation. By the end of the film, the tyrant is deposed, but the ideology of the adult regime is affirmed, and Dorothy’s potential for anarchism contained. And yet Dorothy’s insistence on the reality of Oz maintains some resistance to the regime’s ideology — so the struggle continues.
Hollywood’s message
Salman Rushdie identifies the film’s message as one of self-reliance, for children in particular, in the face of adult incompetence — the incompetence of Aunt Em and the Wizard of Oz in the face of the Gulch-Witch, a failure of both family and state. Dorothy doesn’t defeat the witch alone, however, but does it through cooperation with friends, so politically one could see the story as an argument both against individualism and against reliance on the state, and for organising cooperative action.
I think however that the core ideology of the film might be a belief in the power of art and the importance of imagination in realising the potential of individuals and society, and also the necessity of imagination in confronting dangerous threats. In this, the film sits alongside several other Hollywood musicals, particularly backstage musicals, which argue for the value of popular art — the value of imagination.
The major Hollywood studios promoted a similar message in how they presented their individual brands and their industry, naming studios “Famous Players” and “United Artists” for example, and showcasing the industry’s art and craft at the Academy Awards. The studio that produced The Wizard of Oz was Metro Goldwyn Mayer whose logo bears the motto Ars Gratia Artis — art for art’s sake.
Salman Rushdie objects to the film’s device of presenting Oz as a dream world, a choice diverging from the book where Oz is presented as wholly real. The dream device might be just another alibi to shield the film from censorious adults. Alternatively, and more positively, the ambiguity over whether Oz is real can serve a message about the power and importance of imagination, as Dorothy is portrayed as having gone through a positive transformation in this fantastic film world that may or may not be a dream.
Oz may be a fantasy, but fantasy can have a power in reality, and it can help Dorothy, and help us, to understand reality and to take action in this reality. And as Hollywood promotes itself as a dream factory, the depiction of Oz as a dream can be taken as an exaltation of Baum’s fantasy world rather than a dimunition.
Imagination and the revolution
The idea that exercising the imagination is a political necessity is one I have thought about for a while. The Syrian revolution was an act of collective imagination, with many highly imaginative actions conducted within it. But in recent years when speaking to Syrian friends I have been struck by how the scale of violent disaster has now closed in the imaginative space. It’s much harder to exercise the imagination when traumatised, though I have friends who as a means of survival choose to continue exercising their imagination in areas apart from the war’s horror.
I see the international failure to respond adequately to the Syrian horror as a threefold failure of imagination — firstly there was a failure to imaginatively comprehend the current reality, secondly to imagine how bad things could get, and thirdly a failure to understand how things might get better, which has entrenched a policy of despair.
The first failure — to understand the facts and their implication in the early years of the Syrian war — can be seen as a failure of imagination because it takes a degree of imagination to interpret facts, to see a report of a death count for example and then think to compare it to other information, and to extrapolate further meaning. It requires imagination to see beyond a number, to feel what that says about what’s happening in that moment, to imagine what the number implies. This kind of imagination requires a certain resilience to the horror in order to examine it. Sensitivity to the horror needs to be tempered in order to feel its weight, its scale.
Secondly, the failure to imagine how much worse it may get — this includes a failure by the politicians of largely peaceful democracies to imaginatively comprehend how politics in other circumstances may function. Politics in the West is played with the safety catch on. A Western politician in a suit is mistaken if they look at a dictator in a suit and think they operate under similar constraints. The politics of the Assads is more like Shakespeare — but without the poetry — and you’ll learn more about likely outcomes from Macbeth than from some think-tank reports.
Western politicians liked to imagine that diplomatic words might deter Assad and lead to negotiations. For Assad, area bombing was a tool of negotiation, and deterrence was established by deliberate demonstrations of impunity through carrying out mass atrocities.
And thirdly, a failure to imagine a better future, and to make the commitments necessary to get there. From 2012 on, the Obama administration led Western-aligned states in adopting a policy of containment towards the Syrian crisis, rather than resolution. This containment policy failed again and again (see the refugee crisis, the rise of ISIS, the captagon trade, the expansion of Iranian military power) and yet the policy continued through the Trump and Biden administrations in ever more degraded variations. Containment can be necessary as a stopgap in a crisis while more lasting measures are put in place, but when it is the total policy it condemns whole populations to misery and sets conditions for future disaster.
Fact-checking fantasies
What follows from this? A need to exercise our imaginative muscles in the realm of politics perhaps — Faith Harkey, a Jungian scholar, has written nicely on Niccolò Machiavelli’s use of active imagination, as seen in his famous letter to Francesco Vettori. Machiavelli’s writing is not just powered by his imagination, it also works to develop the imagination of the reader, as Erica Benner describes in Machiavelli’s Prince: A New Reading.
To really grow our imaginative capacity, I feel we shouldn’t be restrictive about where we direct it. The imaginative muscle needs to be stretched beyond one field of interest if it is to grow strong. And it needs to be stretched collectively as well as individually. Do we have an imaginative culture? What helps the imaginative growth of our society? What works against it?
The power of imaginative ideas can also lead wildly astray, to conspiracy theories, where sensitivity and intuition overwhelm rationality and judgment, or political and religious cults. With any powerful imaginative idea, we need to analyse it carefully, not wholly accept or reject it. We need to keep open a fluid imaginative channel while avoiding being overwhelmed.
Might bringing fact-checking into the creative realms of fantasy inhibit our imaginative growth? I think not. Fact-checking our fantasies has to be part of exercising that muscle. To understand and navigate our fantasies, and to push their limits, we need to simultaneously orientate in relation to what we know of reality, to ask two questions — what can we know? — and what can we imagine? And to ask them both over and over again.
The real Dorothy
My earliest memory of The Wizard of Oz is of my mother, Dor, reading the story to my brother and I in a hotel room some time in the 1970s. We were on holiday in Mayo, staying in Healy’s Hotel in Pontoon, and our room looked out over the stillness of Lough Cullin. Once upon a time, when the lakewater was deeper, the Healy of Healy’s Hotel had been my great grandfather, Patrick Healy.
I read that the building was originally a coach house and was used by Bianconi coaches as a staging post. There is a story that one day in the 1880s, the local landowner Lord Lucan and his daughter were coming by the spot on a jaunting car when she lost her ring. A policeman, our own Patrick Healy, found the ring and returned it, and as reward Lord Lucan sold him the coach house for half a crown. Patrick Healy retired from the force and opened a pub and hotel.
There is also a story that Lough Cullin on one side of Pontoon and Lough Conn on the other were both created when the ancient Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill went hunting boar with his two hounds Cullin and Conn. They chased after a boar, but somehow an incredible amount of water poured out over the ground from the boar running about, forming the lakes which drowned the two dogs.
This is where my grandmother Teresa grew up. She had several brothers and sisters. They also had a number of dogs, one big enough to pull a cart and producing so much hair that one of the family used it to knit a jumper, if I remember that story right. Too late now to check the facts. And there was one of Teresa’s brothers, twelve years older than her, who emigrated to New York — that was Edward J Healy, born December 23rd 1892.
The story of uncle Eddie was that he planned to sail on the Titanic with a friend, but he missed catching the boat at Queenstown, County Cork, and took the next one instead, while his friend was unlucky to be on time. And the story went on that in New York this son of a retired policeman and publican then worked in a speakeasy. It may be true. At the time of his death, of a heart attack on 8 June 1942 at 64 East Tremont Avenue, the Bronx, he was working as a taxi driver. Unmarried, he had done well enough to leave money to the family in Ireland, and with that Teresa was able to buy a house at 11 Enda’s Road, Galway. By that time Teresa, with her police sergeant husband Martin Walsh, was already raising several children and soon expecting another. My mother Dorothy Ann was born the next year, 11th of March 1943.
Dor was the second-youngest of eleven children all growing up in a three-bedroom house, and by the age of thirteen she was wishing she could get away from them all, somewhere over the rainbow and off to the Emerald City. She decided to follow uncle Eddie’s example by sailing to New York, and having saved her pennies she bought a train ticket to Cobh, the Cork port formerly called Queenstown, hoping to find a ship leaving for America. But in Cobh she discovered that the transatlantic liners didn’t actually come into dock — instead passengers were ferried out on a tender, and there was no place on that small boat for a young stowaway to escape notice. She turned herself into the police and was sent home.
On her return, Dor heard that Teresa had been praying for her the whole time. She took it as an insult — did her mother not know that she could take care of herself? She had to stay through another two years of school with the nuns, then refused to sit her Inter Cert exams and demanded to leave home. Her mother refused. She had to go through two more years — at secretarial school — before she was at last let loose and went off to London aged just seventeen.
