Orwell Spins a Hole to China, or How Dorothy Didn't Get It

an essay written September 1, 2008

Conservatives believe that Liberals are enemies of “America.” This is what politics are about in this country. Not issues, or policies, or credentials, or personalities, or freedom, not the economy or national security or government spending or foreign policy, or even religion, but the great Cultural Divide that causes conservatives to distrust liberals, to misunderstand and believe, in their paranoia and refusal to engage in self-reflection, that we are out to destroy them and this nation. All of the real issues get swept behind the curtain behind which the little men hide, the Manipulators. Some of us want to expose what is going on behind that curtain. The majority of people, however, prefer to watch the pageant that is being projected and to pay no attention to the little men at the controls, in the same way that they like their technology, but are not curious about how it works. Curiosity killed the cat. So, as does everything else in life, our politics all boil down to one of our greatest cultural treasures: The Wizard of Oz.

For me, the annual showings of this movie on TV when I was a kid was by far the most dramatic yearly event that permeates my childhood memories. Even more than the moon landings, with the astronauts' amazing returns to Planet Earth by parachute into the sea, and which I thought for a while were some kind of annual patriotic celebration, some sort of high-tech display of our national superiority, something akin to the Fourth of July; more than Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, played every Thanksgiving, which was far too creepy and vengeful for my tastes; more than Santa Clause flying gifts in from the North Pole, perhaps because I was just too confused about how he entered our house through our skinny chimney pipe, never satisfied with the answers that sounded as contrived as those I was hearing about how the dinosaurs could have walked the earth for over a hundred million years, yet the Bible was still somehow right about God having created the Earth in six days; more than anything else, I remember those vivid, scary, visually magnificent scenes, one compelling moment after another, complete with sing-along songs and quotable quotes and the unforgettable cast of characters, each one unequivocally representing either Good or Evil, with the single exception of the mysterious and powerful Wizard of Oz.

I have a childhood memory – I must have been about ten years old at the time – of laying in bed after seeing the movie one night, running the story line through my head, thus searing the magical imagery indelibly into my mind. The scene that stands out most to me now is the one in which Dorothy has been captured by the Wicked Witch of the West, and her hapless friends, peeking timidly down upon the heavily guarded fortress, decide that they must rescue her. The Tin Man feels strongly in his heart that they must do something, Scarecrow thinks up a plan, and Cowardly Lion bravely leads the the charge. It seems to me that as I was falling asleep, I looped through from the beginning several times up until this important scene, but never got past it. Perhaps my mind was busy processing the realization that that was where the three companions had proved to actually have the qualities that they thought they were lacking. I woke up the next morning with the impression that I had dreamed all night about it, inserting myself into the story line and acting especially heroically when it came to that deciding moment of facing the castle guards with their haunting chant and those big furry hats.

Several decades later, during the nineteen nineties, I remember taking note of how that iconic movie had saturated our cultural consciousness. Lines like “We're not in Kansas anymore” and “lions and tigers and bears, oh my!,” as well as any reference to flying monkeys or munchkins were immediately identifiable and prevalent in pop culture. I had begun to take an interest in how our culture was influenced by ideas that originated in the stories and images of previous popular culture, how our language was saturated with common phrases that could be traced back to movies and television, although most of us were completely unconscious of their roots. It fascinated me to think about how our entire national identity and understandings of ourselves were tied to these entities, to movies and programs that at once mirrored the attitudes and biases of the times from which they originated and also added new ideas and ways of looking at the world and ourselves, defining us as well as guiding us through the maze of our path from past to present to future.

One day, I was shocked to come upon a person who had never seen The Wizard of Oz. This information astounded me – what red blooded citizen of this great nation could have avoided seeing this movie at some point in their life? It was akin to never having heard the Pledge of Allegiance. The incident got me to thinking about how deeply embedded the movie really is in our national consciousness. What did this mean, exactly, and why did I find it so shocking? How might this lack of cultural indoctrination have caused this man to be free of the messages inherent in the movie? What were those messages? "Good conquers Evil." "David prevails over Goliath." "Follow the Path, and you will be led to the shining Emerald City." "God-like figures are really just projected images." "Strength – Intelligence, Compassion, Courage – comes from within each of us, not from without." And, of course, "There's No Place Like Home." Hmmm, this man was a traveler, a counter culture character, an incredibly intelligent person who never followed convention and had a vivid imagination. I thought about those messages, and about our cultural biases, and about this man and why it was that I was finding myself falling in love with him. I, too, wanted to be a traveler, and to throw away the chains of convention. It wasn't that he was trying consciously to repeal all of the cultural mores that the movie had set forth for us all, because he was immune from them, inoculated. He was simply independent of all of that. I, on the other hand, had been steeped in it. I was going through a process of examination of what it was, exactly, that I valued about my own culture, and what I thought might not be so valuable.

I went through the lessons of The Wizard of Oz again, and evaluated what I held to be the most important among them. Sorting through the list, I placed "Strength coming from within" at the top, with "God-like figures are really just projected images" coming in second place. These are the themes that resonated with me, but obviously, not with everyone in my culture. Why? What were others most influenced by, that I guess I wasn't? It seems almost ridiculous to think that, despite all that beautiful imagery and singing and dancing and brave encounters with evil witches and their obnoxious flying monkeys, despite that beautiful song at the beginning, a classic expression of the human spirit to dare to dream of a better world, Somewhere Over The Rainbow, despite all of that, the strongest message, which is reinforced by the use of Technicolor to highlight the difference between the dream and the real worlds, is to reject all that and get used to the dreary black and white world, because dreams are only dreams, while Auntie Em and the rest of the gang are at home, loving you, which is more important than dreaming, and because you belong at home in Kansas, on the farm, and leaving your loved ones behind and searching out a better world just wouldn't be nice. You can dream the dream, but don't go there, because your family will miss you and worry about you, and you wouldn't want to upset them, now would you.

I did exactly that, and my family was pretty upset with me for a time. Never mind that our nation was built by individuals and families who dared to leave their loved ones behind and set out into unchartered territory, risking their lives, not secure in their futures, but going anyway. Maybe it is just us women who are supposed to stay at home for the sake of the family, or alternatively, go away with the husbands since, after all, our fathers have traditionally paid their fathers to take us off their hands before we embarrass them by popping out a bastard child. It seems to me that only since the dawn of modern communications have mothers become so insistent on those regular phone calls, and only since the advent of modern transportation was it expected of people to gather from afar to celebrate those family holidays, in a mad flurry of activity in the skies and on the nation's roadways. The conceit is seen to be that one would deny their family their presence at such gatherings, not that we as a nation take for granted the resources used up by all that travel back and forth across the continent, for the sake of the family, and as a symbolic yet often contentious show of unity, as in their attempts to subvert deep divisions and painful memories, everyone pretends that their “family values” are intact.

So, in the movie, Dorothy didn't want to be Over The Rainbow from the moment she arrived there. And while the characters that she meets learn to look within themselves to find those strengths that they didn't know they had, Dorothy never looks inside her own self. She is not lacking anything but her family in Kansas, as she goes through all of her adventures with the single-minded determination to get back home. Her big epiphany at the end is, "The next time I go looking for my heart's desire, I won't look any further than my own backyard; if it's not there, then I never really lost it to begin with." Huh??? What was her “heart's desire” again? It was to go Over The Rainbow, which, according to the song, meant she wanted something different, leaving her troubles behind, to explore somewhere far away, to achieve her dreams. Well, apparently, her dreams were to get a little attention from her family and friends at home. She turns out to be the kid who couldn't wait to go off to summer camp, but then is homesick the whole time she is there. Turns out, this is an entire movie advocating the virtue of homesickness, not about daring to follow your dreams.

No wonder our society is so confused. Talk about mixed messages! This movie just adds to all of the other unexamined messages that mainstream society advocates today. Go ahead – dream the impossible dream, sing about rainbows and bluebirds and escaping the ordinary – but then forget about it. Your family has made so many sacrifices for you, you inconsiderate, insolent, home-wrecking, utopia-envisioning ingrate. And your ancestors paved a certain road for you to follow, brick by back-breaking brick, so you will be dishonoring them if you refuse to stay on the path laid out for you. And even if they did horrible things, like enslave people or kill a bunch of Indians who were in their way, they did it all for you, so that you could have a nice big house in the suburbs to raise their grandchildren in. Follow your dreams, but only if they are approved by the dream police, and only if they follow the script, the scripture. And don't even think of giving or taking away any of the special privileges that belong to the upper class. If you are from the lower classes, well, good luck. You must not be working hard enough if you are unable to break through all the barriers that are in front of you, or you are not smart enough, or not worthy enough, and if you are successful, you must have benefited from unfair affirmative action programs. Try cheating – that usually works, especially cheating the government. It's fun, and fruitful! Honesty is overrated and will get you nowhere. Exaggerate, bluff, use some botox, color your hair, improve your image, because Image is everything. But above all, play along with the rest of us. The real world is black and white, not multicolored, and “America” is the land of the free, the home of the brave, the liberators, the good guys, the morally correct – just don't look behind the curtain at how we really operate the ship of state.

Poor Dorothy. She goes, she sees, she returns, having learned nothing from her experience. She is like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon, whose intelligence is dramatically increased through an experimental surgery, and who experiences a much fuller life as a result, but then tragically reverts to his previous state of mental obtuseness. Or how about Jeffrey Beaumont, in the movie Blue Velvet, who innocently descends into the dark underbelly of society, a reality hidden from the white picket fenced, perfect, and pure world that he lives in, where he rescues a woman named Dorothy from unspeakable horrors, then emerges unscathed, unaffected, clueless, back to happy land and white picket fences and innocence and singing birdies, as indeed, the entire film goes in one ear and out the other. David Lynch made an entire movie based on the concept of “in one ear and out the other,” and nobody got it! The haunting theme of Flowers for Algernon, should also make people think about how we become more fulfilled humans by expanding our minds, keeping ourselves open to change, and experiencing other realities, but that gets obscured by the puritans who object to the guy experiencing the joys of sex once he becomes smart. The sad, sad truth is that our society does not want to expand its collective mind. It does not want to improve itself. It resists change, because it thinks that things are just fine the way they are, or even better, the way they used to be, before the hippies corrupted the youth with their mind-expanding drugs, weird music, anti-authoritarian attitudes, colorful clothes, and birth control.

Dorothy not only saw a Technicolored dreamworld, where she might have learned about strength coming from within, if she had paid any attention, but she also exposed the Wizard for the fraud that he really was. She saw that the Godhead was just a show, a projection on a screen, with colored lights and amplifiers and pyrotechnics for extra added effect. She questioned the authority of the Great and Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and found that the show was being run by a regular, if particularly clever, man. In her dreams, Dorothy was a hippie! Questioning authority figures, looking behind the curtains of power, befriending society's outcasts... but, then again, there are the mixed messages, as she also diligently follows the path and longs for the adventure to end and the normalcy of Kansas to return. I guess that most of Hollywood's biggest commercial successes are so successful precisely because they appeal to a large number of people on very different levels. After all, they are not out to change us, but to make money off of us all. It just seems that despite the popularity of heart-warming themes like "David versus Goliath," or "the Triumph of the Underdog" in movies, when it comes to real life, this culture accepts the Goliaths and the Behemoths to actually be the rightful leaders of society because of some kind of (rather Orwellian) Ayn Randian/religious conviction about Natural Order and Social Darwinism... but that is the subject of another essay, entirely.

Our cultural identities ultimately draw most heavily not on the "David versus Goliath" themes nor on the counterculture messages or the deeper meanings present in many of our movies and television shows, but rather, on the more heroic and simplistic themes – the "Good versus Evil" and the "Us versus Them" dichotomies, love stories (sexy as well as more innocent), any excuse for excitement (fights, chases, violence, near-misses) and pageantry, iconic road pictures, rags to riches stories, an obsession with mobsters, and family reunions. So despite how beloved the movie of The Wizard of Oz is by our society, when it comes to questioning authority or looking behind the curtains of power, that is considered insolent and, increasingly, un-patriotic. A patriot follows marching orders, keeps in line, respects authority, and doesn't ask questions, nor should a patriot question the moral authority that is supposed to be inherent in our nation's soul, or question its motives, or its honor, or suggest that we might be a better nation if we would do these things in the spirit of sincere self-reflection. No, that would be blame-America-first liberalism, which is the enemy of all that is unquestionably superior about this nation. Hollywood and the art of movie making is an “American” institution, and the entertainment industry has become an integral part of the military-industrial-corporate-congressional complex that projects only the images and the narrations that it wants us all to see, so that it may play its part in maintaining the status quo of wealth and power distribution, or rather lack of distribution. The entertainment industry must stick to the script, even as those alternative narratives sneak themselves in at times. For that counter culture, maverick image has been surreptitiously conscripted for the cynical purpose of supporting the overarching narrative by projecting independence and attitude as a cultural value, to sell people on the idea that they are bucking the system when the Orwellian reality is that they are falling right in step with the narrative that they are being sold.

I am speaking, of course, about the presidential campaign of John McCain and his newly-chosen vice presidential running mate, Sarah Palin. George Orwell is spinning in his grave so fast, he is about to reach China. McCain and Palin: the Maverick Outsiders. The specter of these two and their surrogates, standing before the Republican Conventioneers, the Conservative Right doing their usual spinning of facts at unprecedented angular velocities, is just insane. Liberals hate America. Republicans are not partisan. Our candidates will change Washington, get rid of Big Government, step outside the Beltway. Pay no attention to the Cocktail Circuit Liberal media, except for the ones who support us. If we say something, it must be true. When they say anything or criticize or point out contradictions or falsehoods, they are lying. Never mind that we are the ones that have been in charge of the government for the last eight years. Infanticide. 9/11. Nukes. Vote for us.