Mat Plendl | Revenge of the Wicked Witch / 1993

the wicked witch of the west gets a gig in las vegas

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mat Plendl (screenwriter and performer) Revenge of the Wicked Witch / 1993

 

Despite The Wizard of Oz’s truly iconic position as a gay classic, I have always felt a bit uncomfortable describing it as a LGBTQ pic. Yes, there is the cowardly “dandy-lion,” a girl who feels quite unhappy with her current identity, and an entire world of fairy pixies she dreams up as an alternative to her rural Kansas life. The witches of her real world represent strictures of authority which she would like to escape but has no way of doing so despite the love of her practical Auntie Em and uncle. In visiting the wonderful and colorful world of Oz, Dorothy has clearly entered a queer world of possibility. In the process she rediscovers her ability to think, her heart, and her courage, all the things a young possible lesbian girl might need to come to terms with herself. But…this is a world that is coded even beyond what one might describe as a 1939 coded film. It’s a truly wonderful fantasy that isn’t truly about sex—which I’d argue is at the heart of all LGBTQ films. But The Wizard of Oz is a coming-out story for anyone who feels compelled to be like everyone else in his or her community, straight or gay equally, which is why it is so totally appealing.

      But then there’s this wonderful 1993 deconstruction of the film by Mat Plendl, which deliciously and quite queerly explores the wickedness, several years before the far blander Broadway musical by Stephen Schwartz Wicked (2003), in a manner closer to the later gay comic entertainer Randy Rainbow.

      Plendl has reclaimed the original story, like a fractured fairy-tale, as an evil Grimm-like story in which the witch is no longer villain but a secret hero, desperate for the ruby slippers in order to prove herself to her family who have obviously disowned her for her wicked ways. She is the true lesbian hero to which the sweet Dorothy might only aspire to, witches long being associated in literary and cinematic presentations of lesbian behavior (read my essays on Bell, Book, and Candle of 1958 or Ulrike Ottinger’s Laocoön & Sons from 1975, and there are others).

      Through his wonderful performance addressed to plastic flamingos, a representation of the famed Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, this dissatisfied bitchy witch wants the ruby slippers simply to get the powers from which she, the outsider, has so long been refused. (“The shoes sure are pretty. Pretty enough to kill for? I bet you’re just about do go tippy-toe down the yellow-brick road to break ‘em in.”)

       But since the story doesn’t really permit it, she sourly settles on forgiveness and a new act in Vegas where Plendl pelts out several witchlike songs, including Lorenz Hart’s and Richard Rodger’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen’s “That Old Black Magic,” and Carolyn Leigh and Moose Charlap’s “I’m Flying.”

      Plendl’s movie displays a true camp spirit that, in a sense, redeems the somewhat saccharine tale of Dorothy in dusty Kansas, to end by suggesting to Auntie Em “There’s no place like Vegas.”

     This version of The Wizard truly confirms its queerness and over-the-top excess.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).