My thoughts on OZ: THE GREAT & POWERFUL and the origins of villains

Like many of you, I saw Oz: The Great and Powerful this weekend.  While there was a great deal that I enjoyed about it, I felt there was one plot point that could have used a little finessing - the moment where Theodora becomes the Wicked Witch of the West that we know from all the other incarnations.

Up until that point in the movie, Theodora is played very naive.  She's got an almost child-like innocence about her and is instantly taken with the Wizard.  It's a little like watching a schoolgirl get her first crush on the bad boy.  Because of this, her heart is easily broken when she learns that Oz now seems to have moved on to wooing Glinda.  She's so deeply hurt that she accepts her sister's offer of an apple that will remove her heartache, basically by snuffing out any capacity for goodness in her.

This triggers not only an emotional transformation, but a physical one which turns her skin green and makes her features more hideous.  From that moment on, the good-hearted Theodora is now a cackling, vengeful hag who's pretty much devoted to evil.

Here's my problem with this: the Wicked Witch is one of the most iconic villains in film history and the origin we get for her is basically that she was tricked into becoming evil.  That doesn't sit well with me.  She doesn't make a choice to go bad, nor is her becoming evil the end result of a descent down that path.  Instead, the transition from good to evil is about as instantaneous as flipping a light switch.  Perhaps the creators' intent was that there'd be sort of a tragedy to this outcome, but the thing is - we don't WANT to feel sorry for the Wicked Witch. 

I remember some people had similar issues with Anakin Skywalker's descent into evil in the final Star Wars prequel.  The idea that one of the Jedi's best and brightest could crossover to the Dark Side is a compelling one, but it demands a compelling execution.  Several people came away with the sense that Anakin had been so manipulated along the way to the Dark Side that the choice was taken out of his hands, and thus, was less compelling.

In that case, I see where those critics are coming from - but at least there, Anakin is presented with a clear moment where he has to make a choice between his Jedi compatriots and Palpatine.  When it comes down to it, he cuts off Mace Windu's hand in order to defend the future Emperor, betraying everything he stands for.  True, Palpatine has stacked the deck a little by misleading Anakin into believing he needs the power of the Sith to save Padme, but Anakin dives in willingly and with little hesitation.

Unfortunately, Theodora isn't even that responsible for her own transformation and it undercuts what should have been one of the bigger moments of the film.  I think there are a lot of things the movie does right (in particular I really enjoyed the third act), but if there is a sequel, I hope the creators use the opportunity to give the Wicked Witch a little more agency on her own path to the Dark Side.

Broad villains in comedies

Derek asks:

Hi Zuul, 

First, thanks for all of the knowledge you've passed down via the site. I've picked up a lot of stuff from it and I appreciate your efforts.

I'm writing a comedy, and the antagonist is an aggressive, serious, overconfident man, kind of like Bradley Cooper's character in Wedding Crashers. A typical d-bag, if you will. I can't help wondering if the script would be funnier if the bad guy was more over-the-top, the way the bad guys Will Ferrell plays are (Zoolander's Mugato is a good example). Seems like it's more meaningful if the bad guy really is just a terrible human being, someone we hate, someone we want to see defeated by the good guy. At the same time, lots of comedies these days go with the over-the-top, likable bad guy to cash in on as many laughs as possible, often at the expense of meaningful conflict. What do you think?

It's funny you should bring this up because I was recently thinking about villains in 80s comedies and how often they were treated much more seriously than modern comedy villains.  In fact, if you made some of those comedies today, they might not even have their "serious" bad guys and instead focus more on the high concept premise.

Consider Three Men & A Baby.  In that film, three bachelor roommates are saddled with an infant fathered by one of the men.  The comedy comes from the men awkwardly embracing fatherhood, only to bond with the infant and then be faced with losing her when the mother comes back into the picture.

Oh, and there's also a subplot about a couple drug dealers trying to get their hands on a package of drugs that was sent to one of the main characters on the same day that the baby was left on the doorstep.

Wait, what?

And then there's Twins.  Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Devito are twin brothers engineered in an experiement who find each other in adulthood.  Not only are the two of different physiques, but also different temperments and lifestyles.  There's instant comedy conflict.

Oh, and in the middle of this film there's a subplot about the brothers having crossed a contract delivery man/killer who murders in cold blood anyone who sees his face.  (I'm vastly oversimplifying, but I don't want to get too much into that unnecessarily convoluted plot.)

I don't know exactly when the shift happened, but my point is that there was a time when even the most fluffy and escapist of premises seemed obligated to include bad guys willing to shoot our heroes dead if needed.  And then thing is, I wouldn't call the antagonists of either of those films "pretty well-developed."  It's not as if the gun-toting killers brought meaningful conflict.  The best I can figure is that those movies were a product of the times.

With regard to your specific question, I think that today, there's a stronger sense of matching the bad guy to the tone of the film.  You bring up Mugatu from Zoolander as an example of the over-the-top bad guy as contrasted with Bradley Cooper in Wedding Crashers.  First, I thought Cooper was pretty much one-dimensional in that film (but that might be because I've never, ever warmed to that actor).  But I think the more cogent point is, you couldn't put Mugatu into Wedding Crashers and have that movie work in the same way.  He doesn't fit in that reality at all.

Yet the other examples I cited would suggest that you can put a "serious" bad guy into an inherently light premise and not disrupt reality as much.  For your specific story, I think the answer probably lies in how elastic your reality is.  In a film like There's Something About Mary, there's enough latitude to go relatively broad with the antagonists without either making them cartoons or threatening the integrity of the film.

But this is probably a topic that could generate a lot of discussion, so what do you say, folks?