An interesting philosophy paper: ‘That Man Behind the Curtain’: Atheism and Belief in The Wizard of Oz. I don’t think the movie The Wizard of Oz is exactly an atheist movie, but represents the current transition we’re experiencing, where the old-fashioned beliefs are becoming increasingly untenable and unsupported by the culture as a whole, while people are still largely uncomfortable with abandoning the traditional big guy in the sky.
This decaffeinated belief—this belief without belief—is everywhere in The Wizard of Oz, even in the film’s conclusion. When Dorothy finds herself back in Kansas, she tries to tell her family about her voyage, but Aunt Em silences her, saying, ‘You just had a bad dream.’ Dorothy replies, ‘But it wasn’t a dream. It was a place.’ When she tells the farmhands and Professor Marvel that they were all there, they laugh. Aunt Em tries once more to convince Dorothy that she has been dreaming, but Dorothy protests: ‘No, Aunt Em. This was a real, truly live place.’ As she continues to describe her experience, she is again met with laughter. But when she indignantly asks the central question—‘Doesn’t anybody believe me?’—Uncle Henry responds by saying, ‘Of course we believe you, Dorothy.’ Her family and friends offer a kind of ‘decaffeinated belief’. They do not really believe her, of course, but they do not wish to shake her faith. Believing in belief, they allow her to maintain her delusional inner conviction that Oz is real.
It is worth noting that ‘decaffeinated belief’ has likely been around as long as belief itself; similarly, belief in abstract (rather than anthropomorphic) deities certainly pre-dates the modern era. (One thinks of the connection made between God and the Word in the opening verse of John, for example; or later, Spinoza’s move toward a kind of pantheism.) Nevertheless, Žižek and Dennett are correct to suggest that various forms of diluted belief have taken on special force in modern times. It has been difficult for many (particularly in the especially religious United States) to come to terms with the serious challenges to the supernatural offered by Darwin, Marx, and Freud. When Hegel and Nietzsche declared the death of God, believers scrambled to put God on life support, re-defining ‘God’ in abstract ways to make belief seem more defensible. Few intellectuals could still argue for traditional conceptions of God in the post-Darwin era (for example, God as a divine watchmaker, pace William Paley), but belief itself refused to become extinct; God mutated into more arcane, abstract notions in order to survive the skeptical spirit of modernism. It is this simultaneous loss of belief and maintenance of belief in the modern era that is captured perfectly in Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz.
There are lots of little bits throughout the movie that give the game away — which never really jumped out at me because I take their attitude for granted. Now I might just have to watch the whole thing again sometime to look for them. Also, flying monkeys are just cool.
It occurs to me that the movie holds another allegory showing that “old-fashioned beliefs are becoming increasingly untenable” when the curtain is drawn back to reveal the real Wizard.
L Frank Baum was definitely a freethinker and secularist. CFI has a blog entry describing him as such . He sent his children to the secular Ethical Sunday Schools.
Unfortunately the Theosophists have also laid claim …
I’ve always liked this criticism of Wizard of OZ by author Peter David:
The modern god is hiding behind the Big Bang right now. And nervously eying the multiverse. He may have to move again.
He missed the Wicked Witch of the East. She is a metaphor for whatever you want, I guess. These days it would be the fundies and the Tea Party. Unfortunately throwing a bucket of knowledge on them hasn’t worked the same.
Hmm. I’m not sure I give Marx and Freud major cred for challenging the supernatural. Marx did argue that religion was a tool of exploitation but that was an argument against the moral authority of actually existing religion, not an epistemological or ontological claim. He was an atheist but he did not personally provide a philosophical challenge to the supernatural per se. In fact I would say he was influenced by Hegelian mysticism and had a kind of faith of his own in a teleological interpretation of history. As for Frreud, I don’t particularly see the relevance at all. He made up (preposterous) stories about the development, organization and operation of the human mind, based largely on his imagination, not science. I would spread credit around for effective challenges to the supernatural much differently — including such people as Galileo and Newton who lived before it was really possible to deny religion publicly (and if you read Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems you will definitely wonder if he might have been a closeted atheist), and then Darwin, Einstein, Hubble, and the later biologists, physicists and cosmologists who developed the scientific means of understanding of the universe we are groping for today. And credit to social scientists and social philosophers who have deconstructed religious belief and explained it as a social phenomenon rather than a set of truths about the world much more effectively and rigorously than Marx and Engels ever did.
I dunno about the Wizard of Oz, but it is true that for many people, religion has become a largely superficial recitation of words and rituals that doesn’t really assert a coherent or meaningful belief system.
Yip Harburg wrote the music and much of the dialogue for the movie and he was an atheist. He also had a book of poems called “Poems for the Irreverant.” He was blacklisted for a while in the 60s. A lot of popular standards that have a humanist viewpoint were written by him. “Brother, can you spare a dime?” I want to say he wrote “Aint Necessarily So” as well, but I might be wrong about that.
Gershwins. Porgy and Bess.
You guys might find this interesting, given the present balance between atheism and biology around here:
http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_475_what-your-t-shirt-really-means_p15/#9
@amylacc #6 – According to the Wikipedia entry for Yip Harburg, he wrote a successful musical about activist Amelia Bloomer (Bloomer Girl) and one that satirized the McCarthy witch-hunts (Flahooley). His best known show (Finian’s Rainbow, in 1947) featured what was Broadway’s first racially integrated chorus line.
Definitely an interesting person.
L. Frank Baum was definitely a freethinker, but probably not an atheist; he was probably what we would call today “spiritual but not religious,” and didn’t approve of adults indoctrinating children into religion or making religion a significant part of public life. The Oz books are great if you’re looking for fantasy books with strong female characters (Baum’s mother-in-law was Matilda Joslyn Gage, a noted feminist) or for an alternate world that’s not a total rip-off of Arthurian legends and motifs.
Someone should have locked up L. Frank Baum for putting poor Dorothy and Toto through such a delusional experience. I blame the poppies.
Interesting theory, but me thinks it’s overinterpretation. The “it’s just a dream” ending of the Wizard of Oz is just a typical Hollywood ending, trying to ruin the whole film.
It’s worth noting that the film version is different from the book. E.g., there are no farmhands and no malicious neighbor lady in the book. One can’t draw conclusions about L. Frank Baum from the movie, and vice versa.
BTW, is “Return” a movie based on The Land Of Oz? FWIW, the book includes a satire of feminism (General Jinjur and her army.)
it’s another Illuminati plot!!!!!
I didn’t like the movie when I was a sprog, and still don’t like it. The adults in my house liked the movie much more than the kids.
@David Wilford:
The book is very different from the movie.The most obvious change is the fact that in the book, the events in Oz really happened, and were not a dream. Dorothy makes several return trips to Oz in subsequent books and eventually settles in Oz for good in “The Emerald City of Oz” along with Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and Toto. At the end of the film, when Dorothy is about to return to Kansas, she tells the Scarecrow that she’ll miss him the most. This line was kept in as an error, as it refers to an earlier version of the script when there was supposed to be a romantic subplot between Dorothy and the farmhand who plays the Scarecrow in her dream, which was thankfully scrapped (this was also when Dorothy was imagined as being an older teen, rather than a girl of around 12 or 13). The slippers were silver in the book, but were changed to ruby to better showcase the Technicolor technology. The 1939 movie better captures the spirit of the book than other iterations of the story, and it’s a fine film, but I just wanted to point out that there are many differences between the two works.
@ thinkfree:
The genuine differences between the book and film aside, Dorothy’s experiences from the POV of the movie viewer are genuine, and it’s her friends and family who don’t have a clue about the Land of Oz.
@3 (Tony! The Queer Shoop!) said
You should check out this short animation from How It Should Have Ended : http://bcove.me/hdhwfpx9
I like number 11.
A bunch of different people worked on the WoZ script and there were a gazillion rewrites. What made it onto the screen was a pastiche; I wouldn’t look for any coherent philosophy behind it.
I think that for Baum, the Wizard symbolized real-life figures–politicians, rulers, and other powerful people. Pastors and priests, too. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”–the one trying manipulate you into believing.
Similar dream parallels occurred in Time Bandits. There, the god satire was fairly direct. Most, if not all of the characters and environments encountered were present in the bedroom as toys before the bandits arrived.
I was hooked from “Return the Map to Me!” A brilliant scene.
I think that this is my favorite “atheist” quote from the movie:
There is a palpable, maybe almost invisible influence that this story has had in our culture. I wonder if widespread reading the story or seeing the adapted screenplay hasn’t created a permanent and enduring idea that “reality” behind myth (any myth) or indeed any report of fact (any report, any fact) is surely much less spectacular than is thought on first look. The consequences of this wouldn’t necessarily have immediately positive effects, I reckon. People don’t universally enjoy disappointment.
I’m certainly not the only one, therefore, to see in the Wizard of Oz a source of strong metaphor and not the only one to use a reference to elements in the Wizard of Oz in illustrating the impossibility of fleshing out parts of the story which don’t actually exist within the narrative: Any claim of agnosticism with respect to knowledge of a narrative not explicitly included in the narrative is to misunderstand something about narrative and about knowledge as such. One simply cannot contrive a logical framework that will fill in the details not included in the story! One cannot simply leave the Yellow Brick Road at will and explore the terrain of Oz; it isn’t in the story; it doesn’t exist!
I think that the last couple centuries has displayed a cultural arc of belief that travelled through a long period in which to fully doubt was considered as suspect and unseemly as to fully believe. I think this ‘decaffeinated belief’ corresponds to — I feel like I’m invoking Žižek here — a nearly equal ‘decaffeinated dis-belief’, to the end that people are accustomed to falling back on a bland Agnosticism rather than rely upon what they know. This is still true. I blame Thomas Huxley.
Well, not Huxley as much as people in our inherited culture who speak and act before thinking. The fear being, I suppose, that if one thinks too hard, the reality they’ve conceived will disappear from view. Better to say “cannot know” and act — and I think this is part of the phobia — than to “know” and be unable to act.
Another hypothesis is that The Wizard of Oz is an exploration of the emptiness of post-Reagan conservatism. The clear cut distinction between good and evil, “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” The only loose end i need to tie up is how L. Frank Baum got ahold of a time machine.
@thinkfree83 #16
Even 12 is pretty old. The pictures of Dorothy in the edition of the book that I used to have made her look to be about 6 years old. My impression, back when I was reading every Oz book I could get my hands on, was that the books were pitched to children under about 10 — maybe because I was between about 6 and 10 years old when I was devouring them.
By the time I was 11 or so, I’d learned that the world is a brutal and cruel place, and imagining a place like Oz simply made reality harder to bear. I suspect I’m not the only one.
@AMM #24
I meant that the Dorothy in the film is supposed to be about 12 or 13. The Dorothy in the book version appears to be about eight, and by the time she settles in Oz permanently in “The Emerald City of Oz” and she ceases to age, she seems to be elevenish. It’s interesting that you mention giving up Oz at 11, because that’s when I really became interested in the books, and I’ve been a card-carrying member of the International Wizard of Oz Club since then. Martin Gardner was also an Ozophile, and wrote a really good Oz book that combines the early 20th century whimsy of Baum’s Oz with modern concept (the Oz characters travel to our world through a wormhole and are mobbed by the 24-hour news cycle).
Something I forgot to mention in my previous response is that one reason why I got drawn into the Oz books is because at the time (11-12 years old), I was having a very hard time in school from a social perspective and Oz was a welcome respite from the cruelty that surrounded me. “Strange” people are the norm in Oz and as long as you aren’t hurting anyone, you’re accepted. This is one reason why the Oz film and the books have traditionally had such a strong gay following. The Oz books also portray strong female protagonists (Dorothy, Ozma, Glinda, Betsy, Trot) who use intelligence and courage, rather than violence to solve problems. It wasn’t until this past year, when I became cognizant about the sexism in the atheist/skeptical movement, that I began to realize how unique the Oz books are in this regard.
@Tony! The Queer Shoop! #3: I always read the film (I’ve never read the books, so none of this necessarily applies to Baum) as a despicable exhortation to the destitute, starving farmers of the Dust Bowl to be content with their lot in life. Futurama’s deeply, appropriately cynical deconstruction pretty much sums it up with one line from Professor Farnsworth: “Now click your big, honking boots together three times and wish to go home to Kansas, to live in poverty with your dirt-farming, teetotalling aunt and uncle.” Pass. I’d rather crack myself in the head and hallucinate singing little people and endless opium fields. The narrative itself is engaging, if occasionally executed somewhat poorly (as with the aforementioned deus ex aqua), but the framing device sets up deeply questionable ethics for the parable.
>>>BTW, is “Return” a movie based on The Land Of Oz? FWIW, the book includes a satire of feminism (General Jinjur and her army.)
There’s actually two movies (both made by Disney) called Return to Oz. The first was an animated cartoon in 1972 with the voices of Liza Minnelli and Mickey Rooney and others and was based mostly on the Land of Oz. General Jinjur and her army are replaced with an army of elephants (also afraid of mice, apparently).
The movie discussed is a live action from 1986 which is mostly based on Ozma of Oz. It features Jean Marsh as a multi-headed Mombi (Languidere) and a clay animated Nome King. Most-well remembered for having Dorothy narrowly escaping electro-shock therapy. This movie was good (at least *I* thought so) but it can not in any way be argued to be atheistic. In fact, it argues a rather bizarre “duality” between the material world and Oz. Oz is still a dream world but it very clearly is a real dream world with real influence on the material world (and vice versa).
cervantes: I agree that Darwin posed more serious challenges to the supernatural than Freud or Marx. Nevertheless, in spite of his bizarre and baseless theories (Oedipus complex: I’m looking at you), Freud did claim that “reason will replace faith in God.” Also, his central (and correct) insight, that we are largely motivated by irrational unconscious forces, in its own way undermines beliefs in the rational workings of the universe and Providence.
And Marx (in spite of his flirtations with mystical teleologies) said, “The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses.” So I think we should give Freud and Marx their due–even if they both slipped into superstitions more frequently than Darwin did.
I just like technicolor.
That one suddenly makes a… bit of sense if you were brought up by a nanny, as Freud and his rich upperclass patients were, and your mother was a sort of stranger to you.
A greater effect than Marx, though, was caused by Lenin and his successors & imitators. Suddenly there’s a country (and then more and more countries) whose government openly proclaims there is no god, even prosecutes religion*, allows women to speak and to work in mines, sins left, right & center, and there’s no fire & brimstone from the sky, no Egyptian plagues, no god-fearing conquerors, nothing! I think this had a profound influence on conservative believers, deconverting many of them.
* For a while, before beginning an odd collaboration.
John Horstman:
Wizzin was a version of Oz I could get behind.
This might be a good time to grab a copy of Baum’s Life and Adventures of Santa Claus which celebrates Santa’s spirit of kindness and generosity. The story has its theistic elements with the immortals of the forest, but the Western religious tradition is almost absent. There was a pretty good animated movie made of it by some Japanese company, and the story meshes nicely with popular Japanese spirit world stories, except it’s Santa Claus.
Baum seems to have been an old fashioned atheist, the kind often noted in the late 19th and early 20th century. He or she might reject religion and belief, but felt that institutions and traditions were important. For example, the atheist in one of the Betsy Tacy stories was proud that his town had a church, as it showed that the townspeople had civic pride. (Actually, the Betsy Tacy stories have what we would consider quite an alien view of religion, as something to do, not something to believe.)
To this Oz book lover the suggestion that the movie out-atheists the book are fighting words.
But I have to admit disappointment and distress in the idea I see around that atheism is somehow incompatible with fictional fantasy. Accepting fantasy within the construct of a story is not a violation of atheism any more than reading a work of fiction is a violation of history (as a simple trip to the newspaper archives and city register will verify that the events in the novel you just read never actually happened.)
The “it was just a dream” was nothing more the conventional device that was cliched and expected at the time; one that is cheap and nearly universally regarded as one of the most disappointing aspects of the film.
Memory is a funny thing but, if memory serves, that is exactly the impression that I had upon seeing this movie for the very first time.
When I was about eight or nine. If I remember correctly. Now, that makes me wonder.
If a child of such a young age who was devoid, at the time, of any religious instruction could formulate such a conclusion about the tension between “belief” in personal experience and apprehension and the convictions (read, “beliefs” mixed with a healthy dose of religious instruction) of the elders, then what is the difference between the wisdom of a child and the wisdom of an elder? Are there significant differences between the beliefs of children and adults?
If not then subtracting the “healthy dose of religious instruction” from the equation results in the statement: 1=1.
I leave you to draw your own conclusions. I’ll just toddle off and recreate Gramie and Grampa’s lake house at Christmastime about 1959. A fire crackles in the fire place and a small boy seeing The Wizard of Oz for the very first time. On a black and white TV*. Snuggling into real down pillows in a huge easy chair. Odds are that there was a dog curled near my feet and Grampa was pegging candy kisses at me from around the corner.
*sighs the size of the Local Group*
*When I later saw the movie in glorious full color I was delighted to find them almost exactly as I had imagined them. Of course, by then I was an old hand at translating shades of TV grey into familiar, real world colors but memory is a funny thing . . .
When Ted Turner et al were colourizing everything they got in their claws, there was a was a floating joke about colourizing
The Wizard of Oz.
I found said joke to be metadroll.