There is a moment in Jon M. Chu’s recent American fantasy film Wicked: Part 1 when the real world intrudes in a most unsettling way.
Adapted from Stephen Schwartz’s long-running stage musical, Wicked: Part 1 (hereafter Wicked) is a revisionist retelling of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as seen through the eyes of its infamous villain, the Wicked Witch of the West. According to Wicked, before she became the stuff of childhood nightmares, the witch started life as a young woman named Elphaba Thropp, an outcast on account of the color of her skin, a dark shade of green shared by no one else in the land.
The moment arrives late in Wicked, when those in power, as part of an unjust smear campaign, issue an edict declaring that Elphaba’s skin color is “but an outward manifestation of her twisted nature.” As the camera closes in on Elphaba, we watch the slur’s visceral impact register on her face. We are watching not just Elphaba’s face but Cynthia Erivo’s, the gifted actor who embodies the role and is a woman of color. Racism, past and present, against people who look like Erivo — and me — supercharges the moment and allows it to punch far above its weight for a scene in a film packaged and sold as a family-friendly pop confection.
By leaning into the dual presence of character and actor inherent in theatrical performance, Wicked points to the future of representation in the American film industry. This future is one in which the industry appreciates the unique contribution that talented actors and filmmakers from underrepresented communities can bring to the allegorical tales of marginalization that have become popular with moviegoers worldwide – and quite salutary to studios’ coffers.
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Adding Green to Hollywood’s – and America’s – Social Imaginary Palette
While some films about real-life marginalization have difficulty securing financing and finding an audience in Hollywood movies, American tales of allegorical marginalization appear to have no such trouble. Consider that 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese’s well-received film about historical crimes committed against the indigenous Osage community in Oklahoma, earned roughly $160 million during its theatrical run. That same year, Francis Lawrence’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, a tale of inequality and oppression set in a fictional post-apocalyptic world, earned twice that amount. Meanwhile, James Cameron’s science fiction colonization allegory, Avatar: The Way of Water, earned an astounding $2.3 billion the year before.
These box office numbers help explain why Scorsese had to go outside the industry (to tech giant Apple) to obtain financing for his marginalization tale. In contrast, films about allegorical marginalization have become franchises firmly embedded in major studio slates.
The first quarter of this century alone has seen allegorical depictions of marginalization become a central plot device in several American major motion picture franchises. Besides The Hunger Games and Avatar, so far this century, we have been treated to allegories of discrimination and homophobia via the beleaguered mutants in the X-Men series (2000-2020, various directors), apartheid allegories in the wizarding world of the Harry Potter series (2001-2011, various directors), and genocide allegories in the rebooted Planet of the Apes series (2011-2024, various directors).
Ironically, this increased interest in films about marginalization has not translated into more opportunities for actors and filmmakers from historically marginalized communities—especially communities of color—to tell or headline these stories. No actor from such historically marginalized groups in the United States as Black, Hispanic, or Asian headlined any of the century-defining marginalization allegories mentioned in the last paragraph. These are some of the American film industry’s biggest films, receiving the most attention from audiences and the studios that made them.
By dint of their popularity, these allegories of marginalization add to the repository of cultural artifacts that compose what philosopher Charles Taylor calls a culture’s “social imaginary”—a society’s ingrained boundaries for what it believes can be possible. The ingrained nature of the imaginary means those within the culture are often unaware of these boundaries or what may lie beyond them. In the words of English literature professor Karen Swallow Prior (by way of historian Timothy Gloege), a social imaginary amounts to “a set of unexamined first principles”.
The consistent exclusion of people of color from the culture’s most popular stories reinforces an unexamined principle of inherent inferiority about these groups that has been part of the American social imaginary for some time. This inferiority principle, in turn, burdens these groups with a sense of what American scholar Salamishah Tillet calls “civic estrangement”, the feeling of not being a full citizen of the country regardless of legal claim. In the American film industry, the inferiority principle results in a de facto caste system in which artists of color do not participate fully—if at all—at the most valued “tentpole” tier of a studio’s production slate, where many of the popular allegories of marginalization reside.
Representing Green in a Jim Crow Hollywood
In her 2019 book, The Hollywood Jim Crow: The Racial Politics of the Movie Industry, Sociology Professor Maryann Erigha runs down the impact of this production caste system on African-American industry professionals. Pouring through the leaked emails from the famous hack of Sony Pictures’ servers in 2014, Erigha confirms the presence of this race-based tiered system.
The emails reveal a sentiment among top executives that “there isn’t a large inherent upside” to tentpoles with African-American leads because they “don’t play well overseas”. This despite the studio’s longstanding relationship with African-American actor Will Smith, a bona fide star, whose Men in Black science fiction film series for the studio (1997-2012, dir. Barry Sonnenfeld) consistently landed a spot among the top-grossing movies for the respective years of their release—with over half of the grosses coming from overseas markets.
That this sentiment regarding the inferiority of talent of color in the marketplace persists in the face of the success of Men in Black and other minority-led tentpoles like Ryan Coogler’s Marvel superhero tale Black Panther ($1.3 billion gross, with about 48 percent coming from overseas engagements) and James Wan’s urban-flavored vehicular mayhem saga Furious 7 ($1.5 billion, with 77 percent coming from overseas) indicates that there are more than market considerations at work in the studios’ executive suites.
Profoundly ingrained assumptions about people of color place invisible boundaries on the executive imagination, making the marketplace inferiority narrative axiomatic. In turn, this narrative explains casting decisions that consistently exclude actors of color from consideration for suitable lead roles in tentpole marginalization allegories, as was the case with Gary Ross’ 2012 film adaptation of the popular novel The Hunger Games.
Author Suzanne Collins’ 2008 bestselling novel told the story of Katniss Everdeen, a young woman with “olive skin, gray eyes, and black hair” living in a marginalized district of a post-apocalyptic American dystopia. When the inevitable film adaptation was announced, many fans of color eagerly hoped that in a break from tradition, the career-making part would go to an actor of color given the nature of the story and Collins’ physical description of the character, which was ambiguous enough to justify a non-traditional approach. Grasping the significance of the moment, Marissa Lee, a co-founder of Racebending.com, a grassroots organization advocating for underrepresented groups in entertainment, wrote a letter to the studio heralding the “unprecedented opportunity for young actors of color to star in a tentpole film.”
The part of Katniss Everdeen became a career-making opportunity for Jennifer Lawrence, a talented white actor with blue/green eyes and auburn hair. Many fans of color were disappointed at the news, especially when reports surfaced that the casting call for the role expressly requested a caucasian actor for the part. While no official explanation emerged for the decision to exclude non-caucasian actors for the role, it is not far-fetched to speculate that practical market considerations acting as proxies for the American social imaginary played a role in the decision. It is particularly ironic that, at the time, Jennifer Lawrence’s marketability was untested. The studio just took a chance on her – a chance they could have taken with a non-caucasian actor.
Whether the executives in charge were aware of the American social imaginary’s influence or not, The Hunger Games’ exclusionary casting decision amounted to a missed opportunity to give an actor of color a shot at the big time and also see what fresh take they might have brought to a popular allegory of marginalization. Instead, the casting choice affirmed the unexamined racial inferiority principle embedded deep within the centuries-old national imaginary while at the same time contributing another artifact to it in a perverse feedback loop. In a 2014 essay dissecting the significance of the casting, Professors Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Emily D. Ryalls conclude that the casting call succeeded in “placing whiteness at the center of the film”.
Deeper Shades of Green
Twelve years after the first Hunger Games film was released, the producers of Wicked did not miss the opportunity to go a different way. Not only did they break with tradition by anchoring a major tentpole with a Black actor, but they also placed Blackness at the center of the film. Choices small and large, like the styling of Elphaba’s hair in micro-braids or the way anti-Elphaba propaganda banners in the film caricature her looks in a manner reminiscent of actual racist flyers used throughout the Jim Crow South, remind audiences that there is a real Black woman under all that fantasy green. This point has not been lost on Black audiences, with one viral social media post declaring that “Wicked is for Black women what Barbie was (intended to be) for white women,” drawing a comparison to Greta Gerwig’s 2023 top-grossing film, which, incidentally, was another allegory of marginalization.
Placing Blackness at the center of Wicked’s marginalization allegory enriched the story’s impact. An actor’s body on stage or screen belongs to the character and the performer. The two exist in a kind of artistic superposition state. In Wicked, the presence of a Black body in superposition with the character of Elphaba meant that some scenes landed differently than if they were a white body. Put differently, non-traditional casting allows for examining the material in fresh ways.
For example, during most of Wicked, Elphaba desires to be cured of her green skin “condition” and be “normal”. In a typical Hollywood allegory of marginalization, one with a white actor in the lead, such moments would be unremarkable. However, knowing there is a Black body under Elphaba’s skin raises at least one provocative question: What skin color would Elphaba consider “normal”? As presented in Wicked, Oz appears to be a multi-racial society. “Normal” citizens come in all skin colors, from white to black and everything in between (save green). If Oz’s social imaginary is anything like the American one, does that mean there is a preferred color?
Questions about what is “normal” are of particular import to members of minority communities in multi-ethnic or multi-racial societies. They are particularly important in a country like the United States, where E Pluribus Unum represents something of “an unofficial national motto”, borrowing a phrase from American Studies professor Heike Paul. By placing a Black body in superposition with its green-skinned lead character, Wicked raises richer ontological questions for the general public and the kinds of questions minority communities will immediately recognize as their own. This recognition relieves some of the civic estrangement imposed by the American social imaginary.
All of which is to say that representation matters.
A Green Future
In her 2020 book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, African-American journalist Isabel Wilkerson notes that the assumed inherent inferiority of people of color in the United State’s social imaginary is in part the result of “a thousand films and images in America, implanting into our minds the inherent superiority in beauty, deservedness, and intellect” of those in the dominant caste, i.e., white. Within the nation’s film industry, Erigha notes that this inferiority principle results in attitudes among industry insiders that “liken whiteness to culturally preferred movies and better financial investments.” In multi-racial/multi-ethnic societies like the United States, greater representation from historically marginalized communities of color in the stories that form the nation’s social imaginary can contribute significantly to reversing this damaging assumption and lead to the civic enfranchisement of these communities.
With a total box office haul of $685 million and counting as of this writing, including about $230 million in international receipts, Wicked proves, once again, that there can indeed be a considerable upside to major studio releases fronted and/or made by people of color. This kind of financial success also proves that, with the proper support from the studios, there is no reason to continue the Hollywood Jim Crow practice of excluding artists of color from playing in the topmost production tier of tentpole filmmaking, particularly when it comes to the allegories of marginalization so popular with audiences today.
Moreover, the upside is not only financial but also cultural and social. Wicked shows how the presence of actors of color in lead roles can enhance the impact of marginalization allegories by interrogating the material in fresh ways for the benefit of all. At the same time, the presence of these actors invites other people of color to see themselves in popular stories that will go on to shape the American social imaginary. Over time, if more genre productions follow Wicked’s lead, one hopes this changing imaginary evolves into something more hospitable to the concerns and aspirations of historically marginalized communities of color in the United States and elsewhere.
Works Cited
Baum, L. F. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Wikipedia.
Taylor, C. Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press eBooks. 2004.
Prior, K. S. The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. Brazos Press. August 2023.
Tillet, S. Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination. Duke University Press. July 2012.
Erigha, M. The Hollywood Jim Crow: The Racial Politics of the Movie Industry. NYU Press. February 2019.
Collins, S. The Hunger Games (Hunger Games, Book One). Scholastic Inc. September 2008.
Dubrofsky, R. E., & Ryalls, E. D. “The Hunger Games: Heroic whiteness and Femininity”. National Communication Association. 1 August 2014.
Paul, H. The Myths That Made America : An Introduction to American Studies. Columbia University Press. August 2014.
Wilkerson, I. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House. February 2023.