Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
...On the flip side, in both the movie and the film, the wizard gets to claim that while he's a bad wizard, he's a good man if a humbug, and that goes unchallenged. Yet we see, to borrow from Hannah Arendt, how evil can be banal....
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In the movie, Dorothy was told to bring back the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West, knowing full well that doing so could have spelled Dorothy's doom ("But to do that, we'd have to kill her."). The original book is even more explicit. In
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, Dorothy and her three companions were all told in separate audiences that if they wanted their requests fulfilled they must kill the witch.
A bad wizard but a good man? I don't think so. In both the original book and the movie, a charlatan and huckster who played loose and fast with people's lives.
Wicked was an improvement in that respect; for while he could still make a public pretense of goodness, you weren't expected to believe it.