Sinful Sunday: Glinda and the Tensions of Queer Villainy in "Wicked"
Ariana Grande's brilliant, wrenching, and haunting performance of Glinda brings out the many contradictions of queer wickedness in the hit movie musical.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
Like many of you out there in the world, I was utterly enchanted by Jon M. Chu’s big-screen adaptation of Wicked. As I wrote in my review, it manages to flesh out the stage play in myriad ways while staying true to its source material, and there’s no denying that it is particularly adept at tapping into the queer appeal that has always been central to the Wicked phenomenon (both the book and the musical). If anything, the movie makes the ever-present queerness of the play even more explicit and, given that we live in an increasingly queer-hostile world, that’s a very powerful thing.
What I find particularly striking about the film, however, is its engagement with the fraught issue of queer villainy (or, to use the film’s own parlance, wickedness). Perhaps Glinda says it best when, during her introductory number, she asks the question: are people born wicked, or do they have wickedness thrust upon them? It’s a query that applies as much to this “good” witch as it does to her antithesis and supposed foe, Elphaba, whose alleged death sets the entire plot in motion. As time will tell, the question of who is the villain of this film is not an easy question to answer, not least because the implicit romance between Glinda and Elphaba, and the undeniable screen appeal of Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, disrupts our normal ways of making sense of who is and isn’t the bad guy.
I found Grande’s version of this character surprising in a whole host of ways, not least because I honestly had no idea that Grande was such a powerful actress. From the moment we meet here it’s clear that, however much she might be participating in the Munchkins’ celebration of Elphaba’s demise, the truth is that she bears a tremendous emotional burden. It’s there in the haunted expression on her face as she gazes up at the effigy, and it’s even more noticeable once she begins to relate the troubled nature of Elphaba’s birth and upbringing. And, once they meet at Shiz and begin their relationship in earnest, it’s clear that Glinda is as fascinated by her new roommate as she is supposedly repelled.
Everything about Wicked draws attention to the remarkable attraction these two fledgling witches feel for one another. From the moment they meet and Glinda expresses incredulity that Elphaba is green, you can tell that she’s got it bad. This being Wicked, though, the course of true love doesn’t run particularly smooth; it takes a while for each of them to get over their initial feelings of “loathing”--which, to be fair, always feel very performative, and I continue to believe “What is This Feeling?” is one of the great love songs of the musical theater. Once they do, though, it’s clear that, for Glinda, at least, the feelings are more than just platonic (there’s just too much joy in her performance of “Popular" for me to believe they’re just friends).
And then there’s the fact that they’re both enmeshed in a love triangle with Jonathan Bailey’s Fiyero. Of course, one can hardly blame the two women for finding themselves so smitten, considering the fact that the man is literally sex on legs. It’s actually quite fascinating to see the extent to which this little menage is actually an inversion of the homosocial triangle, in that it’s two women working out their feelings for each other over and through the body of a man (who, it’s worth pointing out, also gives off major bisexual vibes). It’s all just one big sexy mess, and if that doesn’t scream queer, then what does?
It’s actually been rather refreshing to see the extent to which both Granda and Erivo have been open about the potential romantic attraction between their two characters. Yes, they can certainly be read as merely platonic–and there’s an argument to be made about the need for on-screen depictions of deep friendships between people of the same sex–but I do think that Grande’s textured and nuanced performance as Glinda lends ballast to the idea that, on Glinda’s side at least, things have gone a bit further. I dare you to look at the way she looks at Elphaba with longing in her eyes and not recognize the pang of queer longing.
By the time that Elphaba has her fateful confrontation with the Wizard and Morrible, we’ve been primed to see these two as a fledgling couple, which makes Glinda’s eventual capitulation to the regime in Emerald City all the more heartbreaking. Indeed, this is the point at which her layered queer villainy finally comes into play. On the one hand, we can’t help but be furious and disappointed in her that she would be willing to go along with these two autocrats, no matter how much doing so seems like a strategy for survival at the moment. On the other hand, it’s hard not to wonder whether each of us, when faced with the same choice, can honestly say that we would have done differently.
The brilliance of Wicked’s take on queer villainy lies in its refusal to resolve this tension in one direction or the other, allowing–forcing, even–the viewer to rest in the uncomfortable space of sympathy with someone who might just have been the villain all along. Yes, it’s clear that Glinda has betrayed the woman that she loves (either platonically or romantically or perhaps both) for what the phantasm of political power in the Wizard’s regime. And yes, it’s clear that this is the morally wrong thing to do, since she refuses to believe that there can be any kind of effective resistance against those with power, while Elphaba decides to take the harder, more morally defensible route and raise the flag of rebellion.
At the same time, the film does at least allow us to have some measure of sympathy for Glinda. From the moment that she descends in her little pink bubble to sing to the folks of Munchinland, it’s clear that she carries a heavy burden, that while she has emerged from this whole conflict alive and politically unscathed–unlike Elphaba, who is presumed to have been melted by Dorothy, Morrible, who has been arrested on Glinda’s order; and the Wizard who has been banished–she has lost both of the people that she loved the most in all the world.
It’s also worth considering the fact that the entirety of Wicked is, at least in my eyes, a flashback of Glinda’s. Seen in this light, it’s easier to notice those moments when her inner vulnerability sneaks through, and it becomes abundantly clear that the thing she has wanted all along is some sense of external validation. Her embrace of Morrible while in the Wizard’s throne room is a capitulation, yes, but it’s also the culmination of her desperate desire for approval that has been apparent all along. Maybe it’s just because I’m also a people-pleaser, but this made her much more explicable to me and, while I never lose sight of her moral shortcomings and failings, I can’t bring myself to hate her.
Those of us who know how the play ends are already dreading the full extent of the tragedy about to unfold. By the time the play comes to an end Glinda ends up with neither Fiyero nor Elphaba, left behind to sing of her longing and her grief. Now, one can endlessly debate whether Glinda knows of their survival, but either with her or awareness or without it, the truth is that she is now alone. She has had to reap that she sowed and, like wicked queer villains everywhere, accept that there’s no one to mourn with her, for no one can ever know the truth: about her relationship with Elphaba; about Elphaba’s survivor; and, ultimately, about herself.