WAVE “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”

“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” Video

The piece consist in a deconstruction of the film “The wizard of Oz” and it is presented as a result of mixing fragments of the movie with the intention to do an interpretation of the novel of L. Frank Baum from a queer theory point of view. Reveling some of the issues about why “ the wizard of oz “ has become part of the gay culture, and what are some of the mechanisms has been created a process of identification around homosexual community with determinates elements that constitute the movie. The video also analyzed new meanings and hided messages as a re-lecture can have.



The video show some of the most relevant clips from the movie that has been appropriated for the queer culture to defined the condition of being gay. Some of the songs like “somewhere over the rainbow” or when the Lion interpreted the song “If I had the nerve”:

Yeh, it's sad, believe me, Missy,
When you're born to be a sissy
Without the vim and verve.
But I could show my prowess,
be a lion not a mou-ess
If I only had the nerve.
I'm afraid there's no denyin'
I'm just a dandelion,
A fate I don't deserve.
I'd be brave as a blizzard...
I'd be gentle as a lizard...
I'd be clever as a gizzard...
If the Wizard is a Wizard who will serve.
Then I'm sure to get a brain, a heart, a home, the nerve!


Other relevant song can be the part of Glinda one of the good one’s witches that sang this song:

Come out, come out, wherever you are
and meet the young lady, who fell from a star.
She fell from the sky, she fell very far
and Kansas, she says, is the name of the star.
Kansas, she says, is the name of the star.

As we can see that term “came out” was appropriated in the 70 with the meaning of sexual liberation and came out the closet.

For the gay community of the 70´s and the post war , and much more for people that weren’t lived in the city was pretty hard to had a sexual liberation with a repressive and hostile live in Oz was mean to be a nice, there over the rainbow.