Did the Wizard of Oz Really Happen? Or was it really just a stupid dream?
In the series of books by L. Frank Baum a little girl named Dorothy has her house lifted up by a tornado whilst she’s still in it and transported to the magical land of Oz and attempts to get back home. After journeying from her landing point in the East to the central city in the midwest and then to West, then back to Mid-west and finally to Glinda’s kingdom in the south, she finally returns home but not for long as she later comes back to Oz and later after that moves her whole Kansas family to Oz in a rip off of how Tim Burtons remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory ended (spoiler alert).
The story is a journey-to-another-world adventure series. Oz is a real place on earth surrounded by a desert that turns you into sand if you touch it (seen as one of the least bits of Nightmare Fuel in the 1980s Return To Oz movie), explaining why no other non-fairylanders have ever been there besides Dorothy and the Wizard, and later Glinda puts the whole thing under an invisibility bubble so no one can see it from overhead either, explaining why we still haven’t at least noticed it when flying over at some point.
Makes sense
In the 1939 iconic movie however, the dummies behind the production thought that the sophisticated audiences of the time wouldn’t buy the whole fairyland bullshit so they came up with the conceit that there is no land of Oz, but rather the whole things is a super elaborate dream Dorothy has after recent emotional and then physical trauma. Dorothy gets concussed by airborne debris when in her home trying to escape the twister and falls into a coma in where she dreams the houses is being lifted up and she visits a magical place with familiar faces, realizes she loves her family (and maybe has a crush on Hunk the farmhand – the Scarecrows Kansan-counterpart’s name in the movie) and wakes up safe in her bed surrounded by exactly those familiar faces in the home she never should have left.
So there’s no escaping it and no ambiguity in the movie: it was a dream. We saw her go to sleep, we experienced the dream with her, and we saw her wake up. The end.
So why did I never see it that way, growing up? Why did I never think it was a dream and filled in blanks that were not present in the actual film with theories and excuses as to the real actions behind what I was seeing? I hadn’t read the book until 7th grade, so that hadn’t biased me. I simply watched the movie and assumed it was how it should have been instead of how it actually is.
The film shows Dorothy getting knocked out and float into a dream sequence in which decidedly dreamlike things happen including her nasty neighbor Miss Gultch ride by on her bike and transform into a broomstick riding cackling witch. When its time for Dorothy to go home the transition fades in ways appropriate to symbolize waking up from a dream and she wakes up in her bed muttering what she was saying in the dream. There’s no way around what is on the screen: the bitch was dreaming and none of the events that take place in Oz actually happened except within her subconscious.
Originally the script called for the camera to pan-down and reveal the Ruby Slippers under Dorothy’s bed as an “or was it??” big ending but that was cut, again: because Dummies.
Yet as a child I decided, or rather, thought I “realized”, that both scenes were depicting physical displacements. I thought when Dorothy gets head whacked, she was merely knocked out for a few hours and was awaked by the thud of her house hitting the ground (padded by one wicked witch). What the film was depicting as dropping into a hallucinogenic state of mind, I thought was time passage. As a child I had made the flight from New York to California many times and I figured air travel from Kansas to Oz had to be at least that long, so it made sense to transition the traveling. When Dorothy clicks her heels home, I just figured the magic of the slippers was beaming her back home Star Trek style and she both got knocked out and lost the slippers in the process. Her family found her nearby the wreckage of the home after several days of her being missing and nursed her back to consciousness. The reason the scarecrow, lion, tin man, wizard and wicked witch resembled people Dorothy knew in Kansas was because Oz was partially in another dimension where many things run parallel to our world. A sort of multi-verse theory before I was mentally developed enough to know what that was.
This is in the same theme as the fact that the overbearing Mr Darling in real-life London and villainous Captain Hook in NeverNeverLand are traditionally played by the same actor in stage plays of Peter Pan, the tv Mary Martin version I watched on VHS as a kid and noticed and possibly subconsciously noticed in the Disney animation where it is slightly less obvious (to a child, anyway) that the 2 mens voices are 1.
It all made sense to me and to the best of my knowledge – everyone else who watched the movie.
In fact, I never even really considered the possibility that the movie wasn’t intended to be exactly as I just described until recently. And now, as this question torments me late at night, I wonder if it wasn’t all real indeed. After all, artist-intent only accounts for a minority fraction of any film analysis, so the fact that the film is not intended to depict an actual physical journey is nearly irrelevant to the question. The real question is what do YOU think? If enough of you watched it in a similar way that I did, then that is what happened.
So… is it? Did Oz really happen?
Everyone certainly wants it to have happened to a point where they’re willing to pretend that it did, it seems.
In the last 2 years, 2 terrible movies made by different studios than MGM (makers of the 1939 film) have made sequels or prequels that attempt to set themselves in as much of the continuity of the 1939 film as legally possible and they both depict Oz as being a physical destination that exists in real life.
Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful shows Oscar the future Wizard’s arrival in Oz and an even more terrible animated movie called Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return depicts the character in the title doing the thing it says she does in the title. and both movies depict the physical reality of Oz as exactly the parallel dimension type alternate-timeline-of-earth thing going on by depicting counterparts in Oz and Kansas with similar personality and physical attributes.
So wtf is the deal here? When you watched the Wizard of Oz, did you accept that it was a dream? Or like me did you decide it was real? Or unlike me, did you accept it was a dream but decide to retcon it, knowing full well what you were doing? Or did you know it was a dream, accept it was a dream and have no problem with Oz not ever having been a real place to this day?
It is 2:30AM on a Saturday night as I write this from my master bedroom and I cannot rest until I have answers. WTF is up with OZ?….
It might be as well to say it was a dream…but what do we really KNOW about the nature of consciousness and it’s inter-playing’s with the “material world.” We now know that the universe operates more like a thought rather than a nuts and bolts machine. Without conscious observation, matter and energy still exist, but only as infinite states of probability. If there is no conscious mind observing, its all just formless energy abiding rules that matter to…well only mindless matter.
That being said; if Dorothy’s consciousness was so vividly experiencing this world to the degree she could physically interact with it and it’s inhabitants, then what makes Oz any more or less real than the world we experience every day? When you are dreaming vividly, don’t you THINK you are there? The hopes..the terrors…we feel in dreams are as strong, maybe even stronger, then in “real life.”
Perhaps the only reason our consciousness’ don’t physically drift from one parallel reality to another on a regular basis is due to some property of matter, that an otherwise non objective energy such as consciousness, could easily break away from…we are deluded into thinking there is only here and now..a self inflicted prison that Dorothy, for a time, was able to escape from and venture into the real universe. The universe created by thoughts and dreams…and hopes.
But then again, it was the idea of Home that brought…drove…her back. Whose to say..yes Oz is real…no Oz isn’t real…how can we even pose the question when we ourselves aren’t very sure what is REAL…in OUR “real,” world. I’m pretty sure OZ is real…somewhere…:-)