We live in an age consumed by worship of the psyche. In a society plagued by division of race, class, and gender we are nonetheless bound together by a gospel of psychological happiness. Rich or poor, black or white, male or female, straight or gay, we share a belief that feelings are sacred and salvation lies in self-esteem, that happiness is the ultimate goal and psychological healing the means.
Eva S. Moskowitz, In Therapy We Trust
The wicked witch is not dead but very much alive. Her cape has caught on fire as she descends under the film set; the copper from the green makeup is sinking deeper into her face; her castmate, Buddy, was hospitalized due to aluminum poisoning; horses are painted with Jell-O powder (the horses licking their sweet exterior because of this); asbestos is pouring down onto the sea of poppy flowers; drunken vaudevillians causing a commotion; high-temperature lighting scorching the cowardly lion, drenched in its own sweat. The spotlight hits the young Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale — her body double opens the sepia-toned door, she enters the technicolor wonderland of Oz.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I dove into old movies as a way to kill time and to escape. Somehow old movies appeal to me because they reminded me of a BC (Before-Covid) time and I get to see characters with their full faces. Wizard of Oz has always been on the list taunting me. Fast forward to the 2022 present moment, we are experiencing another regional lockdown. Judy Garland in Summer Stock (1950) sings: “forget your troubles, c’mon get happy / you better chase all your cares away / shout “hallelujah”, c’mon get happy / get ready for the judgment day.” The small talk How are you? only getting more depressing, and the need to feel happy more urgent than ever. Sara Ahmed in Promise of Happiness asks:
We need to draw on such critiques now, as a way of responding to the worldliness of this now. Why happiness why now?”
Wizard of Oz seems the perfect vessel and carrier of happiness.
#IKilledJudyGarland Drag Race Moment
My first exposure to Judy Garland was through Drag Race — the makeover episode on season 5 where contestants are challenged to makeover a gay veteran into their drag “sisters.” One of the gay veterans, 66-year-old Dave knew Judy Garland in his younger days. He confessed to Ru that he may have killed her as he recommended a new drug to Garland (allegedly…allegedly). An awkward silence followed, but this personal relationship did help form the fabulous concept for contestant Jinkx Monsoon to do a Liza/Judy mother-daughter shtick. Dave was transformed into Fortuna Monsoon, and the pair worked it out. Whether Dave’s story is true or not, it did summarise Garland’s status as a camp icon in pop culture — and the underlying poignant mistreatment and neglect she received.
The plot of Wizard of Oz needs no reminding — a story about a young runaway Kansas girl who stumbled into the magical land of Oz and befriends the Scarecrow, Tinman, and the Lion, as they traverse the yellow brick road to find the great wizard of Oz with hopes to help Dorothy get home to Kansas. Turns out Dorothy has magical powers all along within her ruby slippers — that are only available to her after her journey. She wakes up in Kansas surrounded by her family. This reassures the viewer that the whole ordeal was simply a dream. The movie achieved huge success in the box office and till this day still charting as one of the most viewed movies of all time.
In 1939 the year Oz was shot, America historically was in between the end of the Great Depression and the ambiguous beginnings of the Second World War — and Hollywood serves to entertain, or distract the masses from those issues. In the same year, Albert Einstein had written to President Franklin Roosevelt about developing a uranium atomic bomb; the US Supreme Court outlawed sit-down strikes by workers; Hitler called for the extermination of Jews; the United States hosted The World's Fair in New York City. In the midst of all social turbulence, the film presents the land of Oz as a technicolor utopia, an early lesson about acceptance, diversity, and faith.
Queering/Camping Happiness
Last Christmas I finally decided to watch Wizard of Oz for the first time knowing precisely what to expect. It was a heavy and dreary watch for various reasons: the film as the genesis of Garland’s legacy; that the real-life in 2022 is too overwhelming but Oz is too elusive to grasp onto; and expectations to “feel good” and arrive at “happiness” only to be woken up to Kansas? The history of happiness can be thought of as a history of associations, Ahmed writes. If so, since when did we consent to Oz’s association with happiness? I finished watching Oz feeling some of the pieces of the Pop Culture Puzzle coming together. How much of our happiness is purported and (in)formed by pop culture such as film, TV, novels, paintings, and so forth? How does queerness, race, class identities complicate and potentially broaden our conception of happiness?
Within the queer community (especially gay men), the affinity for straight female stars is a process that queer academic Jose Muñoz calls “disidentification”. He thinks that LGBTQ+ people often retroactively assign queerness to characters or stories that are not explicitly queer as a “coping mechanism.” As an example, Muñoz suggests that when a queer person “identifies” with Garland, the subtext is him “writing his way into the mainstream culture in which his own story could never be told.” In a way to make sense of the world’s cruelty and beauty is through the trope of “camp” — finding pleasures of Oz and Garland’s own irony, aestheticism, theatricality, and humor when we find happiness to good to be true. Susan Sontag describes the camp aesthetics:
“Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a “lamp”; it’s not a woman, but a “woman”.
Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp
In our modern age so inundated by self-help/care books, mindfulness routines, and Instagram infographics, the excess of happiness appears more insidious than it needed to be. But it is too easy to see camp as a pitstop for happiness if we decide to live as a cynic and see everything upside down. How do we be more mindful of our happiness — for chemical, clinical, seasonal, or commercial reasons? Again, what are we consenting to, if or when we consent to happiness? Like what Lauren Berlant writes in Cruel Optimism, what if the thing “you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” when happiness becomes cruel when the objects we associate with happiness actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially? We no longer believe that happiness is somewhat connected to fate or circumstances; the absence of ailment, the valuation of a whole life, or a petty consolation for the foolish. Happiness is not the only goal that makes life worth living; the standard by which we should measure the size of our successes and failures, and the progress of our emotional development.
Somehow the three Judys collide altogether — did Dorothy waken to a new Kansas and as a new girl? Did Judy Garland prevail as Dorothy in one of the most ambitious productions in film history? What does Garland’s life inform our happiness as a legacy made up of the highest highs and the lowest lows? Happiness seems to always be thought of in the past tense, in the form of nostalgia; or in the future, as hope. We put things on; we put things in; we take things from; we push things out — the arduous pain and effort it takes to carry the present to the near future. All that glitters in happiness is not gold. This yellow-bricked thing called “happiness,” sometimes you wear ruby slippers and have to get a few tiles dirty to get there.
Inspiration/Further Reading
Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed
Manufacturing Happy Citizens by Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz
Wizard of Oz (1939)