The Wicked Witch Is Dead: The Double-Bind of the Villainess’s Backstory | Features

Life after death, for the villainess at least, began in 1995 with children’s author Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Maguire’s novel is a revisionist take on 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming, and the 1900 novel by L. Frank Baum upon which the Fleming film is based. As its title suggests, Wicked tells the story of the Wicked Witch of the West, whom Judy Garland’s Dorothy kills accidentally with a bucket of water. Maguire fleshes the Witch out, creating a protagonist where earlier she was a stock character, hoping to turn her into something much more human than the personification of evil. The idea for the book came to Maguire after a meditation on the origins of evil — is a person born evil, or are they made evil? By calling someone wicked, do they then become wicked? 

Maguire’s book morphed by 2003 into the vastly successful Broadway musical Wicked, written by Stephen Schwartz, according to which a person is made wicked by society. The musical’s success prompted the idea for a revisionist tale of another notorious villainess: “We thought we could do a Wicked thing with Maleficent and show her backstory,” Disney producer Don Hahn said in 2016. “That was just the germ of the idea and it sat in animation for a while. We did some development and some drawings on it, but then it went pretty quickly over to live-action, where it sat.” Until 2014, when Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie, was released to box office success: it made $758.5 million worldwide against a budget of $180 million. By the time Cruella, starring Emma Stone, came around in 2021 (making $233.5 million against a budget of $100 million), a trend was beginning to emerge.

The mid-2010s saw the rise of girlboss feminism: an application of feminist ideology to individuals within the capitalist structure. Girlboss feminism begins and ends at equality of the genders in the workplace, suggesting not only that a woman is capable of achieving the same level of success as a man, but also that her good lies in this. This ideology ignores the skewed and brutal workings of patriarchal capitalism that might prevent a person, no matter how hard she may try, from succeeding, focusing instead on the individual’s actions and their ability to become like men to gain purchase within a system that is not seen as collectively oppressive. Girlboss feminism is all about getting what you want through any means necessary, including the same ruthlessness employed by men, veritably becoming productive like men, all while leaving the prevailing systems unchallenged. Left-leaning feminists have long decried the unviability of girlboss feminism, but mainstream culture — steeped in capitalist patriarchy as it is — is enamoured of it.

It is at the apex of girlboss feminism, which had been gaining traction since the ‘90s (recall Sex and the City’s musings about women in the workplace), that Maleficent is released, followed swiftly by a sequel in 2019, then by Cruella, and by this year’s Wicked. All three films work to humanize their respective villainesses, to explain their stories so that they emerge as actual heroes within their respective world at most, or justified in their actions at least. Each tale — Maleficent’s, Estella/Cruella’s, and Elphaba’s — claims that the women we have been told are evil personified are actually women who rise against an oppressive status quo and work to achieve or merely live their dreams. What’s so bad about being wicked, Elphaba and Maleficent and Cruella ask, especially when the world is so unjust? It’s no surprise that Maleficent and Cruella reframe their villainesses’ evil as something earned as a survival tactic, just like the girlboss’s masculinization. These villainesses are, in a sense, girlbosses, worthy of their own fulsome tales wherein their wickedness is justified. 

It’s all well and good — if you don’t think too deeply about it, that is. Because to pause and think about what is really going on with Wicked, Maleficent, and Cruella, especially as they exist alongside and depend for much of their meaning on The Wizard of Oz, 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, and 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians or 1996’s 101 Dalmatians, is to consider dire and depressing consequences for these women we have been sold as empowered. The fact of the matter is that we approach these villainesses’ standalone films with certain facts: Elphaba and Maleficent die in The Wizard of Oz and Sleeping Beauty, respectively, while Cruella is humiliatingly defeated by the system she sought to win a place in. The knowledge we as audiences possess as we watch these standalone movies works to sap the villainesses of a certain measure of their power, or meddles with her impact. 

These three prequels are always and inevitably being followed by The Wizard of Oz, Sleeping Beauty, and One Hundred and One Dalmatians; these films are always followed by the villainesses’ downfalls. These women, once clear-cut villains, become complex characters perennially losing against the status quo that we see initially traumatizes them, that victimizes them in their origin stories. The philosophical implications of these villainesses’ backstories are gutting: Elphaba, Maleficent, and Cruella are continually and inevitably punished for their rebelliousness, these films inadvertently and tragically telegraph. And efforts to avoid this bind of leading a complex villain-hero to punishment lead to such intense humanization that these characters ultimately stop being villains. 

In their standalone films, the stories of the three villainesses — Elphaba, Maleficent, and Cruella — follow a familiar form, that of the revenge film. The revenge film is as it sounds: a crime is committed against a person, who then goes on to seek revenge. In the seminal and foundational Men, Women, and Chain Saws, scholar Carol J. Clover says that it “lies in the nature of revenge or self-defense stories […] that the avenger or self-defender will become as directly or indirectly violent as her assailant.” These films turn on an ancient understanding of reciprocal justice, on the idea of an eye for an eye. We watch with bated breath as Elphaba, Maleficent, and Cruella are wronged when they are at their most vulnerable, moved by their pain, and are exhilarated and invested (or at least expected to be) when they seek their revenge, when they hurt those who hurt them with equal intensity. Clover notes throughout her book that to be invested in the protagonist’s revenge, we need to be invested in their pain first, that’s how these films work to gel us as audiences. The characters’ revenge, their monstrosity, is justified in equal measure by the pain they have suffered. 

Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: Part I is almost exclusively a tale of Elphaba being wronged, with the young woman choosing revenge only at the end of the film, anticipating the second part, at which point we the audience expect an earth-shattering revenge to complement, or be worthy of, the more than two hours of insult and injury inflicted upon her. From birth, Elphaba is shunned by the Ozian status quo for her green skin. Rejected and made fun of by family and strangers, she is further ostracized due to her magical prowess. By the time she reaches university and is enrolled against her intentions because of her magic, she’s apparently not experienced any kindness except for a soft love from her younger sister, Nessarose, and the care of animals. 

At school she is made fun of by her peers, and liked only by her instructors, specifically Dr. Dillamond, a talking goat and history professor, and Madame Morrible, who nurtures Elphaba’s work in magic and makes her known to the Wizard of Oz. When Elphaba learns that Madame Morrible and the Wizard want to use her and her magic in order to enslave the animals whom Elphaba loves and respects, seeing a kinship between her and them in terms of how they are treated, Elphaba rebels against the two. Madame Morrible labels the renegade Elphaba a “Wicked Witch” so that everyone in the kingdom distrusts her, meaning that Madame Morrible and the Wizard’s plan might remain a secret. The film ends with Elphaba owning her title as wicked. We are primed to expect a wickedness equal to the pain she has suffered, it is necessitated and therefore points backwards to what has been done against her, to her past (recent and distant) — she will work to be as wicked as the status quo was to her. 

Craig Gillespie’s Cruella is a likewise plain story of revenge. Estella is born with a rebellious streak, but isn’t made evil by it. Rather, she is made vengeful by what is done to her. Her mother is killed when Estella is a child, knocked off a cliff by dalmatians; the young girl blames herself for the death. She grows up a misfit, making a living as a thief until she gets herself a job designing for the Baroness, a cold woman who is one of the city’s most successful fashion designers. The Baroness is ruthless and cruel but notices a burgeoning talent in Estella. At first, Estella aspires toward the Baroness’ affections, but when she begins suspecting that the older woman is responsible for her mother’s death, she decides to become “Cruella,” working to steal the Baroness’ social and professional spotlight. Cruella’s desire to usurp the Baroness becomes an outright desire for revenge when she learns that the Baroness not only really is responsible for her mother’s death, but also that she is her real mother. A heist at the end of the film leads to the Baroness’ arrest and Cruella’s full debut on the fashion scene as the “It” fashion designer.

The dynamic of Cruella’s revenge is bald-faced in the girlboss feminism of the era that gave birth to it. Though it apparently is a story of a younger generation overthrowing an older one with its dated understanding of fashion and decorum, “[i]f you look closely, Cruella is indicative of the very culture it pretends to critique: Its central character is a white woman whose concerns and politics begin and end with herself,” writes Angelica Jade Bastién in her review of the film. “She’s a girl boss pretending to fight against the powers that be. She doesn’t want to overthrow the Establishment so much as become it. Cruella takes one of the richest narrative archetypes — the madwoman — and whittles her down into a glossy, hollow, capitalism-approved monster fueled by girl-boss politics. It has nothing to say about how women move through the world.”

Maleficent follows a similar path to Cruella in the sense that she becomes the Establishment in the process of her revenge in 2014’s Maleficent, though I would say this film has a more sober understanding of how women move through the world. The film, taking great liberties with the original story, frames Maleficent as a caretaking fairy, the most powerful in all the Moors, a magical forest. She heals the flora and the fauna with a touch and takes care of the forest’s denizens. When she finds a peasant boy from the neighbouring human kingdom named Stefan in the forest, she befriends him, and soon the two fall in love. But as they grow older and tensions between the forest and the kingdom grow, with the latter working through warfare to conquer the magical forest, Maleficent becomes more and more the forest’s protector and leader. The kingdom’s king tells his court that whoever kills Maleficent will become the next king. Stefan, hungry for the throne, attempts the murder, but cannot bring himself to follow through because of the love that once charged between them. Instead, he cuts her wings off and takes them to the king as false proof of her death. Heartbroken and in immense pain from the loss, Maleficent grows cold, and when Stefan has a baby, she curses her to the familiar fate: the baby, Aurora, will prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel before sunset on her 16th birthday and will fall into a death-like slumber. 

Jolie has been forthright about the rape allegory in Maleficent. “We were very conscious, the writer and I, that [the scene in which her wings are cut off] was a metaphor for rape,” Jolie said in 2014. “The core of [“Maleficent”] is abuse, and how the abused have a choice of abusing others or overcoming and remaining loving, open people.” The film, thus, because a rape-revenge film, with her curse against Aurora and her violence against the kingdom as vicious as what she suffered. Maleficent doesn’t die in this film, in fact she stays alive and well into a sequel. She and Aurora come together to defeat the cruel Stefan. This act of defeat definitely isn’t coded with girlboss feminism of the era because Stefan is the figurehead of cold patriarchy, while Maleficent is a leader in her own unique and soft way, and there’s the rub. Before the two women defeat the evil man, the film manages to naturalize Maleficent as a complete threat by yanking her back in line with one of the demands of the status quo: that women be maternal.  

Maleficent’s story is critically and crucially altered from the version we get in Sleeping Beauty. Where in the animated feature, Maleficent is a horrifying being working — with her green eyes and cutting edge — as evil incarnate, harboring nothing but hate for Aurora and the humans and going on to morph into a fire breathing dragon, in Jolie’s film Maleficent becomes tamed. Jolie’s Maleficent is walked back toward motherhood and maternal instincts. As she watches Aurora grow up, she grows increasingly fond of the child, and eventually, Aurora calls Maleficent her “godmother.” By the film’s end, Maleficent is a benign and munificent being — she doesn’t even actively kill Stefan, he only falls to his death after trying to kill both himself and Maleficent. She doesn’t herself turn into a dragon, either, having her raven sidekick morph instead. Though the film depicts a beautiful relationship between women, a story of an evil man being toppled, it also manages to defang Maleficent, turning her into nothing but good. She veritably stops being a villain in this film, not even a monstrous hero, for she gives up on her plot for revenge as soon as she realizes she loves Aurora dearly and wants the spell she herself cast on the girl to be broken. In a strange way, Maleficent both thwarts and ultimately upholds the status quo in Maleficent, becoming ultimately demure and tender, not wicked in the slightest.             

Wicked is the most anarchic of the three films here, for the reason that Elphaba, at least in the first film, takes on the rulers and upholders of the status quo. But she carries elements of girlboss feminism in her individuality. Though she is politically savvy, and her rebelliousness is sparked by the injustice she feels and sees in her animal friends, it all ends up being sapped of its vigor by the fact that she becomes despotic. She becomes a cruel iteration of the Establishment, at least insofar as Wizard of Oz is concerned.  

Existing alone within the realms of their standalone films, Elphaba, Cruella, and even Maleficent present interesting stories of characters doing interesting things, even at their most girlboss-y. Even though Cruella doesn’t deliver a perfect story with the best politics, the film is entertaining for the act of revenge it depicts, the visual fun of the heists. Considered in a vacuum, the three films, at least to an extent with Maleficent, portray vivacious attempts at or desires for revenge. But each woman’s attempt at revenge is undercut, almost ridiculed, when recalled within the context of their arching narratives, when recalled in their existence as backstories for villainesses who ultimately do fail. 

In her stunning book House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films, film writer Keir-La Janisse continues Clover’s ideas around the revenge film. “When the woman is avenged, the film ends,” she writes of the typical revenge film. “Reality doesn’t impede this superficial sense of fulfillment with a coda about how the woman was later tried and convicted for her crimes, as would happen in real life. Because that would be depressing. And from my perspective, it seems that rape-revenge films are meant to be strangely triumphant.” The revenge film works best, is most cathartic, outside of the punitive confines of everyday life. (This is why a film like I Spit on Your Grave ends with the lens focused on protagonist Jennifer’s face as she drives a boat away from her final kill.) When a revenge as vicious as the crime committed is doled out, in the real world, the person who takes the law into their own hands would be punished indiscriminately. We don’t really turn to most revenge films for their accurate depictions of reality; we turn to them for a kind of wish fulfillment, we need for them to end before law and order step in because as Janisse says, it would be disheartening otherwise.

Cruella on its own ends at a sweet spot: the Baroness is punished and Cruella wins. But as part of a series, in conversation with One Hundred and One Dalmatians and 101 Dalmatians, which the film depends on for Cruella’s existential meaning, Cruella becomes depressing. One Hundred and One Dalmatians ends with Cruella, a deliciously insane woman with red eyes and grey skin, crashing in a ditch that demolishes her car, and the dogs are able to get away and live happily ever after. She was earlier investigated by Scotland Yard in the animated film, and it is intimated that she will face law and order after the accident. In 101 Dalmatians, Cruella does: she is arrested. 

Wicked: Part I considered in conjunction with The Wizard of Oz also tells a grim tale. If Elphaba owns her wickedness and walks defiantly on the path of revenge, she could conceivably become Margaret Hamilton’s iteration of the Wicked Witch of the West, a deliciously evil witch whose real-world corollary Almira Gulch owns land and rejoices in being bitter to Garland’s Dorothy. She would also die, as she does in The Wizard of Oz. But Wicked the full musical, the story as written, ends with the soggy heft that Maleficent does: it naturalizes Elphaba, effectively saying of her that she is not a villain at all, but rather a victim of circumstance. In the way that Maleficent maternalizes Maleficent, Wicked the musical allows Elphaba to live a saintly life, without having achieved a revenge equal to her suffering, through a faked death.

If we consider the villainesses’ standalone movies in relation to the films that introduced them to us, to the notions we take to these films as audience members, we get a strange lesson. Cruella becomes a villain walking toward ultimate doom, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. A woman who survives a revenge mission, Cruella goes on to be punished as the clear-cut villain in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, turning her act of revenge into a depressing play, invariably marching toward downfall. Likewise for Wicked: Part I and The Wizard of Oz, which leaves Elphaba eternal victim, an avenger, and then a woman punished with death. All three films create a past for these women to remain eternal victims to. While in the original films, they work in a malicious manner forwards, like an arrow moving away from them, engrossingly vicious without a why and wherefore, with the introduction of backstories, we get a past to which all the womens’ actions in their original movies come to retroactively point. 

Wicked the Broadway musical, meaning too the upcoming second film from Chu, tries to avoid the depressing fate that Cruella achieves by going the Maleficent route and naturalizing the villain, turning her into a saint of sorts. If we watch Wicked the Broadway musical and Maleficent alongside The Wizard of Oz and Sleeping Beauty, we are asked to accommodate a strange dissonance. The Wicked Witch and Maleficent become simultaneously so good and absolute evil, simultaneously alive and dead. 

Insofar as they are alive, the villainesses that Wicked and Maleficent present are no villainesses at all; rather, they are boring, saccharine and sickly sweet in their goodness. Hamilton’s Wicked Witch has been so pivotal and crucial to our modern cultural understanding of what an evil witch looks like, laughs like, how dangerous she can be. Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty is nightmare fodder, a stunning creature who moves like a vicious bird, hypnotizes like a cobra with her lurid yellow eyes, and turns into a dragon so inimitably destructive. Hamilton’s Wicked Witch and Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent are women evil for the sake of evil, they laugh because they enjoy their madness, maybe even the sound of their cackle, and they act with a freedom not informed by their pasts, for they haven’t any, and therefore it is a freedom that seems endlessly dangerous, endlessly insane. They’re so evil they have scared us into goodness.

Wicked and Maleficent, meanwhile, present us with good women. In an effort to humanize the villain, their standalone films erase everything from them that made them interesting. Paradoxically, they thereby become less human, less textured, and more impossible goodness personified. Elphaba and Jolie’s Maleficent become sweetness and light, become like Dorothy and Aurora. It’s so strange to see Elphaba with that green skin, Maleficent with the high cheekbones, markers of evil that here turn into a story about appreciating other people’s differences. 

In a strange way, the wicked witch is irrevocably dead, usurped by positive, girlboss-y representations of womanhood. Elphaba and Maleficent become upholders of traditional femininity under patriarchy: they are good and caring and kind, while before, in their original films, they swaggered and snickered and leered, carried the insanity on their sleeves to the cores of their souls. Like Bastién says of Cruella, Elphaba and Maleficent become indicative of the very culture they mean to critique when their creators attempt to humanize them. To continually humanize every character is to ultimately lose morality: lines between goodness and badness are blurred and nobody bears the responsibility for their actions, heaping it instead onto their past and the events that happened to them. One could conceivably humanize Madame Morrible, the Baroness, and Stefan, one could continue this exercise until no character has a bite. Until no character is evil, until every character becomes the sum of everything that has ever happened to them. 

But where’s the fun in that? Sometimes women are just bad.