Ken Jacobs on “The Wizard of Oz”

Lecture: Ken Jacobs

Greetings to The Storefront Movie Tabernacle. Deacon Jacobs will read today, by light of laser, from MGM’s The Wizard of Oz. You are expected to sit up straight, and be models of rectitude and sobriety. Even as our hearts are melting we must put our minds to understanding how and to what purpose was this film designed to engage its Great Depression audience just as WW II was looming. And how is it, despite its clunky staginess, fevered mix of confession and disingenuousness, its muffled screaming mimis regarding sex – in this tale of sexual as well as economic impotence – and its dismissal of the desirability of democracy in an age of electric bullshit (for all the gumption its lead characters show), that it should remain myth-package supreme for Americans? Including that the official right-of-passage for every American kid is to keep eyes open when the flying monkeys attack. One explanation for its staying power (based on the belief that the Great Depression was only lightly built over, and the fault runneth deep) is that the movie promises… another movie next week. We can depend on the movies to be there. Dried up Miss Gulch may own the country but the movies will lift us free, over and over again.

by Ken Jacobs