Step Across This Line Read Free Page B

away. So, with simple shapes and numbers, Dorothy’s family erects its defenses against the immense, maddening emptiness; and these defenses are useless, of course.
    Leap ahead to Oz and it becomes obvious that this opposition between the geometric and the twisty is no accident. Look at the beginning of the Yellow Brick Road: it’s a perfect spiral. Look again at Glinda’s carriage, that perfect, luminous sphere. Look at the regimented routines of the Munchkins as they greet Dorothy and thank her for squashing the Wicked Witch of the East. Move on to the Emerald City: see it in the distance, its straight lines soaring into the sky! And now, by contrast, observe the Wicked Witch of the West: her bent figure, her misshapen hat. How does she depart? In a puff of shapeless smoke . . . “Only bad witches are ugly,” Glinda tells Dorothy, a remark of high political incorrectness that emphasizes the film’s animosity toward whatever is tangled, claw-crooked, and weird. Woods are invariably frightening—the gnarled branches of trees are capable of coming to life—and the one moment when the Yellow Brick Road itself bewilders Dorothy is the moment when it ceases to be geometric (first spiral, then rectilinear) and splits and forks every which way.
    Back in Kansas, Auntie Em is delivering the scolding that is the prelude to one of the cinema’s immortal moments.
You always get yourself into a fret about nothing . . . find yourself a place where you won’t get into any trouble!
    Some place where there isn’t any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be.
Anybody who has swallowed the scriptwriters’ notion that this is a film about the superiority of “home” over “away,” that the “moral” of
The Wizard of Oz
is as sickly-sweet as an embroidered sampler—“East, West, home’s best”—would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice as her face tilts up toward the skies. What she expresses here, what she embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of
leaving,
a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots. At the heart of
The Wizard of Oz
is the tension between these two dreams; but as the music swells and that big, clean voice flies into the anguished longings of the song, can anyone doubt which message is the stronger? In its most potent emotional moment, this is unarguably a film about the joys of going away, of leaving the grayness and entering the color, of making a new life in the “place where there isn’t any trouble.” “Over the Rainbow” is, or ought to be, the anthem of all the world’s migrants, all those who go in search of the place where “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” It is a celebration of Escape, a grand paean to the uprooted self, a hymn—
the
hymn—to Elsewhere.
    E. Y. Harburg, the lyricist of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and Harold Arlen, who had written “It’s Only a Paper Moon” with Harburg, made the songs for
The Wizard of Oz,
and Arlen actually did think of the melody line outside Schwab’s drugstore in Hollywood. Aljean Harmetz records Harburg’s disappointment with the music: too complex for a sixteen-year-old to sing, too advanced by comparison with Disney hits like “Heigh Ho! Heigh Ho! It’s Off to Work We Go.” Harmetz adds: “To please Harburg, Arlen wrote the melody for the tinkling middle section of the song.”
Where troubles melt like lemon drops / Away above the chimney tops / That’s where you’ll find me . . .
A little higher up, in short, than the protagonist of that other great ode to flight, “Up on the Roof.”
    That “Over the Rainbow” came close to being cut out of the movie is well known, and proof that Hollywood makes its masterpieces by accident, because it doesn’t really know what it is doing. Other songs were dropped: “The Jitter Bug,” after five weeks’ filming, and almost all of “Lions and Tigers and Bears,”