There's No Place Like Home

When I was a kid, my sister loved theWizard of Oz, so I watched it all the time when she did. Back then, I thought that it was a flashy musical that played off the use of color versus black and white. Looking at it now, I almost feel the same way. I didn't know that it started as a book but now that I've read the book, I think the movie really just took it to make a movie.

The biggest thing for me is the fact that in the book, it's not a dream. I think that was fact changed the entire view of the story. The movie added characters and the characters in the dream paralleled characters in her real life. To me, that took away the meaning of the original characters of the book and just made them into something of her subconscious view of the new characters. There was a lot of details from the book that I thought were important enough to what they left in the movie that were still taken out anyways, such as the winkies being enslaved by the witch. They still react to the witches death but it almost doesn't make sense without a backstory. The fact that it was a dream also made the ending seem unsubstantial. She just wakes up, starts pointing out people saying you were there and you were there, looks confused and everyone thinks she's lost it, and that's the end. Even though the end of the book was very abrubt, it was still more meaningful than what the movie portayed.

I think another issue raised by the film were the slippers Dorothy recieves. In the book, with the silver slippers, it really does give some economic undertones such as the silver standard. It gives the story a lot more to think about when you go deeper and look into these facts. However, in the movie, they switched it to ruby slippers. Whatever the reasoning to that may be, I honestly feel like they did it because it was flashier to see. To me, all the movie was is something that they could sell. It pulls apart a lot of the issues you could see beneath the story of the book and just made them into something meaningless. It bothers me because I don't see a lot of what people say about how the movie brings out a psychological understanding of the character Dorothy. I get what they are saying as her dream is a challenge to authority, but I don't feel like that is actually the case. I thought the movie was just a movie and that it lost a lot of what the book was trying to point out.