The smallest way Glinda Elphaba fails in Wicked is also the most telling

In every iteration – bestselling novel, hit Broadway show, now a movie that’s really only half a movie – Bad is about the “good witch” Glinda who does not fail upwards. Certainly, Bad is about many things, including bigotry, the rise of fascism, and a woman discovering she has a voice after a lifetime of obeying orders to be quiet. There’s even a love story in it. But watch any of those discussions and you’ll find Glinda in the middle of it, failing on points big and small.

She fails herself, her university and her country, but especially her rival, roommate and eventual friend Elphaba. In the new film adaptation of Act I of the Broadway show, one of the ways Elphaba failed caught my attention in a way that never happened on stage.

The movie – technically Bad: Part I – is almost as long as the entire Broadway show (intermission and all), because director Jon M. Chu wanted to expand Elphaba’s backstory and make her a more believable, well-rounded character. So the film shows more of her as a baby, rejected by her parents and raised by a bear nanny, and as a young child, dealing with bullies and enduring her father’s disgust and disapproval. The explanation for his disdain is the same in both the Broadway show and the movie: once Elphaba and Glinda form a tentative friendship, Elphaba admits that her father detests her because it is all her fault that her mother is dead and her sister Nessarose is a woman with spinal cord injury.

Why? Because Elphaba was born with green skin, and her father was so paranoid about the pattern repeating itself with his second daughter that he forced his wife to constantly chew milk flowers while she was pregnant. The flowers, intended to lighten the skin of his second child, poisoned his wife, who died during pregnancy, and “caused Nessa to come prematurely, with her legs all messed up.” Nessarose has used a wheelchair ever since.

And Glinda, confronted with this clear evidence that Elphaba’s father is a monster and that Elphaba herself has dealt with familial abuse, survivor’s guilt, and misplaced shame all her life, squeaks, “That was the milk flowers’ fault, not those from you!’

In the show, that moment flies by in a quick second, just another small piece of evidence that Glinda, even if she means well, is still shallow and naive. In the film version, however, Elphaba is deliberately more of a realized person, and Cynthia Erivo gives her a haunted, wounded dignity that Chu zeroes in on again and again. When she tells this story, it has a heft and weight to it. It’s a story she’s replayed in her head over and over again and let it define her as a person. It’s not just that her father blames her for these things; she actually believes them herself.

And in this scene, Ariana Grande Glinda takes in Elphaba’s confession with clear sympathy and disgust on her face. She pauses for a moment, takes a deep breath, looks for a way to comfort her new friend, and still comes out with that banal little blessing. It’s still just one quick exchange in the middle of a spectacle film, but it’s so much more, well, gravity in the movie. And in a view of Bad that’s meant to make the characters a little more like real people, it seems even more ridiculous that Glinda misses the point so completely.

Elphaba’s life has been radically shaped by bigotry and cruelty, not by some flowers that didn’t do their job. But she has learned the hard way to blame herself for her father’s choices, as if he couldn’t possibly do anything but reject his firstborn daughter because of the color of her skin, but also couldn’t stop himself from fatally poisoning his wife and permanently killing his other child to cause damage. And the best Glinda can do is suggest that she should blame the poison, not the poisoner.

Chus Bad isn’t well set up to address Elphaba’s increased pain, or give her a moment of realization about how her father’s story about her shortcomings has also harmed her. The script for both the show and the movie flashes past this moment and heads for greener pastures, so to speak. (Act II isn’t about it either, except for a brief comment about Elphaba never coming to terms with her father. Maybe Stephen Sondheim’s new songs planned Bad: Part II can tease out this aspect of the story: If he’s looking for suggestions, let me offer the titles “God, I Really Need Therapy” and “I Finally Realized My Dad Definitely Sucks.”)

Elphaba’s decision to push back against the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) is undoubtedly a symbolic way of pushing back against her father – especially after he pushes her specific buttons in ‘A Sentimental Man’ by suggesting that he be her father figure wants to be. And she’s probably thinking especially of her father in “Defying Gravity,” when she sings, “Too long I’ve been afraid of losing love I guess I’ve lost / Well if that’s love, it comes at far too high a cost.” Perhaps the fact that she never really comes to terms with her father’s blame game is a major emotional blow.

But for Glinda, this moment feels like a turning point in the film. It’s a sign that she’ll never really get it. There is simply no room in her worldview for a scenario in which people are as cruel as Elphaba’s father Frex, or in which people define themselves based on stories that are outright lies. She doesn’t know Frex and isn’t focused on him or trying to throw him off. She sincerely tries to help, but it never occurs to her to question Frex’s story, his motives, or his own guilt.

And that may be because she shares his perspective. Considering the way she treats Elphaba from the moment they meet, as if having green skin defines her and makes her monstrous, it seems likely enough that she gets where Frex came from. Of course he would be willing to poison his wife to avoid having two green children! It’s not that she justifies his bigotry towards Elphaba, it’s just that she doesn’t question it, seeing how it led to a horrific, fatal situation. Because that would cause her to question herself too.

The entire scene determines how Glinda thinks. She lives in a carefully constructed world where no one is evil and no one’s actions are evil, especially her own. It’s just that sometimes bad things happen for no reason. This attitude makes her extremely incapable of dealing with the Wizard and Madame Morrible.

There is no sign in this film – or in the rest of the play, as the story concludes – that Glinda ever really understands why propaganda is dangerous, or accepts that helping spread it herself is a bad choice that hurts people unnecessarily. Even if she is evil, she sees no evil. And that’s because she never really seems to see past the surface of any situation, and malice – at least, major life-altering malice – is so often presented beneath the surface of a much more beautiful lie.

That could be a reading of Bad that gives Glinda a little peace of mind for the choices that are yet to come Bad: Part IIbut it is the reading that the exchange of milk flowers gives us. She is still responsible for her choices, and what those choices are for Elphaba and Oz. Refusing to look beyond the surface – dancing through lifeas Fiyero puts it – is as much a choice as her choice not to sit on the broomstick with Elphaba during ‘Defying Gravity’, and every choice that follows.

But it’s fascinating to see how such a small, brief exchange becomes such an unpackable and symbolic moment in the film version, such a foreshadowing of bigger things to come in the story. A spectacle story is so much about big, bold statements secret desires And public intentionsChu’s version of Bad – and Erivo and Grande’s choices as actors – still make this little exchange seem important, emotional and annoying.

“That was your father’s fault, not yours!” was there, Glinda. And what a different story this would have been if Glinda or Elphaba had been able to see through that particular lie and call it out as selfish, hateful, and more cowardly than the Cowardly Lion ever was.