Though they probably don’t realize it, many Americans spent the tail end of 2024 engaged in a serious theological debate about the nature of evil. This being America, the discussion was held not in seminar rooms but at the multiplex, where viewers were entertained by two drastically divergent visions of corruption. And the outcome, I am sorry to report, was grim.
On one hand, our fellow countrymen gave their vote to the green-skinned heroine of the smash-hit film Wicked—which, in turn, is based on a popular musical by the same name, as well as on the bestselling novel that inspired it. She’s Elphaba Thropp, the young lady who would one day be known as the Wicked Witch of the West, the scourge of the magical kingdom of Oz.
If you’ve seen The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 film on which today’s ravenous pop culture ouroboros is based—and, at this point, it’s hard to imagine an American alive who hasn’t—your dreams are probably still haunted, on occasion, by the original witch, portrayed with vivacious venom by the inimitable Margaret Hamilton. All sharp corners and sinewy malice, Hamilton cackled her way to immortality by giving viewers a masterclass in wickedness.
She begins that classic movie as Almira Gulch, Dorothy’s malicious next-door neighbor, who sets the plot in motion by obtaining a sheriff’s order to seize Toto, the girl’s poorly behaved Cairn Terrier. Right then and there, even before the film bursts into technicolor and Hamilton reappears in black robe and pointy hat, she teaches us a critical lesson about the true meaning of evil. Gulch, we observe, has a choice to make: Her acquaintances beg her to be kind and compassionate, and offer her in return the warmth of their community. Gulch rejects them all, opting instead for raw power and crisp abuse, taking the dog away and achieving nothing more than the dubious accomplishment of breaking a small child’s heart.
It’s this callousness and cruelty that turn her green and make her wicked. Which, in turn, is not a very difficult idea for anyone who has spent even an hour at a church or a synagogue to grasp: The Lord has given us fallible humans free will, and we may choose to walk in his ways and be good or to reject his teachings and be evil. Almira Gulch opts for the latter and becomes the Wicked Witch. QED.
All that, alas, was much too rich for the modern sensibility, that great seeker of root causes. If you take God out of the equation—which, tragically, is precisely what we’re too often doing in contemporary America—the problem of evil looms much larger, nearly impossible to resolve. Why would anyone be bad? Well, if “good” and “evil” no longer exist as independent theological categories; if all we have to measure morality by is the short and crooked yardstick of human behavior, independent of any divine code of conduct; and if we’d like to believe, like all good progressives, that the arc of history must always bend toward the better, it stands to reason that those we call evil are merely misunderstood, poor souls who were once abused and now, because of the emotional trauma, abuse others in turn. The solution: Apply a little tenderness, and the nastiness goes away.
And so, in Wicked, we get a Wicked Witch with a radically different backstory.
Why is Elphaba bad? Her mother, a rich and bored Real Housewife of Oz, had an affair with a traveling salesman. This original sin, through no fault of her own, turned the baby’s skin green, and the shallow and unforgiving society in which she grew up made her feel shunned and unloved. Which, in turn, made her the perfect foil for you-know-who: the Wizard, the patriarchy embodied. He needed a scapegoat to preserve his power, and the green girl was an easy mark. Elphaba thus vilified, the Emerald City becomes a sparkling haven for fascism. Is it any wonder that the green, marginalized girl grew wicked? And might not a bit of compassion have turned her good instead? As John Lennon promised, “It’s easy / All you need is love.”
This loopy logic, devoid of any intellectual and moral depth, is not limited to the silver screen. Ask your average Ivy League graduate what she thinks of those who burn down American cities while claiming to strive for racial justice, or those who behead babies and rape women in the name of freeing Palestine, and she’s likely to mumble something about the alleged oppression these perpetrators have suffered and how discrimination at the hands of the more privileged and powerful bred lamentable but completely understandable resentment and, in turn, violence. What’s needed to make things right is affirmation and solidarity with the oppressed.
It doesn’t take a priest or a rabbi to realize that this infantilizing view robs the marauders not only of personal responsibility but also of free will, which is to say of human agency. The presumption is that, like Elphaba, evil-doers were born with the unbearable weight of a wrong-doing they didn’t commit and which therefore left them no way out from breaking bad.
Think this is the worst way to understand good and evil? That’s only because you haven’t met Art the Clown.
He’s the antagonist of the Terrifier film franchise, which this past holiday season unleashed its third, bloodiest, and most successful installment to date. The series has its own idea about the meaning of evil, which is even more infantile and unserious than the soppy soullessness of Wicked. It’s an idea that requires little description: Art is a psychopathic mime, dressed in black and white, who kills people in horrendous ways. The Terrifier franchise is all about the gore, and it’s not uncommon for movie theaters to put up signs warning viewers that some scenes may elicit very physical reactions, like losing your lunch or passing out cold.
Who is Art? Why does he kill? How come he’s seemingly immortal, with teleportation and other fantastic powers? The filmmakers never bother with explanations, because unlike other memorable horror movie maniacs—think A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, or Halloween’s Michael Myers—Art has no backstory. He just is, and the point of the film is to revel in his excess. Do you like to watch a clown running a woman over in a pickup truck and then eating her face off? If so, Terrifier is just the right sort of sickening movie for you.
And evil unexplained, it turns out, is just as dangerous as evil explained too much, perhaps more so. The Terrifier films don’t require us to grapple with the consequences of moral choices because no moral choices are made. Instead, evil is presented as cartoonish and fun. We are invited to enjoy it without once feeling the pain of the victims mutilated on screen or the regret that the slasher chose carnage when he might’ve chosen otherwise.
Needless to say, in that moral nihilism lies absolute moral rot.
What does it say about America that our popular culture encourages us either to mindlessly enjoy evil or to excuse it altogether? That it offers us either Art the Clown or Elphaba? It’s a question that ought to keep parents, teachers, and members of the clergy up at night. It suggests a full-blown failure of our collective moral imagination, a nation no longer willing or no longer able to recall that each and every human enterprise rests on twin pillars—good and evil. The moral task is to examine these two options with some discernment, tell them apart with some ease, and readily choose one over the other. Unless we assume that responsibility for developing that capacity, we’re never going to achieve that more perfect union that is our most precious birthright and our most pressing challenge.
Our present state of affairs—evil as nothing more than emotional trauma finding misguided expression, or evil as an entertaining metaphysical inevitability—is daunting. There are no facile solutions to this moral infantilism. But one quick fix does come to mind: It’s time to make righteous American storytelling an urgent priority. It’s time to invest in the sort of cultural enterprises that grapple with the profound questions of human morality, giving us better bad guys than the green and beleaguered witch or the unperturbed cannibalistic clown. A page or two of the Bible, of course, should do the trick when it comes to stirring hearts and souls—Joseph and his brothers, for example, or Esther’s contest with Haman the Agagite. But with our storytelling machinery largely manned by those who refuse to take evil seriously, artists who have better stories to tell have a devil of a time trying to tell them. Unless we erect some new machines of the imagination, we’ll continue to live somewhere beyond good and evil, a nation untethered from its good and great foundations, an Oz-like dreamscape souring into a nightmare. Thankfully, help is just one tall tale away.
Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet Magazine and the cohost of its popular podcast, Unorthodox.
Image by Damien Leone. Image cropped.
