We are Created for Good - A Wicked Movie Review

By Amy Peeler

At its debut in 2003, the Broadway version of Wicked spoke to the post-9/11 Bush-era Iraq War. Is one a crusader or a liberator? The charlatan Wizard avers, “It’s all in which label is able to persist.” Now, the movie version appears to be speaking to our era. In Wicked: For Good, Oz falls into fascism as all animals and some classes of people are excluded and captured against their will. The movie seems inspired by videos of ICE agents from last week, even though it finished filming in 2024 before the start of the current administration. 

Many have noted the movie's political overtones, and while I left the theater on Thanksgiving evening appreciative of Wicked: For Good’s glimmer of national hope, I was inspired on a smaller, but no less important, scale. Wicked has made me deeply grateful for God’s gracious provision of transformative relationships.

The three principal characters each undergo a metamorphosis with the help of others. Elphaba, the green “wicked” witch of the west, an outsider in her own family and society, cultivates the virtues available to those on the margins: a clear vision of the ills plaguing those on the inside and even compassion for those stuck therein. She possesses a small degree of self-confidence and trust in her inherent value, but she cannot grow this virtue on her own. For this is not how humans are created, and so she has relationships that aid her, beginning with her compassionate nursemaid, Dulcibear, and then her unlikely friend, Glinda, and eventually her partner, Fiyero. Even in the face of betrayal from mentors she idolized, she finds her voice, and it is quite a voice indeed.

Fiyero’s transformation is more radical. From privileged playboy to disfigured exile, he recovers his moral fortitude by coming to see the beauty in Elphaba. To see loveliness in each other is not a lie, but is, as they say, “to look at things another way.” Kingdom-oriented believers might say that he’s come to see the world right side up. By the end, neither Elphaba nor Fiyero is beautiful as defined by Ozians, but they are good, precisely because their upside-down world deems them as wicked.

It is Glinda, however, whose transformation is the most arresting. It comes in fits and starts, as is true for real humans. She spends significant social capital to rescue Elphaba from social death at a high school dance, but then cannot resist the siren song of public accolade once she is a young adult. “Is it so wrong?” she queries, to participate in lies? Maybe she initially believed that the means justified the ends, but she became so enthralled by the sycophantic means that she became entrapped in them. It takes both rejection and compassion to free her. Fiyero rejects her for Elphaba, and Elphaba sacrifices her reputation for Glinda. Both acts pop the bubble of pretense and performance that she is trapped in. Only then can she begin to learn to be good, not just in word, but in deed.

Like the main characters in Wicked, we are transformed through relationships. Very often, others recognize qualities in us that we cannot yet see in ourselves. For example, in 1989, while growing up in Oklahoma, I was in a production of The Sound of Music. I played the next-to-youngest daughter, Marta. The cast member who played the eldest daughter, Liesel, of “I am 16 going on 17” fame, was Kristen Chenoweth, who went on to stardom as Glinda in the original Broadway version of Wicked. When she was in college and needed to make extra money, Kristen became my voice teacher. I was just nine, but she believed I had talents hidden in my naive and slightly hesitant personality. Although I did not have the innate vocal abilities to follow her path to Broadway, Kristen taught me to use my voice with confidence, a skill that has been a necessary tool for the vocation God has called me to. 

As our Creator, Incarnate redeemer, Advocate, and friend, the Triune God believes the best about us, and not just as a hunch but because this is the truest thing about us. We are created good for good. That truth is made evident to us through worship and the Word, in quiet moments of prayer, and through inexpressible encounters at his table. We often also need to hear this truth from the mouth of another human. This isn’t a design flaw; it is an advantage. God planned for us to need each other, to transform and be transformed by our friends. The best friendships in my life have seen good in me that I could not perceive in myself, and because they believed those things were true of me, and they told me so, they have become so. 

As I enter Advent, I have decided to explore the truth that God loves me. Rather basic, I admit, but it is also rather foundational, and it is a truth with which I have struggled. Specifically, I have been led to wonder, “What if God loves me as my best friends love me, with delight, with pride, with honesty, honesty not for the sake of humiliation but for the sake of transformation?” It feels risky. Somewhere deep in my soul is the idea that God tolerates me but is always wishing and waiting for more. 

My greatest friends do not treat me this way. They really like me. They believe in me when I don’t believe in myself. What if God treats me like that? And not just like that, but even better than any human friendship can muster? What if the One we anticipate in Advent is coming in judgement, but a judgement that does not obliterate but speaks the truth, to purge us of our confusion and waywardness, to pop the bubbles that have entrapped us and in which we’ve willfully languished? What if the One we anticipate in Advent is coming as a friend, a friend who sees us better than we can see ourselves, a friend who loves us, a friend who will transform us for good?

Amy Peeler is Professor of New Testament and the Kenneth T. Wessner Chair of Biblical Studies at Wheaton College. She also serves as associate rector at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Geneva, Illinois, and is a pundit for Holy Post Media. She is the author of Women and the Gender of God.