Wicked is making me insane

On Ariana Grande & meanness

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Isn’t it nice to know / That good will conquer evil?

The year is almost over, and what I remember about 2024 in pop music is Chappell Roan and Brat. But Chappell Roan released one song and hardly ever charted. Charli xcx seemed like a major cultural phenomenon, but reports suggest her SNL episode pulled the smallest audience of the season, and Brat’s time off dance & electronic charts was very short-lived. In my memory, “Good Luck, Babe!,” Brat, and The Tortured Poets Department (these words are still such a joke) all made the same footprint. But that’s not true. The biggest female pop star behind Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter—in terms of charts and cultural impact—was Ariana Grande.

Since 2016, when legacy media failed to predict we would have our first tweeting President, whose first term would come to be in large part defined by an online cult, people have been obsessed with online “filter bubbles.” This idea has taken many different names and contexts in the last 8 years—“disinformation,” “online community”—but they all mean the same thing; people are increasingly alienated from one another, siphoned by the online content they consume. We needn’t look further than how this year in music strayed from the way we talked about it to understand how this works. Distantly trailing Taylor Swift as Billboard’s no. 1 artist is Sabrina Carpenter, and buried in third place alongside Beyoncé is Ariana Grande, commercially miles ahead of Charli and Chappell for all 10 and a half months before Wicked was released.

If I thought harder about 2024 in pop music, I would also remember Addison Rae’s singles and F1 Trillion, all of which I loved but am not finding myself revisiting (apart from this). This might be a me problem, but it would take me a while to remember Grande’s Eternal Sunshine, despite its success and Ariana Grande’s turn on SNL just a couple months ago, which scored the show its highest ratings since Elon Musk’s in 2021. I’m just a little younger than Grande and grew up with her, from Victorious to her solo music debuting when I was in the middle of high school. I should be her target demographic, but I feel she is barely in my purview. Why?

I’m not comparing Ariana Grande to artists who have always been smaller and less aesthetically commercial (or, so they say). What’s funny, though, is how these contours of and fervor about online fragmentation coalesce in Ariana Grande herself. I liked Eternal Sunshine, whose lead single is about her ongoing embroilment in scandal. Referencing spectators’ obsession with her new body and reported stealing of Ethan Slater away from his wife and child, she warns, “Do not comment on my body, do not reply… Why do you care so much whose d*** I ride?”. The video opens with critics lamenting Ariana’s “changes” — “did she really do that?”, “I heard it on the Internet so it must be true.”—who are ultimately won over by Ariana’s song and dance. This positions her rumored evils of anorexia and being the other woman as untrue hearsay, but the song’s title “yes, and?” suggests otherwise: Yes, I am very skinny on purpose and Ethan Slater left his wife for me. And why are you pretending that’s going to deter you from buying this song?

The doubling down of “yes, and?” as a lead single is exciting. But, with the video, she doesn’t follow through on the title’s promise, and still ends up pleading with her fans to move on. A pop star clumsily fumbling through online hate is certainly not novel, but there is something in Grande—simultaneously radioactive and neutral—that makes it feel uniquely strange. Released on January 12, the video’s convergence of commercial success, lewdness, milquetoast sound, conservative aesthetics, and uncertain apologia was, retrospectively, a preview of Wicked.

Poor Glinda, forced to reside / With someone so disgusticified

There are many reasons why Wicked might be making you feel crazy. You might love it more than any blockbuster in recent memory, sending you into euphoric hyperfixation. In this vein or not, its music might also conjure such strong nostalgia from your childhood it has plunged you into weeks of wistful memory. You might not really care about the film itself, but are crazed either by the press or by peoples’ obsession with it. Or, you might think the film is bad, and you feel gaslighted by its success.

While I am sympathetic to nostalgia’s effect on critical thinking, I need to be perfectly clear that Wicked is unacceptably bad. It is not harmlessly “fine,” but at times visually and narratively illegible, and not in a funny way. Everyone in the film except Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey are impressively incapable at performing, and, in everyone but Erivo’s case, also singing. I have never seen such distracting, humiliating costuming and makeup in a film before; Grande’s strip lashes are popping off her gray-toned flesh in the very first scene, and, despite Cynthia Erivo having a bald head containing no obstacles to freely placing a wig on it, her wig is 1-3 inches too close to her eyebrows. This isn’t a 90-minute romp where such oopsies can be overlooked; it is a daunting 2-hour-and-40-minute lecture about FAKE lore from The Wizard of Oz. I do not like the Wicked musical because Stephen Schwartz is a talentless loser who was tasked with writing children’s songs to score an adaptation of a Wizard of Oz prequel about animal rights, and, would you believe it, failed at making that interesting. But I’ll let the source material rest and say that Jon M. Chu has exclusively directed the ugliest, most boring, unfunny, and painful studio films I have ever theatrically endured, and Wicked is no exception. This is innocent, though:

What is most crazy-making to me, however, is that Wicked is not a unanimous critical success, nor, despite its commercial success, is it being embraced in the way it should be by rabid, nostalgic fans (without nuance or any informed reverence).

This is best exemplified by David Ehrlich’s review, which is excellent but also clearly written by a guy going through it.¹ Perhaps in the spirit of “yes, and?”’s evasion of culpability, he insists the review is not a review but “a really long whatever about why [he] *didn’t* review Wicked, and the value in ‘hating’ a piece of commercial entertainment.” This isn’t a slight at Ehrlich, who spends many thoughtful and provocative words wondering what about Wicked makes him feel he isn’t allowed to rip it apart. I appreciate its takedown of the movie’s very premise, as well as its “wand-thin anti-fascism allegory” stretched “into almost 6 hours of empty tedium” on a DCP ran “through a washing machine.” But what is most interesting about the review is Ehrlich’s musings about why, as a film critic, he feels at odds with even making those statements:

...the idea that open-hearted tweens and “Wicked” diehards of all ages will probably love this movie shouldn’t be enough to stop me from wanting to rake it across the coals… Part of me wonders if I’ve gone soft since becoming a dad (which roughly coincided with reaching a point in my career where the pressure to prove myself was replaced by the pressure to disprove what others thought about me)... but “Wicked” was the first worst thing I saw after the election, and my reaction to it made me think about the responsibility any of us have over the things we hate, and how we choose to express that animus. Truth be told, I tend to feel like a piece of entertainment is only worth hating if it actively makes the world a shittier place and/or represents a grave evil of some kind that can’t afford to go unchecked, and much as I hated sitting through “Wicked,” at the end of the day there’s no part of me that thinks this film meets that criteria.

I disagree; Wicked’s bloated, un-cinematic business-doing is as harmful to our culture as Marvel movies, and conceding to its presence because making children happy is “harmless” is completely unacceptable. Do we let Moana 2 go un-critiqued because millennial parents want to give it 400 million dollars? But that Ehrlich spends his Wicked write-up coming to terms with the way cultural criticism works now, I think, importantly solidifies Wicked’s transformative role in its landscape: what if they made Iron Man for girls?

elle

So, what’s the most swankified place in town? / That would be the Ozdust Ballroom

A better way to say that would perhaps be that Wicked is Iron Man for girlies, i.e. all of Gen Z and the girls and gays of its elders. The problem with that, what makes Wicked uniquely crazy-making, is when you make Iron Man for girlies, they won’t swallow it whole without pause; it has to become a point of critical inquiry, even if that inquiry is, “I love this, is that okay?”. While I was writing this, a New York Times op-ed was posted titled “Four Opinion Writers on ‘Wicked’: ‘Women Deserve Rage. We Have a Lot to Be Angry About.’” I think this headline should have the op-ed’s participants laughed out of journalism. The reason people like Wicked is because they saw it as a kid, and because its characters have sparkly dresses and long pretty hair, which you stare at while they sing loudly. The reason people are enjoying the film is because it reminds them of this, and because Ariana Grande is one of the most famous working pop stars. Never has a child of the aughts learned the dangers of fascism from a prequel of the Wizard of Oz that’s about animal rights, despite a post-2016 world insisting otherwise.

This hand wringing about Wicked—it’s ok to like the movie for children because it has women in it who are angry about the fascist Oz who is kind of like Trump, if you think about it—again recalls Moana 2, the only thing sparring with Wicked at the box office. Recently, my friend Ben said something along the lines of, “I just pretend Inside Out 2 isn’t the highest grossing movie of the year.” I do the same thing, because stopping stuff like that from happening seems an impossible feat. But Wicked offended me so greatly, I’m wondering what would happen if we tried.

It’s hard to write about Internet trends and the “state” of things, because it’s anecdotal and unscientific. But I spend hours watching soundbites from movie premiere red carpets, which I use as launching pads for comment reading. I am entirely too well versed in typical commenter behaviors—about as well versed as I am in what I call front-facing-camera-criticism, where people who only watch blockbusters and read Emily Henry attempt to over-intellectualize cultural events.² This is the same thing most people in the country, I think, do all day long. They aren’t watching movies, they’re watching and reading random people talk on TikTok. Short form content isn’t going away, and it isn’t just “another thing.” It’s the beginning and ending of culture right now. This is all to say that if you criticize Moana 2 on TikTok, you will be ousted from the app.

Here’s a sample: this person, seemingly a fan of Disney animation and the first Moana, complains that the writing and music in the sequel are “horrible” and “flat,” like it was “written by AI.” The top comments on their video read “We must have not seen the same movie. It was GOOD”; “...as a proud Pacific Islander ik that [the music being repetitive] resonates with our pacific community”; “Is it just me or I can’t just leave a movie I paid to go see??”; “IT WAS SO GOOD FYM???”. There are, of course, exceptions, but I would estimate 90% of the comments disagree with the video’s author, and maybe 60% of those comments try to construe their criticism as “problematic” in some way.

This is what it’s like whenever Disney does anything, but in light of Wicked it specifically reminds me of the backlash about Rachel Zegler being “ungrateful” in press for Snow White. Post-2016, as Ehrlich suggests, we shouldn’t be so mean; you can’t possibly hate on Moana 2. But when Rachel Zegler is “mean,” i.e. flippant about the original Snow White (yes, that’s what people are upset about), it’s okay to be mean to her. While this is similar to the “let people enjoy things” movement, it is always much more wordy and involved, as exemplified in comments that suggest walking out of Moana 2 is offensively privileged or unappreciative of Pacific Islander heritage. In relentless comments on soundbites of Zegler, people tie themselves in knots saying stuff like, “I always disliked her, and now I have a reason.” They attack her and walk it back, just to justify each other’s attacks in a complicated, confusing frenzy.

The ultimate meanness is, of course, stealing someone’s husband away from them; as Ethan Slater’s ex reportedly put it, Ariana Grande is “not a girl’s girl.”³ Thus, when Slater and Grande’s relationship went semi-public in summer 2023, the same type of girlies who fall in line with Ariana Grande’s use of “♡” had no problem attacking her for this crime of meanness she had committed. So much so, in fact, public comments on her Instagram are now disabled.⁴ But, because Grande has long been a shepherd of the girlie contingent, this kind of reactionary meanness was soon met with the same sort of complex justifying incited by Zegler.

Do you think the Wizard is dumb? / Or like Munchkins so small-minded?

Contributory to ire toward Ariana Grande, of course, is the frightening changes to her body, as well as her constantly changing voice. It has become a meme that Ariana Grande is “transracial,” but it has always fascinated me that, as the height of her pop career coincided with post-Trump wokeness, she was doing blackface to very little mainstream criticism. What thrust her into the most scandal wasn’t impersonating Victoria Monét or doing fake, offensive voices, but being involved with someone else’s marital transgression. This perfectly encapsulates, to me, the sad irony of “meanness” in a post-Trump, now post-woke world; embracing the lyrics “Break up with your girlfriend / Yeah yeah ‘cause I’m bored / You could hit it in the morning / Yeah yeah like it’s yours,” sung in R&B cosplay, but taking moral offense to this sexual fantasy put into action. The blaccent only becomes a problem once she is “mean” to “women.”

Despite my feeling that Ariana Grande is out of my cultural purview, what’s funny is that she is far more a part of my daily life than my friends’. I have always liked her music, but I am also very interested in her monumental influence on normie (non-derogatory) fashion and beauty. In lieu of podcasts, I always have vlogs soundtracking my chores or workouts. This gives me access to anthropological information I wouldn’t otherwise be affronted with, but I also have a genuine affinity for adult women who love Sonny Angels and Squishmallows. My favorite of these ladies is Remi Cruz (who Lana Del Rey also “watches every day”), who has 2.51 million subs on her main YouTube channel and 1.46 million on her vlog channel, 1 million followers on Instagram, and two extraordinarily successful podcasts. To me, Remi Cruz is a niche interest, but her vlogs are frequently interrupted by fans spotting her on the street or on a plane. When I explained this person to my boyfriend recently, he did some Googling and asked, “why was her engagement announced in People Magazine?”. I replied, “because she’s famous.” “There is an entire ecosystem of fame I don’t know anything about,” he incredulously replied.

In that NYT op-ed, Maureen Dowd says:

Remarkably some people on TikTok are comparing Elphaba to Donald Trump, saying that the green-faced girl is like the orange-faced man because she, too, is a victim of the “deep state.” Most people, of course, will see shades of Trump in the Wizard, a con man with authoritarian tendencies who is set on uniting people against a common enemy… The “Glicked” weekend echoes the election in tone — male versus female — and a big gender gap. On opening night, according to The Ankler on Substack, the “Wicked” audience was 72 percent women and 28 percent men. The “Gladiator II” audience was about 61 percent male and 39 percent female.

To which Lydia Polgreen responds:

Wow, Maureen, that is fascinating. And the green/orange thing is kind of perfect. At the end of the day, a big part of MAGA culture is seeing liberals/the left as the real fascists. I do think that the story lends itself to a kind of ideological flexibility. It is human nature to imagine the choices we make to be the good and right ones and to see ourselves as aligned with the hero.

Remi Cruz’s review of Wicked is that “every line from the musical was in the movie” and “I’m an Ari girl, through and through.” This is a far more truthful and utilitarian evaluation than “the green-faced girl is like the orange-faced man.”

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But, at least the New York Crimes is grappling with what’s happening online.

For years, Remi Cruz has shown me what most women in the country are aesthetically concerned with, despite those things never otherwise coming up in my daily life. Ariana Grande is one of those things, having pioneered silhouettes and hairdos that I now believe begot much-discussed TikTok trends like “coquette” and “Balletcore” (help), without any broader cultural credit ever actually going Grande’s way. I have gone years without hearing an Ariana Grande song, only for Remi to show or tell me that one of them is “going viral” on For You Pages that are not my own. In Cruz’s Wicked review, she says, “I know when it was announced that Ari was playing Glinda, so many people were like, ‘oh my god, no, she’s just gonna be like Ariana Grande… it’s just gonna be like, you now, like, ponytail up there.’” I am never not looking at my phone, and I didn’t know that people reacted that way to Ariana Grande’s casting.

It doesn’t surprise me, though, because alongside my Moana 2 research is evidence of a total breakdown in the Wicked fandom, unable to reconcile the presence of a mean, marital-transgression-helper in nice, girly, anti-fascist Wicked. There are as many videos from the platforms most popular creators saying, “I don’t want to have a conversation if it’s not about Wicked, and I don’t want to sing a song if it’s not Wicked,” as there are comments, with over 11k likes, under the Wicked cast’s Letterboxd 4-favorites: “The fact that Ariana said First Wives Club 😳 lol.”

When you search TikTok for “ariana grande wicked,” there are only slightly more videos and comments celebrating Grande’s performance than there are speculating about her (and Cynthia Erivo’s) sickly appearance(s) or strange behavior in press. In one video, a girl reacts to everyone unduly “hating” on Ariana, to which comments unanimously reply, “who is hating?” “I haven’t seen anyone hating.” Not even fans or haters can siphon themselves to Glinda filter bubbles when it comes to Ariana Grande in Wicked.

Don’t talk about Taylor Swift challenge: FAILED

Again, this sounds like a classic problem: if you get too famous, people will nitpick you, running in circles of adoration and loathing. Taylor Swift’s momentum post-1989, for example, betrayed her when seemingly everyone followed Kim and Kanye’s lead. But Taylor Swift never posted a front-facing short form video addressing widespread concern and ridicule over losing too much weight. I spent even more time on my phone in 2014 and the Lover era (when Taylor Swift was hated for the second time), and never witnessed the kind of moral and algorithmic messes that plague Ariana Grande’s celebrity. That’s because, in her current iteration, Ariana Grande is a truly contemporary superstar; not monoculturally massive, but more important to a section of mainstream America than intellectual critics can understand from their siphoned public sphere. She isn’t just “too skinny,” but skinny enough to cause genuine concern. She wasn’t just doing whatever it is that Billie Eilish was doing; “7 Rings” was way crazier and more offensive. And, now, her big film debut is not just Cats, but a generically and ideologically new Marvel.

This is the kind of statement you make, if you have a brain, after you see Wicked: if woke morality is what happens after Trump gets elected once, what happens after woke morality is a complete and total breakdown of critical thought and culture. Writing off TikTokers and vloggers as unintellectual children might have been useful at the height of Marvel’s success, but when the cancerous growth on cinema is an anti-fascist allegory for girlies, that is no longer productive. David Ehrlich, in his wisdom but generational distance from Wicked, and the New York Times, in its detestable reduction of ideology to “green” and “orange,” both end up talking more about what Wicked “means to people” than what’s going on in Wicked, i.e. animals can no longer be tenured professors. The film is awful: ugly, ideologically and aesthetically recessive. Directing ire at Wicked is not mean to Wicked fans, though: they are just as cruel.

More importantly for the world beyond Wicked are questions of critical alienation and meanness. All it takes for algorithms, divisions between intellectual and popular classes or Millennials and Gen Alpha, to break down is putting a “mean” girl in a “nice” movie. We are at a crux of wokeness dying and meanness—anorexia and anti-woman sentimentality galore—being reborn. As critics, leaving mainstream entertainment to mainstream reviewers, letting Moana 2 slip right by us, is a recipe for disaster: you can’t just ignore stuff because it’s “for a different generation,” or bad but “potentially harmless” if left only to that other generation. It is easy to parse why girlies like Wicked and thus why Wicked is making money. It is almost impossible, though, to understand what it means to “like” something now, what it means to be a diehard or superstar. But we have to try.

This effort won’t make bad objects like Wicked or Moana 2 disappear, but the impact they have post-Marvel, post-Trump, post-woke are entirely different in nature than critical tools from even 5 years ago can handle. If we believe culture is part of material life, that spectacle is a part of art, we cannot let the formal and generational barriers to understanding the Internet keep us from engaging with the new public sphere. I cannot pretend Ariana Grande is way less famous than she actually is any more than Wicked fans can pretend Ariana Grande looks, behaves, and sounds like a normal person.⁵ If we want any hope for kids growing up and watching real movies, we can’t just say “Wicked is fine, I guess.” Frozen is fine, I guess. Wicked is a monstrosity of wokeness, meanness, laziness, and ineptitude. I think that, in order to understand contemporary media, you have to understand TikTok and Ariana Grande. But then I guess we know there’s blame to share / And none of it seems to matter anymore.

for the record, i think this is the presently the chicest celebrity couple (getty)

1. And aren’t we all?

2. Here comes the pot talking about the kettle!!

3. There is a whole can of worms here that I don’t have the energy to get into. I basically think the evilness woke children associate with cheating and sex is itself one of the greatest evils plaguing culture right now. I wrote a little bit about that in my Armie Hammer post.

4. Cursory research suggests Grande has frequently toggled comment settings on her Instagram over the years, so I can’t say precisely when it began in this era. I am not an oral historian of Ariana Grande as I am of, say, Vanessa Hudgens.

5. To be clear, while I am not a superfan, I agree with Fran that Ariana Grande is thoroughly lovable because “she’s a silly person behaving silly.” She was the only redeemable part of Wicked and I always look forward to what she will do next. But there is no arguing that she is looking and sounding wacky, not that it isn’t an innate part of her charm, I guess.