Wizards of one kind... and another

Michele finally got her wish.  We watched Oz, The Great and Powerful on Thursday night.  It's a "prequel" that tells the story of how the Wizard, who we meet as an old man in the classic The Wizard of Oz, comes to Oz.  Oz is a world of magic that is "over the rainbow," where good and evil are clearly delineated and Yellow Brick Roads lead people through all sorts of peril to their destinations.  Oz, as a general rule, is not a place that inspires a great deal of thought, and Oz, the Great and Powerful, is not exactly the sort of movie that challenges or inspires the audience in any way, other than making you want to punch James Franco in the head at various moments.

What I found interesting though was the world and the ethos of the stories of Frank Baum, as compared to Tolkien.  I am a bit biased, because Tolkien and Lewis are rather dear to my heart, and I have never even actually read Baum.  Despite watching The Wizard of Oz more times than I care to remember, I can't say I can really judge Baum as an author; so I won't.  What I will do is compare wizards.

The Wizard of Oz, is not really a wizard at all, he's a charlatan, which is pretty much the entire premise of Oz, the Great and Powerful.  He's just a circus performer from Kansas, who gets in rather over his head when a tornado whisks him out of Kansas and into Oz.  The "Wizard" tries to scam his way through a crisis and eventually realizes, in a world of magic, that the only real advantage he has is technology.  Which, any conscious viewer sees coming from the opening segment where he waxes poetic about the "miracles" of Thomas Alva Edison.

Compare that to the Lord of The Rings trilogy, where technology is used mostly by evil, and the world of magic and the "human" spirit are victorious in the end.  Tolkien was but a few decades later than Baum, but Tolkien had WWI in his rear-view mirror and WWII as a rather clear and present reality.  Tolkien, as a soldier in WWI had experience the horror of "modern" warfare and was writing LOTR during the late 1930's and 1940's, and of course, you know what was going on then.  Baum had in his mind that technology could be the thing that saves the world.  Tolkien saw first hand that it was also rather likely to destroy the world.

Baum's characters are not ambiguous, their potential, the fact that "they had it in them all along," is really not a mystery to viewers of the movies (perhaps it is to readers, I just don't know).

Tolkien's characters give you the rather precarious notion that they are simply not up to the task, they fail, they get lost, they let the darker side of their nature repeatedly get the best of them, and ultimately they succeed through grace and dogged determination (yes, you can succeed through both of those at the same time).

I think Tolkien's work stands up better as literature (though again, Baum is certainly not a failure in that regard) because his underlying premise more accurately describes reality: technology is morally ambiguous.  It is not good or evil in itself, it can be used for either with wonderful or terrifying results.  I can use this blog to communicate my thoughts on everything from pilgrimage to the movie I saw Thursday evening and generally (I hope) my musings are helpful, entertaining or thought-provoking.  Others may use their blogs to spew hatred and endorse ignorance.  In either usage, the technology is only the medium.

Baum lived in a world where electricity and the new possibilities that it brought were just beginning to bear fruit.  Tolkien lived in a world where technology had flowered into a mustard gas and atomic weapons, no wonder he made technology the tool of Sauron.

I think we ought to have room in our hearts for two kinds of wizard (not that I'm advocating for occultism).  We should be able to appreciate both technology and magic.  When I say magic, I mean principles that lie deep in the heart of creation, things that bring us face to face with mystery and wonder, things that science and technology, by their very nature, do not and cannot understand.  Magic is in the human ability to love and appreciate and create beauty.  Magic is in our sense of truth and in the depth of our ability to be something more than we seem to be on the surface (like Tolkien's Hobbits, or Dorothy Gayle).

That is where Baum and Tolkien get on the same page: we are more than we seem to be, and that is truly magical.