I’ll See You on the Dark Side of Oz
By JT Hilltop

The wonderful wizard of Oz. If ever oh ever a wiz there was the Wizard of Oz is one because…If you can’t finish that in a capella then you need to check your pulse. Wizard Of Oz is not just a story or movie its an American institution. A global treasure. Many of us who grew up before the age of instant information and entertainment on demand viewing The Wizard of Oz was an absolute must. An elementary school ritual which was all anyone talked about once we got back to school. It was a family night adventure and everyone sat around and watched it around buckets of popcorn and cuploads of soda. The movie mesmerized and hypnotized us and some parts scared the shit out of us. As children we were intrigued and believed in the story. And to boot it left us with a beautiful message when it ended. We learned that we need to face our fears and its best to fight them as a team. We learned that evil is wrong and good will always win out in the end. We learned the truly lesson that “the grass always seems greener on the other side” yet in the end “there’s no place like home.” As a child I absorbed these and other messages from movies like a subliminal sponge. Absorbing from movies such as the Wizard as well as from fairy tales and children songs. But as I got older and more cynical I took on a culture of “nothing is ever really what it seems.” I began to read into and interpret things in search of truth. I wanted to know what was underneath so I interpreted underlying meanings in movies, stories, poems, and songs. A personal fascination for me was the underlying meaning in rock lyrics.
Ah yes, rock and roll the beating rhythm of my generation. Rock song lyrics more than anything got deconstructed by my jagged mind and then placed back in an order that would tell an entirely different story. Sometimes songs were written with a hidden meaning on purpose and that offered a challenge as in the case of Don McLean’s “American Pie.” As teens my friends and I spent hours digging in to the layers of lyrics in an attempt to extract the inner meaning of that tune. When I hear it played today I still think of all the symbolic references and allusions to various celebrities both famous an infamous. To rock events like The Beatles playing Shea or The Stones at Altamont. McLean had deftly hidden all sorts of innuendo and cultural icon references and brilliantly he had masked the clues leaving it up to us to interpret. To me that was a stroke of genius, similar to the musings of the lyrical concepts of The Beatles and The Stones. Those young talents had intuitive understanding of life far beyond their years and successfully conveyed those ideas into words. Some lyrics are crystal clear, some seem to make no sense, and many are written in the abstract to add to confusion.
With many songwriting perhaps even the author doesn’t fully understand the complex structure of their own words. Maybe sub conscious or maybe totally unaware of what the brain is trying to express from them in such an abstract way they deny its very true underlying theme. I lay on you as an example the song “Space Oddity” written by the one and only David Bowie. Bowie himself claims it’s a song he wrote about space after seeing the movie “2001, A Space Odyssey” while he was stoned (I believe he called it out of his gourd) Both that movie and the moon landing were popular events at the time and he claims that was his inspiration. He even wrote a follow up or sequel to the tune called “Ashes To Ashes” in which his purported Major Tom reconnects with earth. I don’t buy it for a second. I look deeper into the embedded subliminal inspirations and I believe whether intentional or subliminal this song is about David’s very own struggle with his sexuality. Its pretty well known he went through what has been described as an androgynous stage and the song reeks of innuendo surrounding the freeing of ones sexual inhibitions. In a phrase it was David coming out of the closet and exploring his own sexual desires. Let me explore for, dare I call it, a deeper meaning.
Ground control to Major Tom, take your protein pills and put your helmet on. Okay, relatively obvious, semen and protein almost synonymous and a condom is the helmet to protect from disease. A common practice back at the time was to bolster the system with protein to increase a males sexual prowess an stamina. (Pre Viagra practice when ED was the name of a talking horse) Ground control is his mind, and major Tom is, well I’ll just call him Major Woody. The papers want to know who’s shirt you wear or which team are you on. Are you with the hetero’s or the non hetero’s? Maybe he’s not sure himself! Now its time to leave the capsule if you dare. Here then is that closet I mentioned David leaving. As he steps through that door he is walking in a “most peculiar way“, two derogatory comments used at the time to describe a gay man. He walks funny, like a girl, and he is queer or peculiar. No wonder the stars look very different today! Planet earth is blue and there’s nothing he can do. Back at that time porn was described as “blue movies”, to him the world is obsessed with sex and there is not a thing he can do about these new feelings. Or is there? He’s past one hundred thousand miles (around the block with women) he’s feeling very still (no zip to his ship). But not to worry, his spaceship knows which way to go. His compass points to experimentations with the North Pole! Tell his wife he loves her very much, she knows(love is not just sexual). He is feeling sorry and a tad guilty for going off on a sexual excursion. She already knows because you can’t hide your real self forever and your partner will likely be the first to sense it. Now the circuits dead there’s something wrong. He has no sexual electricity any longer for his woman and he can’t understand why. So that’s my offbeat take. Or maybe its about an astronaut that was lost in space and cut off from Huston. Floating in a very peculiar way without gravity around. I merely offer an alternative view. That’s what I do, I listen to words then try to make sense of what I hear in a more abstract fashion. I reconstruct words in search of the true meaning beneath the surface. I also enjoy using the same mental exercise in cinema and this interpretation is my reconstructive take on my all time favorite tale, The Wizard of Oz.
The Wizard of Oz is not just a tale of young girl on an adventure but the story of finding your inner strength, learning that what truly matters is not how much gold and glitter you acquire but how much love you acquire. “A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.” The underlying messages in the tale are important and a dynamic learning tool for children but there lies underneath a message intended for adults as well. At least I believe there is so that’s why I am looking deep into the story of Oz to find out what meaning it can have for us as presumed adults. Join me down the twisted path of an existential quirky mind to explore the underbelly of a time honored traditional story. If nothing else, you will have an opportunity to exercise your eyes and hopefully your imagination, and perhaps a smile or two as well. To Be Continued