Wicked explained: propaganda, conformity, and the making of a Monster

There are films that entertain, films that move you, and then there are the ones that leave you sitting there after the credits, a little quiet, slightly stunned, with that very specific feeling that you have just touched something far bigger than the story you were supposedly being told. Wicked, for me, belongs in that category. Because no, it is not just a movie about a misunderstood witch, a popular blonde, and a magical world with gorgeous costumes meant to help the trauma go down easier. It is a film about the making of a monster, about the way a society decides who will be lovable, who will be acceptable, and who will be forced to carry the moral ugliness of everything else on their behalf.

Welcome to Ink & Acid, the podcast where we dissect pop culture, stories, symbols, collective hypocrisies, and sometimes, very frankly, our absurd habit of applauding our own reflection when the lighting is flattering enough. I’m Harmonie, and over here, we do not skim the surface. We crack things open, we look at what is inside, and when it stings a little, well… that is usually where it gets interesting. Today, we’re talking about Wicked. But not the “I loved the songs, the actresses are incredible, what a beautiful reinterpretation of a classic” version. No. Today, we are going to talk about what Wicked reveals about us. About our obsession with simple narratives. About our collective need to manufacture figures to love and figures to hate. About the way power does not always need to be brutal, as long as it is seductive. And above all, we are going to talk about one deeply unsettling thing: how easily an audience can watch a critique of its own hypocrisy and never once feel personally addressed.

Because that may be the most disturbing thing about Wicked. This film stages propaganda, conformism, the manufacture of a public enemy, social violence gift-wrapped in good intentions, and despite all that, a huge portion of the audience walks away with the comforting feeling that they have simply watched a beautiful story about injustice. As if, obviously, the problem were other people. Always other people. The naïve ones, the sheep, the masses, the gullible, the easily manipulated. Us? No, of course not. We would have understood right away. Naturally. Self-assigned innocence is incredibly convenient. It costs nothing and goes with everything.

So in this episode, we are going to take the machinery apart. We are going to look at how a society invents its monster. Why certain figures get rejected not because they are evil, but because they cannot be smoothed over, disciplined, or made comfortable. We are going to talk about charm, respectability, soft violence, public narratives, collective psychology, sociology, bias, and that almost embarrassing human passion for the kinds of lies that keep the existing order nice and cozy. In short, yes, we are going to talk about Wicked, but even more than that, we are going to talk about the very real world that makes it feel so uncomfortably relevant.

And before we begin, one important note: the musical interludes you will hear throughout this episode are my own songs. You can find them in the bio and on every streaming platform. So if one of those tracks grabs you on the way through — which, frankly, would be an excellent instinct — you know where to go. Get comfortable. Because we are not just going to talk about a movie. We are going to talk about the way a society decides who deserves to be mourned, who deserves to be believed, and who has to be turned into a threat so that everything else can keep staring at itself in the mirror without wincing too hard. And trust me, this is going to be a lot less comfortable than a movie musical fairy tale.

The Making of a Witch: How a Society Invents Its Monster.

What Wicked stages with almost cruel elegance is a truth societies usually prefer to disguise as some kind of moral accident: you do not become a monster only because of what you do, but because of what a group needs you to represent. Elphaba is green, visible, discordant, impossible to smooth out. She does not fit into the scenery, so the scenery eventually defines itself against her. The film is certainly about a friendship, a political trajectory, a rupture, but underneath all that, it is also telling a much older story: the collective reflex of turning a visible difference into proof of danger. And there is nothing exceptional about that. Social psychology defines prejudice as a hostile attitude toward a group or its members “without sufficient grounds,” or even before any serious examination has taken place. In other words, condemnation often comes before the evidence, and then the evidence gets cobbled together afterward. Stereotypes, for their part, radically oversimplify a group or a figure and very quickly signal who can become a legitimate target for collective frustration. It is spectacularly efficient and intellectually lazy on an almost Olympic level.

The film’s real strength is that it shows exclusion is not merely moral, but aesthetic and social. Elphaba first disturbs the eye, then habits, then the symbolic order itself. Even before she is accused of being dangerous, she has already been constructed as “outside the norm.” That is where what sociology has long described as stigmatization enters the picture. Erving Goffman, in his work on stigma and the presentation of self, shows that social life relies heavily on interpretive frames: we never observe an individual in some pure state, we read them through signs, expectations, categories. In other words, visible difference is never neutral; it is immediately encoded. A person stops being perceived as a complex subject and becomes the support for a collective meaning. In Wicked, green skin is not just a physical trait; it becomes a social syntax. It allows everyone else to project, anticipate, judge, and above all, not think too hard. And for a society, it is always wonderfully convenient when appearance allows it to outsource moral effort to a reflex.

This is where precision matters: monstrosity is not a fact, it is a narrative. Elphaba is not born “wicked”; she is gradually narrated as such. And that shift matters, because it moves collective hostility out of the realm of violence and into the realm of legitimacy. No one is persecuting someone anymore; they are “protecting” the community from a threat. Scapegoat theory, popularized in particular by René Girard, is useful here. It shows that a group under tension will often try to restore cohesion by displacing its conflicts onto one individual or outsider, who is then presented as the cause of disorder. The absolutely delightful detail — delightful in the sense that it makes you want to flip a table — is that the people participating in the sacrifice do not see themselves as persecutors. They see themselves as restorers of order. Girard insists on precisely that point: the mechanism works because the community believes it is punishing a guilty party when in fact it is crushing an innocent person who has become a convenient container for its dysfunctions. Put plainly, the group washes its hands in somebody else’s reputation.

It is no accident that the figures chosen as scapegoats are often already marginal, visible, or perceived as ugly, foreign, disturbing. Even historically, the ancient Greek ritual of the pharmākos sometimes selected individuals deemed physically undesirable to symbolically carry away the community’s evil before being expelled or killed. Yes, humanity very literally institutionalized the idea that collective tension could be purged by sacrificing the wrong silhouette. Nothing is more reassuring than a civilization that turns its own discomfort into ceremony. Wicked updates that mechanism in a pop grammar: the group needs an embodied anomaly, and Elphaba has the strategic advantage of already being legible as an anomaly before she has even spoken. Her existence comes before her trial, and that is precisely what makes the trial so effective.

The film becomes even more interesting when it shows that the construction of a monster depends less on truth than on framing. Goffman spoke of frame analysis: the way reality is “framed” determines what it means to others. The same person can be read as dissident, ungrateful, dangerous, heroic, or tragic depending on the story wrapped around them. In Wicked, hostility toward Elphaba therefore does not depend simply on what she does, but on the fact that her actions are inserted into a narrative already designed to make them look threatening. The movie itself signals that propaganda logic even through its musical construction — the official score includes a track titled “Propaganda Speech,” which is not exactly subtle, but at least it has the elegance to take the mask off in front of everyone. Elphaba becomes less a person than a narrative device useful to power.

And that is where the bridge to our own era stops being a comfortable analogy and turns into a slap. We live inside media ecosystems where reputation circulates faster than complexity. Platforms reward what shocks, moralizes, simplifies, divides. The American Psychological Association summarizes the problem with sinister clarity: on social media, sensationalistic, moralized, emotional, and derogatory content about “the other side” spreads faster than neutral or positive content. Translation: the machine absolutely loves anything that turns a person into a repellent symbol. It is not merely that people judge too fast; it is that the very architecture of information circulation rewards narratives that dehumanize efficiently. We are no longer just consuming people; we are consuming compressed versions of them, optimized for our outrage, our side, our moral comfort.

That is also why Wicked is more unsettling than it first appears. The film does not merely say, “Look how unfairly a different woman is treated.” It says something much more uncomfortable: “Look how quickly a collective can convert its discomfort into a moral narrative, then applaud its own cruelty because it has been staged well enough.” We often imagine that social monsters emerge when a person commits the unforgivable. In reality, they often emerge when a society needs a simple story to avoid a more expensive truth. The problem is not that Elphaba is inexplicable. The problem is that she forces the system to look at itself. And that is something a society rarely forgives. It almost always prefers to manufacture a witch rather than admit that it built its order on fear, conformism, and a chronic allergy to nuance. It is less glamorous than a grand finale suspended in midair, but unfortunately far more useful if you actually want to understand the world.

Glinda, the Power of Charm, and the Soft Violence of Conformism.

The irritating genius of Wicked is that it does not simply oppose a persecuted outsider to a brutal power structure. That would already be effective, yes, but also a bit too clean, a bit too reassuring, almost pedagogical in the worst possible way. The film does something more disturbing: it shows that social order does not survive only through tyrants, propagandists, or grotesque authority figures. It also survives through the charming faces that make it feel bearable. Glinda is not simply “the popular girl” standing opposite Elphaba the dissenter. She embodies that socially rewarded gray zone where adhesion to the system comes through grace, through smiling, through relational intelligence, through the ability to be loved. In that sense, she is infinitely more interesting than a flat caricature of superficiality, because she represents one of the most powerful engines of collective order: desirable conformity. Social psychology defines conformity as the process by which an individual adjusts beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors to align more closely with those of a group they belong to, or whose approval they seek. Put more simply: we do not just want to be right; we want to be accepted. And very often, acceptance wins.

That is exactly what makes Glinda fascinating. She does not dominate through force; she rules through legibility. She intuitively understands the codes of the world she inhabits and, above all, she knows how to make herself flow smoothly within them. She possesses that socially overrated quality of making everyone around her feel comfortable without ever seriously disturbing the structures that reassure them. You could call that tact, charm, adaptability. You could also, with a little less indulgence and a little more lucidity, call it perfect compatibility with the existing order. Normative conformity rests precisely on that logic: people conform because they want to be liked or, at minimum, not rejected. The result, as the research descending from Asch’s work explains, is often public compliance rather than deep adhesion. People do not always fully believe in the system; they mostly learn not to resist it too visibly. Glinda excels at exactly that art. She knows how not to look like she is collaborating, while never truly threatening the machinery that rewards her.

What makes the Glinda-Elphaba dynamic so lethal is that it reveals society does not merely treat people according to morality, but according to what might be called social readability. And that readability depends heavily on appearance, style, tone, the way someone occupies space. Here psychology becomes almost obscene in its frankness. The halo effect describes the way one perceived positive trait — beauty, confidence, charm, prestige — contaminates our judgments about completely unrelated qualities. A person perceived as attractive or elegant will also seem more intelligent, more trustworthy, more competent, sometimes even more moral, without any real basis for that conclusion. It is the old social lie in one neat formula: what is beautiful must surely be good. Glinda benefits from that logic almost effortlessly. She is not just appreciated because she is gentle; she is also read as gentle because she is already judged pleasant to look at, pleasant to hear, pleasant to integrate. Social favor loves disguising itself as obviousness.

Elphaba, by contrast, suffers the darker inverse of that same mechanism, what we might call the horn effect in the background: one perceived negative or disturbing trait ends up contaminating the interpretation of the whole person. She is no longer simply different; she becomes difficult, alarming, excessive, potentially dangerous. And the most pernicious part is that this asymmetry does not need to be consciously thought through in order to produce its effects. The APA reminds us that implicit biases influence perception and behavior even when people have no idea they carry them. In other words, social preference for Glinda and suspicion toward Elphaba do not need to be formulated as doctrine. They can unfold as a reflex, as a climate, as shared “common sense.” That is the chic horror of conformism: no one has to say “let’s be unjust”; it is enough that everyone finds it more convenient to prefer what does not disturb the collective stage set.

This is also where the film touches something deeply gendered. Modern societies love proclaiming that they value intelligent, strong, ambitious women. Wonderful. They value them mostly when those women remain legible within a reassuring femininity: elegant but not too radical, brilliant but not abrasive, visible but not threatening, assertive but always relational. Elphaba’s problem is not only that she opposes; it is that she opposes without sufficiently acceptable packaging. Glinda, meanwhile, masters what could be called performative respectability: the ability to move within the expected codes of social grace, which allows her to exist at the heart of power without being immediately perceived as a danger. The system rarely rewards truth in its raw form; it prefers truth perfumed, brushed, diplomatic, delivered with a smile that threatens neither the hierarchy nor the furniture. That preference is not anecdotal. It concretely organizes who gets heard, who gets forgiven, who gets promoted, and who gets dismissed as “too much.”

Interactionist sociology helps explain why. Goffman showed that social life depends on performances, on presentations of self adjusted to the expectations of the stage. Some individuals instinctively know how to play the role their environment rewards; others, deliberately or not, expose the seams of the stage itself. Glinda is a virtuoso of adjustment. She knows how to inhabit the scene without breaking the illusion. Elphaba, on the other hand, reminds the audience that the set is, in fact, a set. And nothing irritates a society more than someone who deprives it of the comfort of its own theater. Conformism is therefore not just intellectual submission; it is an emotional and relational choreography. It requires smiling at the right moment, minimizing violence when it is elegantly administered, finding someone “awkward” when they tell the truth with too little varnish. In that context, Glinda is not an exception; she is a model of social survival in a world that confuses ease with virtue.

There is, finally, something even crueler here: the system does not merely need people who obey it; it needs people who give it an appealing face. That is what Glinda makes visible. The most durable social regimes are not the ones that look purely violent, but the ones that know how to produce seductive mediators, transitional figures, people capable of softening the unacceptable through personal charm. It is not that such figures are always lying; it is that they make the lie habitable. The danger, then, is not only the blunt brutality of power, but the softness that serves as its moral passport. And that is where Wicked becomes truly acidic: it forces us to admit that most collectives hold together less through raw terror than through an accumulation of elegant accommodations, polite silences, aesthetic loyalties to the order of things. The Glindas of the world are not asked to be monstrous. They are merely asked to be charming enough that no one notices the monstrosity of the machine standing behind them. And frankly, for a piece of social criticism, it is almost rude to land the hit that accurately.

Why the Audience Applauds a Critique of Itself Without Feeling Targeted.

There is something extraordinarily convenient in the way we consume political or socially critical works: we have a remarkable tendency to interpret them as diagnoses of the world, but rarely as diagnoses of ourselves. Wicked offers exactly that comfort while pretending to remove it. The film talks about propaganda, the manufacture of a public enemy, manipulation of narrative, collective adhesion to a convenient version of reality. And yet a huge portion of the audience walks away with the flattering feeling that they “got the message,” and therefore must, by definition, be on the right side of that message. It is a very old psychological magic trick: the more clearly a work denounces a mechanism, the more protected the viewer sometimes feels from that very mechanism, as though recognizing it were enough to become exempt from it. Media psychology partly describes this through the third-person effect: the tendency to believe media messages influence other people more than they influence us. We think propaganda seduces the crowd, that simplistic narratives manipulate the gullible, that moral panics swallow up less lucid people. We, of course, observe all of this from a superior, clean, nearly sterilized vantage point. Which is precisely what makes us so easy to reach.

This illusion of distance is not some minor side detail of social functioning; it is one of its most elegant fuels. If everyone believes the real problem lies mainly in other people’s credulity, no one seriously examines their own interpretive reflexes. And those reflexes do exist, and they are often less noble than we like to imagine. Confirmation bias pushes people to privilege information that validates what they already think and to treat anything that disrupts their preexisting worldview with extra suspicion. The mechanism is largely involuntary, which is scientifically fascinating and politically extremely convenient. So a work like Wicked is never received in an intellectual vacuum. It is received through prior beliefs about justice, power, marginality, manipulation, and above all, one’s own morality. The viewer does not just see the film; they see the version of the film that allows them to remain coherent with the image they already have of themselves. And that image is rarely modest.

This is where another mechanism steps in, quieter and even more vain: the self-serving bias. We tend to interpret our successes, our correct intuitions, our moral readings as products of our intelligence or integrity, while mistakes, blind spots, and complicities are more readily attributed to context, confusion, pressure, the circumstances of the moment. Applied to Wicked, this produces something delicious and deeply suspicious: viewers readily recognize themselves in the ability to perceive manipulation, but far less in their tendency to participate in it. They admire their own retrospective lucidity. They imagine that they would have seen through the propaganda, that they would have understood Elphaba, that they would not have been seduced by the official narrative. That is surely possible for some individuals; statistically, as a collective myth, it is mostly a massive operation of moral cosmetic surgery. A society does not function because a handful of great villains hypnotize passive masses. It functions because a huge number of ordinary people find it more comfortable to believe themselves independent while absorbing the narrative frames that reassure them.

Add to that a particularly modern phenomenon: consuming critique as proof of virtue. Watching a socially engaged work, loving it, quoting it, sharing its themes can become a way of signaling one’s moral awareness without actually changing one’s own practices. Behavioral ethics research speaks here of moral licensing: after doing, thinking, or displaying something morally valued, individuals can feel implicitly authorized to lower their ethical vigilance elsewhere. In plain English, perceiving yourself as someone “on the right side” can sometimes exempt you from the labor of seriously questioning yourself. You watch a film that denounces exclusion, and suddenly feel less implicated in your own ways of excluding. You applaud a story about propaganda, and imagine yourself more resistant to propaganda. You cry over a victim of a collective narrative, and forget how easily you, elsewhere, participate in reducing people to symbols. Cinema becomes not a shock to the conscience, but a premium moral spin cycle. Delicate program, social justice fragrance, 1200 RPM.

This mechanism is all the more powerful because the contemporary media environment rewards exactly the kinds of content that activate quick, polarizing, identity-based moral reactions. The American Psychological Association summarizes the dynamic with a sharpness that ought to be posted at the entrance to every social platform: sensationalistic, moralized, emotional, and derogatory content about “the other side” spreads faster than neutral or positive content. People are more likely to share what shocks, scandalizes, reassures their side, and offers a clear object to condemn. Wicked therefore enters a landscape in which we are already trained to read the world through narratives of innocents and guilty parties, purified victims and useful enemies. The film may be brilliant, but it also lands in a culture of permanent narrative judgment, where politics is consumed like a moral casting call. The consequence is formidable: instead of pulling us out of that logic, it can sometimes flatter us into feeling we have mastered it. We become critics of simplification while simplifiying in turn who, in real life, would be Elphaba, who would be Glinda, who would be the Wizard. Nothing slips more easily into caricature than a work denouncing caricature.

There is also a less comfortable truth to state plainly: audiences love critiques of the system when they remain aesthetically digestible. A work like Wicked allows people to feel gravity without immediately paying its cost. You can be moved, shocked, feel intelligent, walk away with the sense that you encountered a profound truth, all without risking your status, your relationships, your habits, or your own methods of judgment. That is the difference between feeling justice and practicing justice. Feeling justice is emotionally satisfying. Practicing it often requires giving up advantages, simple narratives, group loyalties, flattering certainties. And we are always a little too fond of overestimating our own resistance to influence and our future capacity to act morally; psychology literature identifies this as one form of optimism bias. We love imagining that, faced with collective pressure, we would be courageous. In practice, societies mostly hold together because most people prefer not to test that hypothesis on themselves.

That is why the true force of Wicked is not aimed only at propagandists, institutions, or officially designated villains. It also targets the audience’s almost pathological need to tell itself it is already awake. The film becomes genuinely interesting when we stop watching it as a beautiful denunciation of collective falsehood and receive it instead as a far more humiliating question: in how many rigged narratives have I already accepted my role because it was aesthetically, socially, or morally comfortable? Modern propaganda does not always ask for fanatical adhesion. More often, it asks for something much more banal, much more polite, much more chic: that we accept simplified versions of other people, as long as they protect our side, our taste, our self-image. The audience applauds a critique of itself not because it is stupid, but because it is human — which is to say extraordinarily talented at turning an accusation into a compliment. And honestly, if we had to choose a collective specialty for our era, this one would be in the top three.

Conclusion.

At its core, what Wicked lays bare with such elegance is not merely the story of a rejected woman, nor even the story of a well-orchestrated political lie. It is something much more embarrassing, which of course makes it much more interesting: the ease with which a society turns its discomfort into moral certainty. The speed with which it decides who will be readable, lovable, credible, and who will have to carry on their face, their body, their reputation, everything the collective refuses to confront in itself.

Because that may be the film’s real strength. It does not only speak about power as a vertical structure imposed from above by grotesque figures or well-placed manipulators. It speaks about power as diffuse complicity. As atmosphere. As aesthetic. As a shared narrative. It speaks about that very human moment when people prefer a simple story to a disturbing truth, a reassuring face to a dissonant voice, a stable fiction to genuine self-interrogation. And that is precisely why Wicked exceeds its own frame so completely. It is not just a variation on The Wizard of Oz. It is a dissection of the collective need to manufacture monsters so that no one has to interrogate the machine producing them.

What makes the film so unsettling is that it does not allow us to remain comfortably installed in a binary reading. Elphaba is not simply the perfect victim, Glinda is not merely the sweet villain, and the audience — inside the story and outside it — is never as innocent as it loves to tell itself it is. And that is where the narrative becomes truly adult. It forces us to recognize that injustice is not always administered by openly monstrous people. It is often made possible by charming, polite, socially fluid individuals who know exactly how to preserve their place inside a structure they did not invent, but have no serious intention of disturbing. Violence does not always arrive shouting. Very often it arrives smiling, perfectly groomed, entirely legitimate, armed with the vocabulary of reason, good taste, pragmatism, and “let’s be measured.”

And then there is us. Always us. The audience. The spectators. The readers of the real. The people who love believing they would have seen the propaganda coming, that they would have understood the manipulation, that they would have defended the marginalized figure before she became an acceptable tragic symbol. That is perhaps the sharpest edge of Wicked: the film talks about our passion for simplified narratives while simultaneously giving us every condition necessary to consume that critique without seriously damaging our own moral self-image. We love works that denounce social hypocrisy, provided they do not force us too brutally to recognize our own. We love being moved by injustice, sometimes more than we love challenging the reflexes that make injustice possible. We adore feeling lucid, especially when that lucidity threatens neither our comfort, nor our side, nor the way we judge others.

So no, Wicked is not just a film about a witch. It is a story about the manufacturing of deviance, about the reward structure of seductive conformity, about the social price of integrity when it becomes impossible to package nicely. It is a story about public narratives, affective hierarchies, the way a society chooses its sacrificial figures and its decorative ones. And if this film unsettles so many people, it is not because it is too radical. It is because it is too recognizable. It touches something we all see, sometimes without wanting to name it: the fact that collective lies rarely work because they are brilliant. They work because they are practical. Because they protect existing hierarchies. Because they give some people a target, others a place, and almost everyone the illusion of being on the right side of history.

So perhaps the most honest question to leave hanging at the end of this episode is not: who is the monster? Perhaps the real question, the only one really worth anything, is this: in what narrative have I already accepted a ready-made monster because it made the world easier for me to understand? In what narrative have I found someone “too much,” “difficult,” “threatening,” “illegible,” simply because their presence disturbed the aesthetic or moral order I was used to? And on the other hand, how many times have I found a reassuring, charming, moderate figure automatically more legitimate, more socially acceptable, more credible, just because they were better at speaking the language of the system?

That is the elegant cruelty of Wicked. The film does not merely ask us to sympathize with Elphaba. If we are actually willing to follow it all the way through, it asks us to distrust our own narrative comfort. Our need for readability. Our almost compulsive desire to sort people too quickly into luminous figures and frightening ones. Our habit of believing truth always presents well, that it knows how to smile, that it knows how to make itself acceptable. But truth, sometimes, arrives green, awkward, too intense, impossible to market cleanly. And that is precisely why it disturbs us.

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