Wade - I can come into The Wizard of Oz just at the part where she is saying goodbye to the threesome, and it's instant tears for me. I LOVE that film and own the DVD. Classic is too mild a word for that movie!

By having Dorothy so dearly wish to return to the grey (literally) economically straightened dust bowl that was Kansas, is the film saying that family and duty are more important than personal fulfilment.

Wouldn't it have been better to stay in her glorious technicolour dreamland, with her trio of lpatheticly gfrateful male companions and her cherry red fuck-me pumps.

And is is our depression era Alice telling us something about the the internal or ecternal world or even about precocious little girls and how they bring out the best, purely paternal instincts in middle-aged male writers.

If I did some reading, I guess it would become clearer, but I've never really understood the messages of the Wizard of Oz. By having Dorothy so dearly wish to return to the grey (literally) economically straightened dust bowl that was Kansas, is the film saying that family and duty are more important than personal fulfilment. Wouldn't it have been better to stay in her glorious technicolour dreamland, with her trio of lpatheticly gfrateful male companions and her cherry red fuck-me pumps. Is Dorothy's fantastic but morally homely bildungsroman, a cautionary tale of about pleasures of the road or a testament to mom’s meatloaf? And is is our depression era Alice telling us something about the the internal or ecternal world or even about precocious little girls and how they bring out the best, purely paternal instincts in middle-aged male writers.

I don't know why it's so difficult for adults to get what kids grasp instinctually. Kids always want to return home, no matter what home is. Even kids in terrible circumstances are very reluctant to leave home, or a part of them wants to go back home. And what kid, no matter how great a vacation he's had, isn't happy to be back home after it's all over. Home is the safety place, and that seems to be true psychologically even when it isn't true literally. How many novels, movies, etc. have been written about a person's desire to get back home, or back to the home they had as a child? That's really, at bottom, what nostalgia is all about.

Maybe its hard to understand in the case of the movie, because Judy Garland was clearly no longer a child when the movie was made, and we expect her to have a more mature response. Then again, anyone who has gone to college must be familiar with freshmen using any opportunity that comes along to get home for the weekend, even though they generally claim to be happy to be out on their own. It's a pychological draw few can resist.

Kids get why The Wizard of Oz makes sense, while adults are always saying, "But Miss Gulch is still there!"