The newest Hollywood fad is trying to launch the next “Barbenheimer”—the unexpected cultural event that came about when two movies, Oppenheimer and Barbie, refused to move from releasing on the same day. This turned into a social media trend and ended up buoying both movies to box office smash success and cultural dominance. Naturally, Hollywood would like to recreate the effect. They feel like they might have done it with “Glicked”.

　　“Glicked,” made up of the simultaneous releases of Gladiator II and Wicked on November 22, fits the bill in many ways. Like Barbie and Oppenheimer, they’re both very different movies that are respectively very “boy” and “girl” coded. Gladiator II is a violent sword-and-sandals sequel to a classic Ridley Scott film. Wicked is an adaptation of a beloved Broadway musical full of bright colors and empowering messages about believing in yourself.

　　But when it comes to their themes, Gladiator II and Wicked have a lot more in common than Barbie and Oppenheimer. Both are largely critiques of Western civilization, levying similar accusations against it. The main difference is that Wicked’s accusation is a lot more damning, while Gladiator II gives more hope.

　　Spoilers for Wicked and Gladiator II now follow.

　　Gladiator II follows a young man named Lucius (Paul Mescal) taken as a slave by the Imperial Romans and made a gladiator by the rich arms dealer Macrinus (Denzel Washington) who wants to use him to destroy Rome. Rome is ruled by petty and self-indulgent brothers, Emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hetchinger), who act as dictators. Lucilla (Connie Neilsen) and her new husband, General Acacius (Pedro Pascal) still believe in Marcus Aurelius’s “Dream of Rome” from the first film, and plan to depose the emperors and give power to the senate. This puts them on a collision course with the emperors, Macrinius, and Lucius.

　　Wicked follows the story of Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), the Wicked Witch from the original Wizard of Oz, who grows up hated by her father and bullied by those around her because of her green skin and uncontrollable magic powers. She dreams of getting to meet the famed great and powerful “Wizard of Oz” (Jeff Goldblum) and living with him in his Emerald City where she believes she would be accepted. When she demonstrates these magical powers at Shiz University, she is taken to the Wizard, only to find out he’s a fake. He’s also behind a plot to round up and render animals mute, so she rebels against him.

　　Both these movies have a lot in common. They both deal with tyrannical empires that oppress their people while hiding behind the pretense of being great and noble societies. “The Glory of Rome” and the “Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz” loom high in these stories. In both, the heroes come from the marginalized and oppressed who must defy them.

　　Where they are different is how each movie sees the inherent goodness or badness of its civilizations. Wicked sees the goodness of her society as a lie, whereas Gladiator II sees the goodness of the society as a “dream” that could be realized.

　　Macrinus lays out the stakes succinctly in Gladiator II. He confronts Lucilla, insisting that “the dream of Rome” once promoted by her father (to be a republic instead of an empire, where its citizens ruled and freedom and justice reigned), and that she’s fighting for, was never a dream, but a “fiction.” The truth is that all of Rome is built purely on power and oppression, from top to bottom. Rome had no ideals or better angels to live up to, because the dream was never good faith or sincere, merely a lie by the powerful to smokescreen their exploitation of the weak. He has decent reason to believe this: Marcrinus was the slave of Marcus Aurelius, the very one who advocated for this “dream of Rome.”

　　Wicked never even debates whether the myth of Oz is a fiction; it just is. Elphaba believes what she’s told about the wizard being good and powerful until she meets him. Then she discovers he’s a charlatan faking his magic power and rounding up animals to give the people of Oz an enemy to fight. If Oz is going to be reformed, it has to be by changing it into something new, not by going back to an original dream of what it was.

　　Looking at both Rome and Oz, it’s easy to draw analogies with the West and America more broadly. Along with Christianity, Rome is a major basis for our civilization. If the ideals of Rome are a “fiction”—particularly the ones they speak of, like human dignity and self-governance—then there is reason to think ours might be also. The stigma against the wicked witch archetype is a stigma of Christian Western society. If “Wicked” claims that stigma is bad, it is not unreasonable to see an implicit critique of the culture that produces that stigma.

　　The logic here suggests that to effect change, you need to be close enough to power to have the capacity to challenge the existing power structures, but far enough away that you have an incentive to do it.

　　Many of the same critiques in these movies have been directly levied against the West and America in our world. The Wicked Broadway musical came out in 2003 (and the book it was based on in the 90s) when “bad guys were really the good guys” stories dominated pop culture. In Twilight, the vampires were the good guys. In The Matrix, our world was a simulation run by machines. In American Beauty, The Truman Show, and Fight Club, the heroes discover that it’s capitalism that is oppressing them. Iron Man, and nearly every subsequent MCU movie, was about heroes discovering that their mentors or institutions were evil and having to rebel against them in order to fight for what’s right. Then again, there have always been counter-narratives. The original Gladiator came out at the same time with its “Dream of Rome” at the forefront.

　　It’s no wonder the generation that grew up on these ended up engaging in political movements that told this same story about our culture. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Red Pill, and MAGA, all told the story that the establishment was evil and had to be torn down. There’s disagreement about what the “establishment” is, whether it’s the 1 percent, the Patriarchy, White Supremacy, the gynocracy, the postwar consensus, or Coastal Elites. But everyone agrees that we’re ruled by would-be-dictators who’ve brainwashed everyone except for them and that we must launch a resistance.

　　There are different ways the narrative can go, however, when one sets out to fight the man. This is illustrated by the diverse trajectories of the two films. In both Gladiator II and Wicked, the protagonists have a mixed parentage that confers on them a mixed insider/outsider status. Lucius is the illegitimate son of Lucilla and Maximus but was sent away to protect him from assassination plots. He therefore grows up as an outsider, thinking his mother abandoned him and hating Rome. He only hates Rome more when they come to his home, kill his wife, and enslave him and his people. Elphaba was the result of an affair between the Wizard of Oz and her mother, resulting in her green skin and outsider status among her peers. She grows up not knowing her parentage, desperate to meet the Wizard and thinking that he will accept her and change her skin. But she rejects him when she finds out he’s not a real wizard and that he’s behind the plot to turn the animals voiceless.

　　Both films make use of a common narrative trope that the effective rebel must have both insider and outsider status. Robin Hood was an aristocrat who was turned into an outlaw by Prince John. Zorro was secretly part of a wealthy family, even as he was a thorn in the side of the local authorities. But this has happened in history too. Washington and many of the other Founding Fathers were wealthy landowners. The early tyrants of ancient Greece (from which we get the name “tyrant”) were members of the ruling Elite who were still on the margins of power in their class, so they gained power by ginning up support from the common people and using it to undercut the rest of the elites. The logic here suggests that to effect change, you need to be close enough to power to have the capacity to challenge the existing power structures, but far enough away that you have an incentive to do it.

　　But there are two differences between Lucius and Elphaba’s relationship to their parentage, which change how they interact with it. The first is that Lucius fundamentally identifies with his heritage, while Elphaba does not. This is because Lucius was accepted and Elphaba was rejected. Lucius hates Rome at first because he thought his mother didn’t want him. He changes his attitude when he realizes that she did it to protect him. In Elphaba’s case, the Wizard never tells her that he’s her father, and never tells her a story about her parentage that makes her identify more strongly with him than with the animals he’s exploiting. Further, the fact that he’s a fake wizard means that the one thing they might potentially have had in common isn’t real. He is not bringing her into the fold because he loves her, but because he wants to use her. Worse, he wants to use her to hurt people who she does identify with—those of the marginalized.

　　We see this in our world too. People who are rejected and marginalized by the culture are far less likely to identify with it. Fredrick Douglas pointed this out in his famous Fourth of July speech, telling his audience, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” While the Americans celebrated freedom, they still kept black people as slaves.

　　The other big difference is that Luciuss mother believes in the Dream of Rome, and Elphaba’s true father (The Wizard) literally invented the fiction of Oz. Lucius is the son of Marcus Aurelius, who made her a true believer in the dream. Whereas everything about the myth of Oz was made up by the Wizard to gain and retain power. Therefore, gaining a closer relationship with the Wizard makes believing in the dream harder rather than easier.

　　The belief (or lack thereof) of the dream by the elites makes all the difference in how hopeful the endings of their stories turn out to be. In Gladiator II, many in power actually believe in the dream. So they are working to save Rome from the emperors and restore Rome to its status as a Republic. General Acacius and Lucilla work with the other senators and hatch a plan to stage a military coup that will depose the emperors and restore power to the senate. This plan only fails because Macrinus—a man from the outside who wants Rome to burn—bribes a senator to expose the plan.

　　But this level of internal buy-in from its citizens for the dream of Rome is what saves the day in the end. When Lucius kills Macrinus, he’s able to prevent his army and Marcinus’s army from going to war with each other by appealing to their belief in the dream. The buy-in from both the people in power and the common people makes that dream realizable and enables the good to win out.

　　When activists pushed for changes to the Western and American systems, the ones who did so successfully did so by appealing to foundational Western principles.

　　The first Wicked film ends at the halfway mark of the stage musical. Here, Elphaba rejects the Wizard’s offer and is therefore forced to flee Oz while the Wizard and his allies tarnish her name as a “Wicked Witch.” Glinda meanwhile—even though she and Elphaba have become best friends—can’t bring herself to side with her over the Wizard and Oz. So Elphaba leaves, having to escape back to the margins in society.

　　The second act of the stage production is a bit more complicated. Glinda is able to eventually depose the Wizard. But Elphaba has to fake her death in order to find peace in life. She’s never able to be welcomed back into Oz. The fiction of Oz—that the Wizard was “Great and Powerful” and she was “Wicked,” was too powerful. It is that fiction that—far from saving the world—keeps her marginalized.

　　Both Lucius and Elphaba incur great costs in their fight against their empires. Lucius loses his mother and her husband—his stepfather—and his wife. Elphaba loses her sister and anyone she might consider her friend—aside from her lover Fiyero. But the difference is who does the killing. In Gladiator II, most of the people who die (aside from Lucius’s wife) die because of Macrinus—the man who comes from the margins trying to destroy Rome. In Wicked, it’s those at the center of power, the Wizard and Madam Morrible, who kill Elphaba’s sister and turn Oz against her. Likewise, it’s the “good” characters like Bok who ruin their own lives and then blame Elphaba for it. 

　　Likewise, in our world, there is a raging debate between those who believe in an “American dream” and those who see more of an “American fiction.” Does the greatest threat come from the system itself, or those trying to tear it down? Does it come from propping up the values of our society or does it come from those trying to subvert and replace those values?

　　Life in the West is pretty good today. It’s a cliché to say, but Western civilization has produced one of the (if not the) wealthiest, freest, most diverse, and most compassionate societies in history. And these things are largely because of the West’s foundational principles rather than a rejection of them. Capitalism and the industrial revolution created the wealth that has lifted people around the world out of poverty. Christianity created the values of compassion and human rights that led to things like feminism, antislavery, and racial equality movements around the world.

　　When activists pushed for changes to the Western and American systems, the ones who did so successfully did so by appealing to foundational Western principles. Martin Luther King Jr. said of America, “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

　　Likewise, when Susan B. Anthony made her “Is it a Crime to Vote?” speech, she appealed to the country’s founding principles: “The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of the several states and the organic laws of the territories, all alike propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights.” Meanwhile, places like The French Republic and The Soviet Union that tried to change their world by rejecting these principles ended up dissolving into tyranny.

　　Culture critic Matthew Yglesias points out that there is an added danger in claiming our society is based on evil from the ground up: it makes evil seem more attractive. He notes that some want to say that our modern prosperity is built on slavery and exploitation—even though the data says that things like slavery actually held America and the West back economically—because it makes it easier to argue for overturning things like capitalism. He then observes:

　　I think this is a dangerous game. Most people are somewhat selfish most of the time, and if you tell them that their prosperity hinges on the cruel exploitation of others, they are likely to say “well then, let’s do some cruelty and exploitation.”

　　The stories we tell, shape us. The stories of Broadway’s Wicked and the original Gladiator helped shape a generational debate on whether our civilization is built on a dream or a fiction. Time will tell how—or if—“Glicked” will do the same.