I think in Wicked (the musical at least – not sure about the novel), there's a bit of an uneasiness between the theme of "everyone is morally gray, no one is all bad or all good" and the fact that Elphaba is a freedom fighter against a fascist government that commits atrocities against a minority group.
Yes, the Wizard has some sympathetic qualities, Elphaba has some flaws and briefly turns to villainy toward the end, and Glinda is a mass of moral grayness under her perky pink facade. But for the most part it's clear who the villains are (the Wizard and Madame Morrible), Elphaba's stance against them is clearly heroic, and Glinda's choice to work for them is clearly a moral sell-out, with which she struggles and from which she eventually redeems herself. When the Animals' treatment parallels the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, you can't take a "both sides" view of the situation. But every now and then, the show seems to do just that – whether in the song "Wonderful" with the Wizard's talk of "moral ambiguities" (though of course in that song, he's trying to justify his actions and manipulate Elphaba into joining him), or Elphaba and Glinda's reconciliation in "For Good," where they paint themselves as having been equally at fault. And again, and again, I've heard people say "There are no real villains in Wicked: the whole point is that there are two sides to every story and neither side is all good or all bad." But if that's the intended message, does it honestly fit with a plot that involves fascism and racial persecution?
Another work of fiction that I think has some uneasiness between its themes is Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Namely between "the Beast as a suffering, misunderstood outcast" and "the Beast as a powerful bully who needs to be humbled and change." I think a lot of the controversy about that movie stems from the uneasiness between those two themes.
On the one hand, the Beast is a spoiled, selfish prince, who was cursed as punishment for shutting out a poor beggar woman, who has a terrifying temper, and who orders others around and throws tantrums when he doesn't get his own way. His beastly appearance and mannerisms can be seen as outward symbols of his bad behavior, which is based in toxic class privilege and masculinity. From this perspective, Gaston is his kindred spirit, which is emphasized by visual cues: e.g. their similar striking blue eyes, or Gaston's pelt-covered, horned chair in the tavern that looks like the Beast's silhouette. The difference between them is that the Beast finally realizes he was wrong and changes his ways, while Gaston only becomes more beastly. But on the other hand, the Beast is also an "other", who hides from the world, who struggles with basic social skills, who is full of insecurity and self-loathing, whom Belle bonds with because they're both misfits, whose bestial mannerisms and overpowering rages are at least partly because the spell is warping his mind (in other words, a magical mental illness), and whom a mob tries to murder just because he looks scary. Analogies have rightly been drawn between the Beast and victims of racism, homophobia, or other prejudice. From this viewpoint, Gaston is his opposite: the type of privileged boor who receives undeserved hero-worship just because he's handsome and charismatic, and who persecutes "others" like the Beast.
When people view it chiefly as a story about the taming of a powerful bully, you hear accusations of "Stockholm Syndrome" and of the dangerous fantasies of changing an abuser. Viewing the Beast as a misunderstood outcast, who finds acceptance in a fellow outcast and who overcomes his mental health struggles and bad coping mechanisms as a result, reduces those accusations. But if you view the Beast chiefly as a misunderstood outcast, then his character arc can feel disempowering: so much of it consists of learning to be more people-pleasing and self-effacing, not to mention re-learning "normal" human manners and behavior (as an autistic person, I know I've sometimes felt "He needs to mask to be loved"), and he becomes fully "normal" by becoming human again in the end.
Maybe there is no uneasiness between these different themes: maybe it's just complexity. Maybe my feelings on the subject shows that I'm autistic and struggle with things that aren't black-and-white. But in both of these works of fiction, I do sometimes feel as if the writers were trying to tell two different stories at once, which sometimes fit together, sometimes not.
Does anyone else feel that way about other works of fiction? Can you name any other stories with multiple themes that seem slightly opposed and uneasy together?
I've been thinking again about works of fiction that seem to want to tell more than one story at once, because I came across a YouTube video that accuses Pixar's Brave of the same thing. It argues that the movie is very blatantly the work of two different writer/directors – Brenda Chapman, who conceived it, and Mark Andrews, who replaced her after she was fired – and that it feels like two different movies in one.
The video's thesis is that Brave is set up as a character-driven fairy tale about a mother-daughter relationship, with underlying themes of freedom vs. tradition, but that after Queen Elinor becomes a bear, it leaves behind the character-driven storytelling and turns into an action-adventure film. (While the video doesn't explicitly say that the film shifts from more a "feminine" type of storytelling to a more "masculine" model, that subtext is easy to read.)
It also argues that there seem to be two different character arcs for both Merida and Elinor playing out at once, especially for Merida. Is she right to seek freedom and self-determination, or wrong to rebel against her mother and her duty? And do mother and daughter both need to change, or to accept each other as they are? According to the video, the movie initially sides with Merida, but then switches to framing her as having been wrong and selfish. It also argues that the conflict set up at the film's beginning is that Merida and Elinor need to learn to accept their differences instead of wanting each other to change, but that after Elinor's transformation, it shifts instead to "Merida needs to learn to be more like Elinor, while Elinor needs to learn to be more like Merida."
Now, I don't know if I personally agree with this video or not. It got some very different responses in the comments, some people agreeing and saying "This is why Brave was Pixar's first failure," others disagreeing and saying they thought the film's different aspects and themes fit perfectly well together.
But the argument stood out for me, because it reflected my exact feelings about Beauty and the Beast and Wicked.
With Brave, the video had an easy explanation for the clashing themes: the movie had two different writer/directors, one of whom replaced the other partway through production. With Beauty and the Beast and Wicked, the cause is less clear, but I suspect it also has to do with different creative team members' different concepts of the story.
I know that there were some behind-the-scenes clashes during the making of of Beauty and the Beast. For example, Linda Woolverton pushing for Belle to be a more "modern," feminist heroine, while other creative team members wanted a more traditional fairy tale heroine; or Howard Ashman clashing with the directors about whether to portray the Beast as having been cursed as a child or an adult.
And with Wicked, I think there are several things we can point to. There are the changes that Gregory Maguire made over the course of writing the original novel (he initially just conceived it as a study of how a lifetime of being labeled "bad" might genuinely drive a person to evil, but then added the political themes in response to then-current events), followed by the musical's efforts to make the plot less dark and more family-friendly (resulting in a morally whitewashed Elphaba, even when we're told that she's morally gray), and of course the enhancement of Glinda's role and the whole plot being restructured to revolve around Elphaba and Glinda's relationship.
It's all very interesting to try to analyze.
