And I'm back with my two cents and an essay no one asked for to say: I truly love the movie version of the catfight scene so much because despite Fiyero being the catalyst, never once is it actually about Fiyero; it is 100% about what happened during Defying Gravity.
Elphaba sets the tone right away with “It might be hard for you to comprehend that someone like him could choose someone like me” which is such an interesting way to phrase that because she doesn’t say “it might be hard for you to comprehend that he could choose someone like me” she says “someone like him” (privileged, beautiful, adored by the public, living in luxury…Glinda) and then emphasizes the hell out of the word choose.
She’s throwing Glinda’s choice to not leave on the broom with her right in her face, which is such an excellent moment, because Fiyero did choose to come with Elphaba - WILDLY different circumstances and I will forever maintain that Fiyero's choice was incredibly easy and very low-stakes when compared to Glinda's situation - but the fact remains, he did choose, and I think the shock of being chosen finally, FINALLY flips a switch for Elphaba and she goes from just missing Glinda, to letting herself be angry as hell with Glinda for choosing to stay behind.
Given both the wistfulness and the clumsiness of their earlier scenes together in Act 2, I think up until this moment some part of Elphaba has tried to soften, excuse, and rationalize Glinda’s decision to stay behind - Elphaba being Elphaba, you know she’s thought it through a thousand times and came to the reasonable conclusion: Glinda grew up in this world of privilege, it was unrealistic for me to think she could just leave it.
So then when Fiyero joins her, Elphaba’s brain comes screeching to a halt like HANG ON - someone like him (someone like you) could choose me, but you didn’t.
And she finally allows herself to feel that anger toward Glinda in a way she hasn’t before and she just lights the fuck into her. And then she keeps twisting that knife by highlighting every lie in Glinda’s life, every tiny little fabricated detail Glinda has had to surround herself with as a result of her decision to stay - the wand, her public figure persona, the fact that she can’t magically transform her life into the picture of perfection she pretends it is, her absolute sham of a relationship with Fiyero - and you know Glinda doesn’t have any real argument against any of that because it’s all true so she just up and SLAPS her.
That whole opening interaction is fantastic because even though Fiyero is literally the subject of the conversation, he’s just a device Elphaba is using to point out what Glinda failed to do. If you want to go so far as to look at it through a gelphie-fied lens, it even reads as a “this could’ve been us” moment - whether you see it as romantic or platonic, dealer’s choice, but at the end of the day, it’s all about driving that knife home: someone like him chose someone like me - you could have chosen me, but you chose yourself instead.
And to be clear - I’m actually not trying to fully demonize Glinda for staying behind during Defying Gravity. I’ve written more in-depth about it here and here, but the quick version is: in the big picture moral sense, Glinda was absolutely in the wrong to stay behind, and REALLY, DEEPLY in the wrong to live in the comfort of denial and become a public figurehead for the Wizard; that’s a very fair objective truth. However—
—someone saying “give up your entire life to become a fugitive with me where we’ll be hunted to the ends of the earth by the most powerful people in the world, you’ll never see your family again, you’ll never know a moment of safety or peace again and you don’t fully comprehend why, also armed guards are ramming down the door as we speak and you just watched the entire world flip upside-down in realtime, you have 10 seconds to decide, yes or no” - is a tall order, and frankly, 18-year-old Glinda staying behind isn’t that hard to understand. She had no idea that decision was going to result in becoming a political prop, but Morrible got straight to work grooming her for that role while Glinda was still reeling from far and away the most traumatic experience of her life.
That said, I really love that Elphaba would rightfully be not just hurt, but angry, that Glinda couldn’t make the same choice she could and revolt against everything she knew, because they are very different people, and Elphaba could make that choice, and that’s what makes their dynamic so rich. I will always lament that Act 2 of Wicked doesn’t give Elphaba enough time or space to express her anger, but the movie-verse catfight scene really feels like her finally getting to let off and be angry with Glinda for things which, again, have very little to do with Fiyero himself, and everything to do with what Fiyero did versus what Glinda couldn’t.
So going back to an earlier point of the catfight, we've also got this bit, which to me is actually just really funny:
Fiyero’s choice to come with Elphaba “happened and it’s real” with no mention of the romantic aspect of it being the significant factor - later on, she even straight up says the words “he loves me” but NEVER says anything about loving him, which is a weirdly glaring absence for a catfight supposedly about boyfriend-stealing; meanwhile Glinda ONLY refers to him quite literally as an object (“taking things that don’t belong to us”). This poor man isn’t even a man to them, he’s a baseball bat they’re using to smack each other in the head with.
And even the metaphorical baseball bat isn’t good enough, because then they take more literal sticks to hit each other with, and when that STILL isn’t enough, they both just ditch the weapons and throw down jungle style.
So then we come to the Gale Force showing up to apprehend Elphaba and when Elphaba is rightfully devastated that Glinda would use Nessa’s death to capture her, we get THIS line:
Glinda's motivation for what she thought was only going to be a rumor about Nessa was never about getting Elphaba arrested - she wanted to draw Elphaba out so she could confront her alone, on her terms, because they do have so much shit to hash out that could never be hashed out in the stilted, dancing-around-feelings way they tried at the Emerald City Palace - and of the shit that needs to be hashed out, the boyfriend-stealing is just a symptom, not the root cause.
Because the truth is, while Elphaba’s anger with Glinda is fully justified from every angle morally, politically, and personally, Glinda also has reason to be angry, to feel like she was abandoned, and to feel like she was shoved into a role she never intended to be in because of Elphaba. Glinda’s decision to stay behind during Defying Gravity was her own, but the resulting Glinda the Good persona wasn’t, and the fact that she has created this life built entirely on lies is all the more cruel because when she and Elphaba were friends, Elphaba was quite literally the only real thing Glinda had ever known. So by choosing to leave in Defying Gravity, Elphaba took that one brilliant little piece of something real away from Glinda, and Glinda was pushed right back into the fake persona she’s been forcing herself into since childhood. Has she benefited from the Glinda the Good persona? Absolutely. Has she been the shiny distraction keeping all of Oz passive and besotted amidst the rise of this regime? You betcha. Has it brought her even a split second of true happiness or sense of purpose? Very clearly not. And while the staying behind was her choice, it's not unreasonable that some part of her would blame Elphaba for not only the mess she's found herself in, but for actually understanding why she isn't happy, why she knows she's in the wrong and still doesn't have the courage to change it. If she'd never known Elphaba, she wouldn't have that insight into why her life feels so empty, but because she was friends with Elphaba, that insight is going to eat away at her and all the denial in the world won't keep her safe from it. And with that much bitterness and anger and resentment and regret built up between them, it’s honestly no wonder they’re using Fiyero to beat the absolute crap out of each other.
So finally we come to the cherry on top, which is Fiyero showing up in person to sacrifice himself (and I’ll be real, I genuinely feel sorry for this boy, he is so devoted to Elphaba, and Elphaba just like…canonically assumed alaym was a one night stand and had no intention of ever seeing him again even when he offered her a whole castle, which will forever be hilarious to me) - anyway, tangent, sorry - so Fiyero himself shows up to sacrifice his penis his life, and EVEN THEN, the scene STILL manages to center on this stand-off between Elphaba and Glinda.
I don’t ever want to downplay Fiyero’s sacrifice because he is important to both of them, and narratively it serves as a really effective breaking point to have the person who chose her be "killed" because of her as the final (literal) straw that makes Elphaba succumb to the Wicked Witch persona in No Good Deed - but before all that, even with Fiyero himself telling Elphaba to leave, Elphaba doesn’t budge until Glinda tells her to.
And I love that a lot because Fiyero stating he’s willing to kill Glinda for her is a bluff and Glinda knows it’s a bluff - but for Elphaba, there’s just enough of a risk that it might not be a bluff that it actually makes her hesitate. She obviously doesn’t want to leave Fiyero behind because she cares about him and doesn’t want any harm to come to him, but she’s also not going to leave if Glinda’s in any real danger from him, so despite Fiyero dramatically trying to fling himself onto a grenade for her, Elphaba isn’t moving an inch away from that grenade until Glinda gives the word - and when she does, that’s when Elphaba obeys, not a second before.
tldr; regrettably, even when our boy is literally the subject of the scene, it's still all about the girls, stupid.
