Allegorical stories have two stories running in parallel. There is one story which everyone can read and enjoy on the surface, which shrouds the second story that runs underneath. A viewer can completely miss the second story completely and still enjoy it; though knowledge of the second part will lead to a new-found appreciation for the first story itself. A great example of an allegorical story is the book “Animal Farm,” by Georgy Orwell. On the surface it is a story about animals in a farm rising against their human overlords but secretly, it is a story about the Russian Revolution of 1917.
A good allegory for understanding an allegory would be a puppet show. We just see objects and characters moving on the stage, but the knowledge that they are being controlled by the puppeteers is not necessary to understand the story. But if both sides were visible to the audience, their experience of the show would be completely different. Here we take a look at a movie, a book and one animated TV series: mother!, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Over the Garden Wall respectively. All of these have a thick coat of paint concealing a hidden painting underneath: lets try to shine some UV light and uncover the hidden meanings of these works of fiction.
mother!
On a first viewing, mother! appears to be a completely nonsensical film. It appears that Darren Aronofsky, the movie’s director and screenplay writer, took a bucket of ideas for a horror movie that didn’t make it to other projects and dumped it all into one movie. You want an idyllic landscape with a huge house that will obviously bite the dust later in the movie? Check! You want gore? Check!! How about obligatory cannibalism just to spice things up a bit? Triple Check!!!
Just like the exclamation mark and non-capitalized m in its title, the story of mother! doesn’t make much sense until you dig deeper. However, digging deeper might be a mistake because once you dig down, you can’t go back out. There’s a whole can of worms that for people to uncover underneath the soil.
The worms slither in and around your neurons once the allegories become apparent. You want environmental symbolism? Check! You want religious imagery? Double check!! You want to showcase the arrogance of Man and our hopelessness as a species? Triple Check!!! Checking spree.
This movie will induce two very different reactions from different people. As a viewer, you might think it is an absolute genius or a complete waste of time. Either way, it is a movie that people are going to be talking about for years to come. It’s not just a movie, its the mother! of all allegories. Yes, the exclamation mark was intended. If you want something more mindless, I recommend The Mummy starring Brendan Fraser instead.
Also God is probably a douche. I don’t know, just watch the movie.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
A high school teacher named Mr. Littlefield wanted to teach his students the Gilded Age of American history (1864-1914). Being a dedicated teacher, he came up with interesting ways for his students to want to learn about this period marked by the Gilded layer of economic prosperity, which masked the rust of economic disparity and poverty underneath. During this process, he discovered quite a few allegories for this period in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and was motivated to publish his findings. Some other people, including scholars from several disciplines, have come out and published on the allegories on this book.
So which are the some of the allegories from the Land of Oz? The story follows a girl called Dorothy Gale (representing an Everyman from the American West) who ultimately has to fight the Wicked Witch of the East (Or Wall Street in the East) which allegorized the power that banking and financial corporations wielded during the Gilded Age. In addition, Tinman might represent the industrial worker and the scarecrow the farmer, both groups which were negatively affected by the wealth disparity during the Gilded Age. Last but not the least, the lion could stand for the William Jennings Bryan, the presidential candidate from the election of 1896 known for his populist ideology.
Taking the economic motif further: they take the yellow brick road to the Emerald city, representing the American dollar backed by gold during this period. Dorothy can be freed from this nightmare and return to her home by tapping silver sandals, representing Bryan’s attempts at solving the economic problem by replacing the gold standard by silver. The yellow brick road journey itself could stand for the urban migrations by rural folk during this period, while the Wizard himself, Oz literally stands for the measure of gold and silver (ounces, oz).
Did L. Frank Baum intend for any of these allegories to happen? It’s too late to ask him this question personally, since he passed away in 1919. We can look for his written publications and other records, which do reveal some of his political leanings. But that doesn’t mean he wanted to inject his own beliefs into a story. There have been tons of publications on this topic, with everyone from economists to historians having there own opinion on this topic. In the short span I researched on this topic, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus about what exactly those allegories are.
What do I think of all of this? As much as I would like to deny, it doesn’t seem to be an allegorical text at all. He might have been influenced by the political climate of the era, but there’s no direct proof that he did. However, as readers it is fun to speculate and draw our own theories about such literary classics. In some ways, it is L. Frank Baum’s genius that led to the creation of such a timeless classic. Even a hundred years after its publication, it is still going strong.
Every puppet show has a puppeteer who pulls the strings to entertain the audience. In this case, it might even be the puppeteer who is pulling the audience’s strings to entertain the puppets.
Maybe the allegory in this story is that there’s no allegory at all.
Over the Garden Wall
Stories for grown-ups have several themes and concepts which are not comprehensible to children. Such stories provide the inspiration for watered-down versions which have the same gist and morals as the original, but are packaged for younger viewers. An example of such a story is Over the Garden Wall, a miniseries which aired on Cartoon Network during 2014 which borrows characters, story elements, and imagery heavily from Dante’s Inferno.
Dante’s Inferno, the Italian classic (1300) by the Florentian Dante Alighieri describes the journey of the duo of Dante (a poet, nerd and who is repeatedly turned down by girls) and Virgil (an outgoing and curious individual with a penchant for music) as they travel through the several circles of Hell. They encounter sinners who have sinned in their life and now have to face a poetically just punishment in the hellish landscape. At the end of their journey they come face to face with Satan, the Devil himself in flesh and blood.
Over the Garden Wall (OGW) created by Patrick McHale, follows two half brothers, Wirt (writes poetry, is shy, and can’t confess to a girl) and Greg (naive, curious, and likes to sing), who get lost in the forests of the Unknown and have to find a way to escape it. They encounter several denizens of the Unknown, and all of them have a sort of an eerie creepiness to them. At the end of the journey, they come face to face with, you might have guessed, a creature called the Beast whom they must overcome before escaping back into the real world.
The similarities don’t end there. In the Inferno, there are nine circles of Hell (ten if you count the forest at the entrance); each circle inflicting a punishment which is poetically just to the sinner’s actions on Earth. In the miniseries, there are ten episodes each of which draws upon some inspiration from each of the levels from Dante’s Inferno. As an example, the very first chapter has Dante and Virgil walk through the entrance to Hell with the words “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” while Wirt and Greg walk into the Unknown for the first time and are given a similar warning by the Woodsman. Every episode has a similar reference to a circle of Hell from Dante’s Inferno; I highly recommend watching Trey the Explainer’s awesome video about Over the Garden Wall and its accompanying parallels to Dante’s classic.
OTGW is a great example of an allegorical tale done right; it knows its audience, and it knows its source material well, and combines those two into a product which has the potential to be a classic. No wonder McHale’s Unknown won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program.
Conclusion:
Allegorical movies, books, and TV shows are all around us. Some are intelligent allegorical tales created to tell a certain message (mother!), while some draw inspirations from older classics (Over the Garden Wall). Some might or might not be allegories at all (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) but it is fun to speculate and theorize about its possibilities. Which allegorical movies you love or love to hate?
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