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Wicked has faced more than its fair share of controversies since it was first announced; from the uproar over recasting the play’s leads, to fan-made posters going viral for the wrong reasons, to the debate over people singing along to it in cinemas and ruining it for everyone.
As such, Wicked does not wish to cause any more upset, which is why it has gone out of its way to cut any new controversy off at the pass. Exhibit A: the BBFC has slapped a warning on the film, alerting viewers that it features scenes of discrimination against those with green skin.
The BBFC website states that “seeing beloved characters being mistreated, especially when Elphaba’s skin-colour is used to demonise her as the ‘Wicked Witch’, may be upsetting and poignant for some audiences.”
And this is an important warning. Perhaps you yourself happen to be a green-skinned witch who has been wrongly demonised by the population of a magical land, and seeing this scene without advance word would have given you PTSD. Or perhaps you have the rare genetic disorder hyperbiliverdinemia, which turns your skin and urine green, and you wanted to go and see Wicked purely as an act of solidarity with what you assume to be a fellow sufferer. It would be extremely upsetting in this instance to then see some people be mean to her. Or maybe you’re a frog, I don’t know. Either way, it’s a good thing that the BBFC has taken this important step in protecting green people.
Obviously this hasn’t gone down well in all quarters. Since the BBFC justification effectively amounts to a trigger warning, the move has been a red flag to the sort of public spokespeople who like to splutter and guff about everything being too woke these days. Talking to the Daily Mail, sociology professor Frank Furedi sneered “Green skinned people under attack? You cannot make it up. It is evident that the authors of this silly classification are living on planet Bonkers.”
He has a point. Nothing makes me angrier than seeing organisations like the BBFC pander to people with green skin. For too long, these green-skinned arseholes have been getting away with coming over here, taking our non-witch jobs and having sex with our non-witch wives. There’s nothing that we right-minded non-green citizens want more than a film about loads of people being arbitrarily horrible to someone with green skin, and we could really do without those snowflakes at the BBFC coddling us by assuming that we might find it upsetting. Quite frankly, more films should contain targeted abuse at green-skinned people. There should be a scene in Gladiator 2 where a Roman pushes a green-skinned witch under a charging rhinoceros. Or a bit in Paddington in Peru where Paddington Bear gestures at some green-skinned people in the background and mutters the word “twats” at them.
The crazy thing is that the BBFC doesn’t even stop there, going on to provide us with a trigger warning about a scene where a talking goat is vilified. Now we can’t even enjoy scenes of cruelty to talking animals! What is the world coming to?
Oh sure, there will be some who will claim that this sort of thing is literally the BBFC’s job, one it performs for most major releases, and all the post was doing was highlighting the sort of complex discussions about content and subtext that go into awarding a film with a classification. Indeed, some people might even argue that Elphaba’s skin colour is an allegory for any form of racism – in fact an allegory that if anything is a little too heavy-handed – and that the organisation had a moral duty to explain that these depictions of racist abuse are what landed Wicked with a PG certificate rather than a U.
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But that would be political correctness gone mad, wouldn’t it. We shouldn’t have to put up with trigger warnings, even on films that have been heavily marketed for children despite being based on revisionist novels that contain several scenes set in BDSM clubs. Children need to learn that racism and animal abuse happens every day. They should be subjected to depictions of this without warning, especially if they’re five years old and just want to watch a nice fairytale movie with lots of lovely songs in it.
In short, you cannot traumatise a child enough, and that’s why it’s clear that the real villain of this story is a polite little notice that someone put up on a website. How dare they.
