Screenwriting Lessons: The Wizard of

OzPart 1: Disunity toUnity

A five-part series exploring lessons we can glean from classic 1939 movie.

Joel Coen of the Coen brothers has said: Every movie ever made is an attempt to
remakeTheWizardofOz. True or not, all I know is I constantly reference the film in my
teaching. Why? Because it contains so many classic narrative elements.

Therefore I was inspired to take on a week-long series focusing on screenwriting lessons we

can draw fromTheWizardofOz.

Today:DisunitytoUnity.

In most movies, the Protagonist goes through a transformation, starting off in one psyche
state, ending up in quite another. Typically in Hollywood movies, the transformation
represents a positive change. Going beyond the surface-level idea offlaworwound, if we
look at the totality of the Protagonists psyche, what we very often find at the beginning of
the story is this:

The Protagonist exists in a state of Disunity.

NOTE: This ismylanguage: Disunity-Deconstruction-Reconstruction-Unity.

It echoes the sentiment of Joseph Campbell who says of the hero at the beginning of the
story:

TheHeroismakingdo,butfeelssomethingmissing,asenseofdiscomfortor
tension.TheHeroneedstochange,eveniftheyareunawareofthatneed.

And Carl Jung who asserts:

Thepsychologicalrulesaysthatwhenaninnersituationisnotmadeconscious,it
happensoutside,asfate.Thatistosay,whentheindividualremainsdividedand
doesnotbecomeconsciousofhisinnercontradictions,theworldmustperforce
actouttheconflict.

[Emphasis added]

A sense of discomfort. Remains divided. Disunity.

From a screenwriters perspective, a good Protagonist is one who has emotional and
psychological dynamics at work in the characters psyche which are at odds with each other.
This is the basis of conflict.

They need to change and that happens outside, as fate.

Enter Dorothy Gale inTheWizardofOz. Remember that beautiful song Somewhere Over
the Rainbow? What about this line of lyrics:

SomedayIllwishuponastar

Andwakeupwherethecloudsarefar

Behindme.

Wheretroublesmeltlikelemondrops

Awayabovethechimneytops

Thatswhereyoullfindme.

Dorothy expresses her Want which reects her initial state of

Disunity.

What are herclouds? What are hertroubles? As it turns out, the song conveys a sense of
Dorothys discomfort deriving from these factors:

Shes a young girl surrounded by people older than she (in the Kansas scenes, there are
seven other humans and each of them is an adult).

Everyone on the farm from Auntie Em and Uncle Henry to the hired help Hunk, Zeke,
and Hickory has a specific job or task. Dorothy does not.

Nor does she have anyone (other than Toto) to play with, one reason she gets into
trouble while walking along the railing between the pig pens and falling in,
 necessitating Zeke to rescue her (this incident reinforces how she just doesnt fit in with
the ways of the farm).

She even dresses differently than everyone else in a crisp blue-and-white dress whereas
the others wear dingy work clothes.

Perhaps the single biggest contributing factor for Dorothys sense of alienation is a fact
we may tend to overlook: she is an orphan.

Shes living in a home that doesntfeellike home. She yearns to fly away to some dream-
like place over the rainbow where she hopes to find a sense of belonging.

And there you have it, right at the beginning of the story: Her Disunity state, fundamentally
a feeling ofalienation, indicates the end point of her metamorphosis: Unity = Connection.

In other words, Dorothys journey is one in which she goes from a sense of being Home-Less
to one in which she embraces the Kansas farms in which she lives by proclaiming: Theres
no place like home.

Disunity: Home-Less
Unity: Home-Coming

The Disunity to Unity iteration of a Protagonists transformation is one common to

Hollywood movies, often referred to as the characters arc.

Its right there, smack dab at the heartTheWizardofOz. In order to move toward Unity,
the Universe acts as Fate and creates a Call To Adventure which compels Dorothy to leave
her Ordinary World then transport her to the Extraordinary World of Oz, a journey
shemusttake.