The Dark Side of the Rainbow

 

It’s a popular urban legend: syncing the Wizard of Oz with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon leads to some crazy coincidences.  The first time I tried it, I was pretty impressed with how well it lined up, but I wasn’t fully convinced it absolutely had to have been intentional.

 

A few years later, in my Message Analysis class at Penn State, I decided to take another approach.  I figured that if Pink Floyd really went to all of the trouble to sync their album to the movie, there would have to be some kind of deeper message.  So, I decided to take a chance and write a paper on the hidden messages in the combination of the movie and music, hoping that I’d have something write about.  Luckily for me, there was.

 

I went into this project thinking that the coincidences were pretty interesting but skeptical that they were intentional.  When I dug into it, I kept surprising myself with how much I found.  There are a ton of websites that list the coincidences between the two works but in this paper, I try to find messages in the combination.  Some of my friends found this pretty interesting so I figured I’d post it online:

 

Full paper: DarkSideOfTheRainbow.doc

 

Contact: pandrejko@gmail.com

 

It’s really long so I threw together some cliff notes really fast:

 

(I look at each separately before combining them to see how they compare)

 

Wizard of Oz (and Wicked)

Dorothy is bored at home and goes on an adventure to Oz but spends most of her time wanting to be back home.  The good witch makes her go see the Wizard of Oz and get the Wicked Witch’s broom before she can go home.  On the way, she meets Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion who each need a brain, a heart, and courage respectively.  As they get the broom back, each of them realizes they have those qualities within them all along: the message is that we shouldn’t take for granted our abilities to think, feel and act.  But at the end of the day, “there’s no place like home” – the movie values security over adventure.

 

Good and evil are very clear-cut in the movie.  The witches are named “The Good Witch” or “The Wicked Witch.”  There are even some racial undertones: all of the evil characters have dark skin and all of the good characters are white (with the exception of the Tin Man and maybe the Lion who is more yellow than anything else).  Wicked (2003) revisits this – the Wizard uses the Wicked Witch for a while and when he loses his influence over her, he launches propaganda to deem her “wicked” and tells society not to trust her.  She isn’t really evil in Wicked, she is just branded as such because it’s convenient to those in power.  The spinoff challenges the notions of good and evil in the original movie.

 

Dark Side of the Moon

The album has a few overacrching themes: live a full life without getting bogged down by daily responsibilities (Breathe).  Value time over money (the songs “Time” and “Money” take the opposite view that most people take: time is something much more finite and valuable than money).  Your life is only made up of the experiences that you have (Eclipse).  Good and evil are subjective (Us and Them). Already, we’re seeing this is the opposite of the Wizard of Oz’s themes on home and good vs. evil.  This section of the paper is pretty concise and has some good examples of all of that, so it’s worth reading if you want more detail.

 

Dark Side of The Rainbow

-       Breathe is playing when Dorothy is on the farm, longing for adventure.  The lyrics are all about living your life to the fullest – exactly what Dorothy is angsty about in Kansas.  “Run, rabbit run / dig that hole, forget the sun.  / And when at last the work is done / Don’t sit down it’s time to dig another one.”

-       Toto is the only free spirit in Kansas – Miss Gulch takes him away to Time’s “Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day.” He jumps through Dorothy’s window to “Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.”

-       The Great Gig in the Sky is an instrumental with a screaming female vocalist – this song is perfectly synced with Dorothy’s emotions in the twister.  Since this song is so freeform, this could’ve been very useful to “sew” the album together.  The band could’ve worked on songs before and after this scene and then connected them with a freeform song of whatever length they needed.

-       Money begins playing as soon as Dorothy enters Oz in full color.  Color film costs more but color itself is another theme – Dorothy is only in color when she is in Oz, living her life to the fullest.  Just like the album cover, she’s a dull single white beam of light transformed by a prism (oz) into the many colors she had inside her all along.

-       The Good Witch appears to “don’t give me that goody good bullshit” – immediately the song starts attacking the idea of clear-cut good and evil.  Money has a very clearly defined beat and all of the munchkins are dancing to it in sync, like parts of a machine.  Dorothy hesitates – unsure if she wants to jump on the bandwagon.

-       Us and Them totally changes the mood of the scene where the mayor presents the Wicked Witch’s death certificate.  In the movie, it’s a big celebration, but Us and Them is somber – the message is that it’s actually a sad thing that she’s dead.  The new message is: it’s a tragedy that anyone died regardless of her political affiliation (there are no real sides, we’re only people).

-       Us and Them makes its message very clear with “And who knows which is which / and who is who” while both witches are on screen.  It’s a legitimate question – the Good Witch manipulates Dorothy the entire movie (come to Oz, land on the Wicked Witch, get the other Wicked Witch’s broom and eventually kill her too).

-       When Dorothy decides to go down the yellow brick road and starts moving forward with the munchkins, the music compares the Good Witch to a general leading troops to slaughter: “Forward he cried from the rear / and the front rank died / and the general sat and the lines on the map / moved from side to side.”  Dorothy is really just the Good Witch’s pawn.  Dorothy is manipulated into following the yellow brick road, but we should decide for ourselves which path to take rather than celebrating conformity.

-       The end of the album re-emphasizes this theme: “There is no dark side of the moon, really.  As a matter of fact, it’s all dark.”

-       “Down and out” as the camera shows the dead Wicked Witch of the East’s feet and the Good Witch fading “out” in her blue ball.  “It can’t be helped that there’s a lot of it about / With, without / And who’ll deny that’s what the fighting’s all about.”  Dorothy’s ruby slippers match “with” and “without” refers to the WWotWest who wants them.  This is what the fighting is all about: property (ruby slippers and the WWotWest’s broom).  The lives lost are more valuable than the property they are lost fighting for (just as the lost time is more valuable than the money they’re trying to gain).

-        The Dark Side of the Moon (album) asks us to think, feel, and act – just like the Scarecrow, Tin-Man and Lion want to do.  This is highlighted again on a repetition of the album when the four heroes are running down the stairs to escape the WWotWest to “all you touch / all you see / all that you taste / all you feel.”  Dorothy is experiencing life in Oz like she never could in Kansas, caught up with her responsibilities.

-       Dorothy clicks her heels and returns home on the third repetition of “Time” to “The time is gone, the song is over / Thought I’d something more to say.”  This line puts a damper on the happy ending “home, sweet home” in the movie.  She was only experiencing life in Oz and now she’s stuck back in Kansas with “something more to say.”

-       Dorothy wakes up in her bed to Breathe’s “Home, home again / I like to be here when I can / When I come home cold and tired / It’s good to warm my bones beside the fire.”  In the album, this is about an old man returning home to die.  When the movie and music are combined, that’s effectively what Dorothy is doing (despite being so young).  She might as well be dying because shse can’t live life to the fullest in Kansas and is just going to waste her time with day-to-day responsibilities.  The combination of the two works flips “there’s no place like home” completely on its head.

 

(for search engines)

Dark Side of Oz

Dark Side of the Moon

Wizard of Oz