4. What's the Point?

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There comes a point when a costume stops being just a costume.
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A black dress, a broomstick, and a silhouette rising to a point are enough for most of us to recognise a witch before we've even seen her face.
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We don't need to see her cast a spell, and we certainly don't need anyone to introduce her.
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We already know.
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Or at least we think we do.
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We've met this particular witch before on Hexposition.
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Back in episode 1, Margaret Hamilton helped us uncover why generations of witches have ended up with green skin.
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But there's another part of her appearance that has been hiding in plain sight.
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Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch wore it, Mildred Hubble wears one to school, and if Hogwarts had followed its own uniform list properly, Harry Potter should have spent considerably more time wearing one too.
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Then eventually, someone gives one to Alphabet.
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Not because they think she'll like it, because they want everyone to laugh at her.
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Instead, Alphabet puts it on, walks into the room, and eventually makes it iconic.
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Because sometimes, when you give someone a symbol intended to humiliate them, they decide it belongs to them instead.
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Hello, and welcome to Hexposition Witches on Screen, the podcast where we look at witches in film and television, where those images came from, and how much history, folklore, and complete nonsense has become tangled up with them along the way.
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I'm Millie Hardy Ashton, and today's episode contains spoilers for The Wizard of Oz, Wicked and Once Upon a Time.
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Today we're going back to Oz.
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Sort of.
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Because in episode one, we briefly met Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 Wizard of Oz, we talked about that extraordinary green face and how something created for a Technicolor Hollywood film became so successful that nearly 90 years later, children are still colouring witches green.
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So I don't want to tell that story again.
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Instead, I want to look at what happened to the Wicked Witch after Margaret Hamilton.
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Because Hamilton gave us a character who is wicked almost by definition.
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She doesn't even get a proper name.
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Decades later, Wicked takes essentially the same woman, calls her Alphabet, and asks whether we've misunderstood her completely.
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Then Once Upon a Time gives us Zelina, another Wicked Witch of the West, but builds her wickedness around jealousy, abandonment, and resentment.
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They're all recognizably descendants of the same character, but they tell us very different things about what being wicked actually means.
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And somewhere in the middle of all of this is a hat.
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A very famous hat.
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Not for too long, because we've already spent time with her, but Hamilton casts such an enormous shadow over every version that follows that we can't really avoid her.
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When the Wizard of Oz arrived in cinemas in 1939, the Wicked Witch of the West didn't need much psychological explanation.
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The film isn't particularly interested in why she became wicked, what her childhood was like, or whether she might have a reasonable political objection to random farmhouses landing on her relatives.
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She is the Wicked Witch of the West, and that's enough.
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That's her name, her job description, and essentially her entire moral position.
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Margaret Hamilton's performance then gives that simple character and extraordinary presence.
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The green makeup, which coincidentally contained lead and poisoned Hamilton, severe black costume, broomstick, and pointed hat combine with Hamilton's voice and physical performance to make her immediately threatening.
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When she arrives through smoke and fire opposite Judy Garland's young Dorothy in her gingham dress, the film doesn't leave us wondering which woman we are supposed to trust.
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It's incredibly effective.
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It's also very different from the witch L.
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Frank Baum created.
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Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1900, and while his wicked witch is certainly not somebody you'd particularly want as a neighbour, many of the details we now automatically associate with her come from later adaptations.
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Green skin is MGN's contribution, as we discovered in episode 1.
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More importantly for today, the film brings together several things audiences already associated with witches and packages them into one unforgettable character.
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And because the Wizard of Oz became so culturally enormous, Margaret Hamilton gradually stopped being simply a version of the Wicked Witch.
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She became the image of the Wicked Witch.
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And that distinction matters.
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When later filmmakers, television writers, or costume designers want to reference the Wicked Witch of the West, they aren't working from a blank page.
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Margaret Hamilton is already in the room, which creates an interesting problem.
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What do you do with one of cinema's most recognizable villains when audiences already think they know everything about her?
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Well, for starters, you give her a name.
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What makes a witch wicked?
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In 1995, Gregory Maguire published Wicked, The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, and the basic idea behind it is wonderfully disruptive.
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What if we heard the story from the witch's point of view?
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The Wicked Witch becomes Elphaba.
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Her name, created from the initials of L.
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Frank Baum, LFB, or L.
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And suddenly a character who existed primarily as Dorothy's enemy has a life beyond Dorothy.
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Maguire's novel was later adapted into the stage musical Wicked, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman.
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It opened on Broadway in 2003 with Adina Menzel as Alphabet and Kristen Chinawath as Glinda, before eventually making the journey to cinema with Cynthia Arrivo and Ariana Grande.
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And this is where the Wicked Witch becomes particularly useful for a podcast about witches on screen.
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Because Wicked doesn't throw Margaret Hamilton's image away, it takes it apart.
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We already know what Alphabet is eventually supposed to become.
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We recognise the green skin, the black clothing, the broom, but instead of presenting those things as proof that she is wicked, the story gives each of them context.
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Her green skin is the most obvious reversal.
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Margaret Hamilton is green partly because the filmmakers need her villainy to be visually unmistakable in this extraordinary technicolor world.
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Alphabet, on the other hand, is born green.
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The colour doesn't tell us anything about her morality, it tells everyone around her that she is different.
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People stare at her, ridicule her, and make assumptions before she has done anything to deserve them.
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The very feature that once helped Cinema identify the villain is now being used to show us how easily people can decide someone is an outsider.
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That changes our relationship with the image completely.
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And then there's the hat.
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At the Oz Just Ballroom, Glinda gives Elphaba a tall, pointed black hat.
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If you know the Wizard of Oz, you recognise it immediately as another piece of the character falling into place.
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But within Elphaba's story, it isn't an iconic witch's hat yet.
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It's a cruel joke.
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Glinda expects the hat to make Elphaba look ridiculous, and Elphaba arrives at the ballroom believing she has finally been included, only to realise that everyone is laughing at her.
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It's an uncomfortable scene precisely because the humiliation is so ordinary.
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There's no magic involved.
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It's just someone exploiting another person's difference because they think it will be funny.
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Elphaba realizes exactly what has happened and she chooses to dance anyway.
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She doesn't fear the hat, she doesn't tear the hat off or disappear from the room.
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She stands there, visibly hurt, and refuses to give the people watching her the reaction they expect.
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When Glinda eventually joins her in her dance, it becomes an important turning point in their relationship.
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But I think something else happens in that room as well.
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Elphaba takes ownership of the joke.
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She keeps the hat.
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The thing intended to make the strange green girl look even stranger eventually becomes part of the most recognizable image of the wicked witch of the West.
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And that gives the costume a completely different meaning.
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Margaret Hamilton arrives already wearing the uniform of the Wicked Witch.
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With Elphaba, we watch the world give it to her.
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But there's another modern version of the Wicked Witch who takes Margaret Hamilton's image in a completely different direction.
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In 2014, Once Upon a Time introduced Rebecca Maider as Zelina.
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If you've never seen Once Upon a Time, its basic premise is that fairy tale and literary characters exist within the same interconnected universe, a town called Storybrooke, Maine.
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So the evil queen can encounter Captain Hook, Rumpel Stiltskin can become the beast from Beauty and the Beast, and eventually Oz can collide with Storybrooke.
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Selina is the show's Wicked Witch of the West, and once again she is green.
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But once upon a time gives the colour another meaning.
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Selina discovers that she is the daughter of the evil queen's mother, which makes her the evil queen's half-sister.
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She becomes increasingly resentful of the life Regina, the evil queen, has had and the opportunities she believes should have belonged to her.
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Her jealousy becomes so consuming that the show makes an old expression literal.
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She is green with envy.
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It's wonderfully unsubt, but Once Upon a Time has never particularly been a program frightened of committing to a metaphor.
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And it gives us an interesting progression.
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Margaret Hamilton's green helps us recognise evil.
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Alphabet's green causes other people to assume things about her.
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Zelina's green reflects something happening inside her.
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Three adaptations can therefore use essentially the same piece of visual shorthand to tell three very different stories.
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And Zelina gets another advantage Margaret Hamilton's witch never had.
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Television gives her time.
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Over multiple episodes and seasons, we can understand her family relationships, her anger, and her capacity to change.
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She makes appalling choices, sometimes tries to be better, and sometimes spectacularly fails at it.
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Understanding her doesn't mean excusing her.
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It simply means that Wicked Witch is no longer enough to explain who she is.
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And that change from archetype to character tells us quite a lot about how witches on screen have evolved.
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And this week I want to investigate something that looks so familiar that we rarely question it.
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The pointed black witch's hat comes from the Puritans of New England and the Salem witch trials.
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Fact, fiction, or folklore?
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I'm calling this one folklore.
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And slightly frustrating folklore at that, because I would love to give you one wonderfully neat origin story for the witch's hat, but unfortunately there isn't one.
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One popular explanation connects the hat to Puritan clothing, and you can understand why.
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Our modern image of 17th century New England tends to involve somber black clothes, white collars, and tall, broad, brimmed hats.
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Sound familiar?
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Put that alongside the Salem witch trials of 1692, and it's very easy to imagine one stereotype gradually turning into another.
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The problem is that we're comparing two stereotypes.
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People accused of witchcraft in Salem dressed like other people living in their communities.
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There was no special clothing that identified somebody as a witch, because of course there wasn't.
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And the familiar image we have of the pilgrim has itself been simplified by later popular culture.
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There are other possible influences on the witch hat, and some of them are much darker.
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Pointed hats were imposed upon Jewish people in parts of medieval Europe, and historians have explored the overlap between anti-Semitic images and later visual stereotypes used for witches and other supposedly threatening outsiders.
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And then there's my personal favourite piece of internet witch history, the alewife.
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You may have encountered the claim that women who brewed and sold ale wore tall pointed hats so customers could find them in a crowded marketplace, and that these women eventually became associated with witchcraft because they're women.
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It's a fantastic story.
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It is also one of those stories where the internet has become considerably more confident than the historical evidence allows.
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So rather than finding one person who invented the witch hat, what we find is a visual stereotype developing gradually.
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Changing fashions, religious prejudice, illustration, theatre, and popular entertainment all potentially contribute pieces until the pointed hat becomes something audiences can recognize immediately.
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Which is why I'm calling it folklore rather than complete fiction.
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There are historical threads running through the story.
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They just don't tie themselves into the lovely neat bow we might want them to.
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And by the time Hollywood gets hold of the hat, none of that complexity really matters.
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Audiences already know what it means.
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If you haven't worked this one out yet, I may need to become considerably better at hiding things.
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The hidden hex is the pointed black hat.
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Margaret Hamilton didn't invent it.
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The association between pointed hats and witches existed long before The Wizard of Oz.
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What Hamilton did was help turn it into one of Cinema's most recognizable silhouettes.
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Her hat is huge.
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Its broad brim frames that green face, while the exaggerated point makes her outline instantly readable.
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You could probably remove every detail from the image, leave nothing but the silhouette, and still identify the wicked witch of the West.
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And that silhouette travels.
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One of my favourite examples comes from The Worst Witch.
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Jill Murphy published the first Worst Witch novel in 1974, creating Cackle's Academy and the wonderfully disaster-prone Mildred Hubble.
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Murphy drew on her own experiences of school when creating the series, and the transformation from ordinary schoolgirl to witch is wonderfully simple.
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Familiar pieces of school life become magical equivalents, chemistry becomes potions, bicycles become broomsticks, and the ordinary school hat becomes pointed.
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That last change does an enormous amount of the work.
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Put a group of children in school uniform and their schoolchildren.
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Give them pointed hats and broomsticks, and suddenly we're at a school for witches.
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The various screen adaptations preserve that visual language because it works instantly.
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Whether your Mildred is Faruza Balk in the 1986 television film, Georgina Sherrington in the 1998 series, or Bella Ramsay and later Lydia Page in the CBBC adaptation, the hat helps establish the world before anybody needs to explain it.
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And then we have Hogwarts.
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There's a detail from the Harry Potter books that the films gradually allow us to forget.
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Hogwarts students are supposed to own black, plain pointed hats for day wear.
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They appear far less prominently as the film series develops, but the idea is there from the beginning.
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And of course Hogwarts turns the witch's hat into something even more memorable with the sorting hat.
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The films eventually moved away from the plain pointed hats for a practical reason as well as an aesthetic one.
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In crowded classroom and great hall scenes, the hats could mask the faces and hair of the actors, making it harder for audiences to read their reactions.
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They also complicated camera angles and group compositions.
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A forest of tall points could obscure other performers, interfere with clean sightlines, and make it more difficult to frame several characters clearly in the same shot.
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So the hats gradually disappeared from everyday Hogwarts' life.
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The sorting hat remained because it had specific narrative function, but the ordinary pointed hat was sacrificed to the demands of filming.
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What I find fascinating about The Worst Witch and Harry Potter is that the hat has changed jobs.
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For Margaret Hamilton, it helps mark someone as dangerous.
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For Mildred Hubble and Harry Potter, it can simply mean magic.
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Children can wear it to school.
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A piece of clothing once associated with the frightening fairy tale witch becomes part of the uniform of characters we're actively encouraged to identify with.
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Which brings us back to Alphabet, because Wicked understands both meanings.
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We recognize the hat as magical and iconic, but within Alphabet's world, it is initially something ridiculous.
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Glinda is effectively exploiting the cultural idea that the strange pointed hat will make an already unusual-looking woman seem even more absurd.
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Alphabet's decision to keep wearing it therefore becomes more than a costume choice.
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She reclaims it, and there's something particularly satisfying about watching an object intended to mark someone out as laughable and different become part of an image associated with enormous power.
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The hat hasn't changed, but our relationship with the woman wearing it has.
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And that is this week's hidden hex.
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They show us how much the screen witch has changed.
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In 1939, Wicked Witch is enough.
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Margaret Hamilton's character can be frightening, entertaining, and extraordinarily memorable without the audience knowing very much about her at all.
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She exists primarily in relation to Dorothy.
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She is the danger our heroine has to overcome.
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Modern storytelling tends to be less satisfied with that.
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Wicked asks whether the villain was ever really the villain in the first place, while Once Upon a Time allows Zelina to genuinely do terrible things, but still asks us to understand how she became capable of them.
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Those aren't the same argument.
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Alphabet is a story about prejudice, propaganda, and the construction of a public enemy.
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Zelina is much closer to a story about what resentment can do when somebody allows it to shape their identity.
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But both stories are interesting in something the Wizard of Oz largely isn't.
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The woman underneath the witch.
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And that reflects a broader change in the way we tell stories about supposedly wicked women.
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We increasingly want to know who called them wicked in the first place, what they actually did, and whether those two things even match.
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That question becomes particularly interesting when we put fictional witches alongside the history we've been exploring throughout Hexposition.
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Women accused of witchcraft historically did not get much control over the stories told about them.
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Their identities were recorded through accusations, interrogations, court documents, religious arguments, and sensational accounts written by other people.
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That doesn't mean alphabet is secretly an allegory for every woman accused during a historical witch trial.
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She isn't.
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But the mechanism should feel familiar by now.
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Decide someone is dangerous, make their difference part of the evidence, tell the story often enough, and eventually the label begins to feel like fact.
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And Wicked plays with our own participation in that beautifully.
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Because we arrive already knowing what Alphab becomes.
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We know the Wicked Witch of the West, whether we've seen Wizard of Oz or not.
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We know the green face, the broom, and the pointed hat.
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We may even know how she's supposed to die.
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So when we meet this intelligent, awkward young woman at Shiz University, there is always another character hovering somewhere behind her.
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Margaret Hamilton.
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The audience carries the 1939 witch into Wicked, whether Alphabet knows it or not.
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That is what makes watching her gradually acquire that familiar appearance so effective.
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We're not simply watching somebody become a witch.
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We're watching somebody become the witch we thought we already knew.
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And when Alphabet finally owns that image, Wicked asks us to reconsider everything the image once told us.
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Perhaps that's the biggest change in the Wicked Witch across nearly a century of screen storytelling.
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The silhouette remains remarkably familiar.
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What has changed is our willingness to ask who is standing inside it.
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Margaret Hamilton didn't invent that image, but the Wizard of Oz helped make her version of it extraordinarily influential.
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Later stories inherited the same visual language and started changing what it meant.
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The worst witch and Harry Potter can put pointed hats on schoolchildren because by them the hat doesn't necessarily mean evil at all.
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It can simply signal that we've entered a magical world.
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The Harry Potter films eventually reduced the everyday hats because they obscured actors' faces, complicated group shots, and made camera angles and sightlines more difficult to manage.
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And in the real world, the pointed black hat remains one of the most dependable signs that Halloween has arrived.
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Am I wearing one while recording this episode?
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You bet I am.
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And I own several.
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Once Upon a Time takes another famous part of Margaret Hamilton's appearance and turns Selena's green skin into a very literal expression of envy.
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And Wicked does something perhaps more interesting still.
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It takes the hat we already associate with the villain, gives it to Elphaba as an insult, and lets her decide that it belongs to her.
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That feels like a fitting place to end because so much of the history of the Screen Witch is about other people deciding what she looks like and what those things mean.
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The pointed hat has been frightening, ridiculous, magical, childish, and powerful.
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Sometimes all it takes to change the meaning, sometimes all it takes to change the meaning is a different woman underneath it.
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You've been listening to Hexposition, which is on screen.
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I'm Millie Hardy Ashton, and the theme music is Hulderfolk, Hidden Folk by Jamie Sims.
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And remember, just because you recognize the witch doesn't mean you know her story.
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Next time on Hexposition, we're stepping out of Oz.
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We've talked about the Wicked Witch's green skin.
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But why did green become such a powerful visual shorthand for villainy, magic, and danger on screen?
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And why does Disney keep coming back to it?
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We'll explore the semiotics of colour, discover what green means in colour magic, and meet the very different green witch of modern witchcraft.
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Because perhaps green isn't evil at all.
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We've been taught to understand green before we even knew that's what was happening.
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That's next time on Hexposition Witches on Screen.
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This has been a Familiar Footsteps production.
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Love and Light.