The Wiz (1978)

The Wiz occupies a curious position in the taxonomy of progressive cinema. Released in 1978, it predates the specific constellation of cultural anxieties that would come to define contemporary social consciousness by more than three decades. To score it according to modern frameworks is somewhat akin to applying a 2025 diagnostic tool to a 1978 patient. The film features an all-Black cast, an all-Black creative team, and a deliberate reimagining of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz through the lived experience of urban Black America. These facts are not incidental to its artistic vision. Sidney Lumet's direction and Joel Schumacher's adaptation transform Baum's fantasy into a pointed allegory of racial struggle, with the Yellow Brick Road representing the journey toward self-determination and Evilene's sweatshop standing as a clear metaphor for systemic exploitation. Diana Ross delivers a performance of considerable restraint, and Michael Jackson's presence as the Scarecrow adds a cultural weight that transcends the role itself. The film engages authentically with questions of Black identity and empowerment without the self-congratulatory preachiness that would come to characterize later progressive cinema. It is, in many respects, more honest than films made decades later that announce their virtue at every turn. Yet honesty about racial struggle is not the same as the specific markers we associate with contemporary progressive sensibilities. The film contains no LGBTQ+ content, no explicit feminist agenda, no climate messaging, no body positivity rhetoric. Its racial consciousness is genuine and central, but it flows from artistic conviction rather than cultural obligation. That distinction matters. The film remains important and culturally significant, a work that took risks in its moment. It simply does not register as woke in the modern sense, which is to say it predates the categories entirely.