Vulture was unable to obtain an actual photo of the cardigan, but trust us, it’s evil.
Photo: Giles Keyte
Spoilers ahead for Wicked, the 22-year-old Broadway show, and Wicked: For Good.
Last year at the Oscars, Paul Tazewell deservedly won Best Costume Design for Wicked, and he could very well do so again this year for the film’s sequel, Wicked: For Good. If he manages this feat, it will be due to the gloriously detailed costumes of the Munchkins, Glinda the Good’s slew of artisanal pink gowns, and the Tin Man’s silver suit, which is simultaneously beautiful and eerie. It will also, technically, be for Elphaba Thropp’s bulky, itchy-looking, ragged greige cardigan, which she puts on to make love. And that will be something that both Tazewell and I will have to live with.
The sex cardigan appears only once, during what should be the steamiest, naked-est moment in the film: Elphaba and Fiyero’s love scene, set to “As Long As You’re Mine.” After a movie and a half of build up, Fiyero has just finally left Glinda for Elphaba, and the two lovers have stolen away to Elphaba’s tree hole, where she is hiding from the Wizard and Madame Morrible. The intro music for the sultry song comes on … and Elphaba begins to disrobe. She takes off her coat. She looks longingly at Fiyero. Then, for some reason, she dons a giant clunky sweater. For emphasis: This man has left his fiancée for her, they are in a tree hole together, and they are singing a sex jam. Then she pulls out an extra layer of scratchy wool.
Part of the issue here is the sweater itself. It is an insipid shade of gray-brown that dulls the entire frame with its presence. It looks like it has been dragged across the forest floor and is covered in holes. It’s the only part of Elphaba’s witchy-chic wardrobe that has ever looked unkempt. Plus it’s just so long. The garment goes down to her calves, and when the two later hold each other while levitating, the cardigan in fact seems to gets longer in real time. It is the only garment in either film that could be described as unfitted and lumpy. Why is it being deployed as if it were a piece of lingerie?
Director Jon M. Chu has said that he intentionally changed “As Long As You’re Mine” to be less horny than it is in the Broadway version of Wicked. Onstage, the two begin the song while making out; here, they don’t kiss until the end of it. That’s a mistake. The lyrics that Elphaba opens the song with are “Kiss me too fiercely, hold me too tight,” which don’t make a lot of sense from someone who has yet to be kissed or held. Onscreen, the romantic partners have very little sexual chemistry, which is compounded by the fact that they barely touch. The sweater becomes the physical manifestation of their lack of connection.
Worse, Elphaba is supposed to end the song realizing, for the first time, that she is beautiful. She’s wrong to be self-conscious about her “verdigris”! Fiyero still wants to have sex with her so badly! But in the film, all we see her do is cover herself up more. She is putting a large woolen blockade between herself and Fiyero and hiding her green arms from sight. It looks like an item somebody would wear in Saturday Night Live’s “Fashion Coward” sketch. And Elphaba can’t be a coward.
After “As Long As You’re Mine” ends, the movie cuts to the loving couple in bed the next morning. Clearly, they’ve had sex. And, while he’s shirtless, she is not only wearing her dress (the movie is PG-13, after all), but she’s also still wearing the cardigan. The implication, to my eyes, is that she never took the thing off. She got railed in her sex cardigan, then turned over and went to sleep. Please, dear Oz, won’t someone cast a spell in the Grimmerie that makes it go away by the time Wicked: For Good hits Peacock?