Warning: This post contains spoilers for Wicked.
In order to defy gravity, you’re first going to need to learn how to read the Grimmerie.
By the time Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande) arrive in the Emerald City for Elphaba’s meeting with the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) in the Wicked movie, now in theaters, we’ve seen both of the young Shiz students try their hand at sorcery. While Glinda can’t yet seem to manage much, it’s clear that Elphaba has a natural talent— albeit one that she can’t particularly control. But once she gets her hands on the spellbook known as the Grimmerie, it allows her to focus her magic in such a way that she’s quickly revealed to have more powers than anyone else in Oz.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Although the first installment of director Jon M. Chu’s two-part Wicked film adaptation ends at the point of intermission in the hit Broadway musical—i.e., immediately after Elphaba sings “Defying Gravity”—we already know that Elphaba’s ability to read the Grimmerie has marked her as a dangerous opponent in front of the Wizard and Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh). In fact, Elphaba’s refusal to use the book to help further their goal of corralling the animals of Oz and targeting them as scapegoats for all of the kingdom’s problems is what leads to the Wizard and Madame Morrible’s “wicked” smear campaign against her.
While the Grimmerie is also featured in the stage show, its lore is expounded on in the movie to incorporate some specifics about the spellbook detailed in Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. That book loosely inspired the 2003 musical and was itself a revisionist origin story for the supposed villain of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its 1939 film adaptation.
In the movie version of Wicked, as Elphaba and Glinda tour the Emerald City during the song “One Short Day,” they stop to watch a performance of the musical “Wizomania” just as they do in the stage show. However, this time around, the “Wizomania” portion of the song is expanded to include cameos by none other than Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, the Tony-winning original stars of Wicked on Broadway.
As part of the show within the show that is “Wizomania,” the pair relays the history of how the Wizard came to rule Oz and explains the backstory of the Grimmerie. Basically, the book of enchantments is an ancient tome with mysterious origins that is unreadable to almost everyone in Oz. At some point in time, a prophecy was put forth predicting that, at Oz’s darkest hour, an immensely powerful individual with the ability to read from the Grimmerie would emerge to save the kingdom’s people. The citizens of Oz believe this savior to be the Wizard, but as is revealed shortly thereafter, the Wizard has lied about his qualifications and only Elphaba is capable of deciphering the book’s strange language.
In Maguire’s novel, there is a reference to the Grimmerie having been brought to Oz by a powerful sorcerer from Earth sometime in the distant past. The reason Elphaba is able to read it is that—spoiler alert for Wicked: Part Two—the Wizard (who is also from Earth) is her real father and her half-Ozian, half-Earthling heritage has gifted (or cursed) her with unique magical talents. Despite the fact that the Wizard is from Earth, he is a charlatan with no actual magic and can therefore do nothing with the book on his own.
The first time we see Elphaba perform magic using the Grimmerie in both the Broadway musical and movie, she does so without understanding the consequences of her actions. Urged by the Wizard and Madame Morrible to grant the Wizard’s monkey captain of the guard, Chistery, the power of levitation, Elphaba reads a spell that causes Chistery—along with the rest of the palace’s monkeys—to undergo a painful wing-sprouting transformation against their will. While the now-flying monkeys are technically able to levitate by the end of this process, it’s clearly not what Elphaba meant to happen and makes her realize that she’s been tricked into performing an irreversible enchantment.
Elphaba uses the same spell again before the end of the movie to create a flying broomstick for herself, which makes it seem like she may be getting a better grasp on how the Grimmerie works. But, as those who have seen the musical know, the book’s fickle nature with regard to intention vs. outcome comes back to haunt Elphaba a number of other times before the story’s emotional end.
