There's No Place Like Home (down on the farm)

"The next time I go looking for my heart's desire, I won't look any further than my own backyard; if it's not there, then I never really lost it to begin with," Judy Garland playing Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" emotes emphatically.

Dorothy utters that line to publicly punctuate her epiphany that she had the power all along and that "there's no place like home."

Rewatching it with The Boy last Friday night left me oddly disturbed (and I'm not talking about the exploitation of the "little people" either).

I used to get a warm and fuzzy feeling reminiscing about the flick. I remembered the message being that home is a comforting, safe place to lay your head down.

But now I'm not so sure if there isn't another message reflecting a sign of the times.

Dorothy takes charge and runs away to save her beloved Toto from unwarranted extermination. For this, she gets repeatedly "punished" by a powerful wicked witch.

It's only when she wakes up in her own bedroom on the farm that she feels safe and all remains right with the world. She emphatically promises to never leave the farm.

To never leave the farm.

In the 1930s, farmers across the country battled voracious insects and the harshest and longest of droughts in history. This destroyed families as well as lifestyles. Many lost their farms, either by force or by mass exodus. Many young men reinvented themselves in government jobs building roads and bridges instead of tilling soil. The weather eventually abated and the government installed programs (finally) to assist rural America, but then the country was well into the 1940s and many had moved on from farming.

Maybe the big Hollywood machine decided to infuse a little subliminal message that farming good, leaving farm bad. A Big Brother type-message to the young that they shouldn't seek greener pastures in the big cities. Because bad things might happen.

Or maybe it was a hidden nod to the dedication and persistence of so many farmers who stuck it out and survived this horrible period of time.

In any case, there were definitely departures in the movie from the book. The Kansas-based scenes played a huge role in the film, not so much in the book. Baum depicted Oz as a real place, rather than the symbolism of dreams and desires. Dorothy, in writing, only utters "there's no place like home" once early on and does not use it as a mantra/portal to get home.

I can forgive the subliminal. What I can't forgive is that we never do find out if Toto perishes at the hand of Miss Elmira Gulch or not.

I need closure. Really.