ENTP: The Wizard, “The Wizard of Oz”

The Champion

There are two ways we can look at the characters in the land of Oz: one, as fully realized persons in their own right; and two, as personifications of the different parts of Dorothy’s personality. It really depends on whether you go with it all being a dream, or if you prefer to believe it was real. Of course, some people do go both ways.

The Wizard of Oz himself is at once an interesting, complicated character with his own backstory, and also a metaphor for Dorothy’s wild imagination and indecision. Let’s take a look.

Dominant Function – Extraverted Intuition/Ne, “What Could Be”

A mark of a strong Ne user (hi, I’m an INFP!) is the ability to BS our way through new and unfamiliar situations. The Wizard is a master at this. As he tells it, he crash-landed in Oz and was promptly named the Wizard everyone was waiting for (I’m not gonna reference the 2013 James Franco movie here, so you can just forget about that).

“Times being what they were,” the Wizard tells Dorothy and her friends, “I accepted the job.” He clearly had no options or resources, so the Wizard jumped on the new opportunity and went with it. And when we finally meet him in the flesh, he’s been going with it for a very long time, pulling the wool over the eyes of everyone in the Emerald City and in Oz with elaborate, creative deceptions.

Unfortunately, he’s been using his creativity out of fear and selfishness. He clearly has no intention of helping Dorothy and her friends—because he can’t—so he makes up a bunch of excuses and sends them on a dangerous quest to kill the Wicked Witch. Dorothy, at the start of the movie, is also caught up in her own Ne, although it’s lower down in her cognitive function stack. So it’s not her strength, and I think the Wizard’s reckless use of his own Ne-dom reflects the way that Dorothy’s ungrounded desires have led her astray.

It isn’t until Toto unmasks him that the Wizard is forced to use his quick wits to directly help others. Even then, the Wizard is kind of BS-ing it as he pulls tricks from his bag, but this time he’s making helpful connections between what Dorothy and her friends need, and creating meaning from symbols to give them confidence. He’s still kind of conning them, but for a good cause.