Opinion | ‘Wicked’ Revels in the Glory of Female Frenemies

When Glinda and Elphaba, the leads of the new movie adaptation of “Wicked,” clap eyes on each other, it’s loathe at first sight.

Glinda shrieks (but charmingly). In response, Elphaba smirks and asks if she’s got something in her teeth. Glinda, short for Galinda, played by Ariana Grande, is pale and pretty in pink. Elphaba, played by Cynthia Erivo, is glowering in glasses and green skin. “No, I am not seasick; yes, I have always been green; and no, I did not eat grass as a child,” she says.

And right then, you know where you are: Act One of a classic frenemy love story.

These two young women, classmates and roommates — one giggly, glamorous and beloved, the other studious, plain and lonely — seem destined to despise each other forever, or at least until graduation. But if you’re a connoisseur of this particular genre, there is no question what happens next. Glinda could be Vivian Kensington clocking Elle Woods on the quad in “Legally Blonde” or Cher Horowitz when she first sees Tai Frasier in “Clueless.”

Swap green skin for an off-trend outfit, set your story in the merry old land of Oz instead of Harvard or a Beverly Hills high school, and you’ve got “Wicked,” a frenemy story nonpareil, offering the promise of a platonic love that will leave you better than you’ve been, changed inside and out for good.

And who could resist that? In a typical boy-meets-girl story, a woman wishes, hopes, prays that a man will fall for her (or she swears that she would never in a thousand years be interested in someone like that or that she’s not looking for love or that she’s in love with her job or any of the other familiar variations). Three hundred pages, 90 minutes or eight streaming episodes later, he informs her that she’s bewitched him body and soul or that he loves her just as she is. Regardless of how many wobbles there may be along the way, we know where we’re going to end up.

Frenemy stories do something more complicated. By their emotional logic, it’s not the ending that matters; it’s the journey. The main characters draw each other out and learn from each other not in order to achieve the cliché of happily ever after but for the experience of friendship in its own right.