Willy Wonka as Late-Capitalist Monster, or,I Bet The Economic Hegemony Makes the Chocolate TasteTerrible
The original Willy Wonka movie might be one of the most spiteful and misanthropic of all beloved family films. The list below is by no means conclusive. It just illustrates some grave social implications for many of Wonka’s shenanigans, which are somewhat hideous when you stop to think about them. A lot of people agree this is a classic that’s more than a little creepy. What I’m driving at here is that the world it takes place in is also totally insane, and ONLY in this world can Wonka not only survive but thrive. Berserk Franken-science, an unequivocally dangerous work environment and the havoc its owner wreaks on the global market for fun!
The greatest critique of quirky eccentricity as a cover for unrestrained hegemonic corporate power in movies
After revisiting the film, I am convinced that the lead-up to the introduction of Wonka and the factory tour - the stretch of the movie that most people find boring by comparison - is vital for its framing of what happens later with the kids and their various tragic mishaps. What we learn about the world in which Wonka’s candy factory exists is revealing and insightful in the way it works as a contrast to the factory itself. Frankly, I think we should be a little more concerned about the state of this world and what kind of people it produces. It’s lamentable that the resemblance it bears to society today, some 50 years later, is uncanny and fairly alarming.
Wonka is on shaky ground with the audience before we even meet him. He must win over the audience as completely as he does his guests. We’re right to be a little suspicious. Just who does he think he is? Does anyone stop to think about what right Wonka has to set in motion the chain of events he does — which have the effect of creating economic havoc all over the world? Is there no public debate about the nature of this? We’re meant to be on his side when we do meet him (because he’s played by winsome Gene Wilder) but in some ways, he never seems truly approachable. For all his charm and showmanship (or those moments when he has to be truly scary), his humanity and fallibility are always just out of reach.
Because the story doesn’t introduce him until about halfway through, we enter the factory with any number of preconceived suspicions about this rogue candymaker, about his infernal machines and about the economic pyrotechnics he deploys to justify them. The early scenes are not just there to make the factory look more wondrous and fanciful by comparison when we finally see it. They give us a blueprint for understanding Wonka’s operation in a larger context and it’s in this context that the operation starts to look like an engine of economic and social chaos. An operation that is doggedly nefarious in every aspect, whose venality and evil (yes, evil) is held in check only by its contrast to the ethical and moral corruption of the society it’s housed in.
Going forward, I must state one thing. I’m NOT knocking this movie. I’m too much in awe of it:
1. The world in which the movie takes place is a late-Capitalist dystopia in which candy and chocolate are the epicenter. Humanity is perpetually only a candy bar away from anarchy on both local and international scales. Into this mix, Wonka’s golden ticket scheme throws the entire global economy into utter chaos. Human behavior becomes completely primitive and animalistic all over the world (the scene with the woman seriously mulling over the decision to pay the ransom of her case of Wonka bars for her kidnapped husband’s life points to the utter lunacy Wonka has no qualms about inciting). Riots ensue. National economies go into freefall. The Pandora’s Box of a prized magic Wonka Bar becomes the “Final Commodity” for a decadent society — both an economic lodestone and a doomsday surplus, serving the purpose of revitalizing global consumption and ripping apart the social fabric. An ouroboros product.
Wonka makes NO MENTION to his guests of what he had just wrought upon the world in the time between the announcement of the Golden Tickets up to the moment he begins the tour, which brings me to my next point.
The Final Commodity
2. Wonka is sheer evil. An Ayn Randian monster. He’s essentially operating a rogue corporate nation with complete sovereignty and jurisprudential impunity from international regulation. Many jokes have been made about his abduction and subjugation of an entire race but to me, the business with the Oompa Loompas is a lesser offense compared to the pandemonium unleashed by his crimes on the world stage, along with those against science, nature and probably God. His operation cracks and then hoards infinite (or everlasting) matter, shrinking technology, anti-gravity and condensed molecular food. It’s amazing the US government didn’t order a covert CIA action to take out anarchist Wonka and replace him with a fascist puppet to better serve its material interest. Or at least remove his boot from the throat of the market. Bitterly OCD, misanthropic, and cloistered as Steve Jobs, Wonka seems possessed of a certain primordial evil. Equal parts kindly cruel, paternal Superego and destructive, amoral, childlike Id. Being that the Superego and the Id are often regarded as the same voice, complimenting each other and sharing interests, this makes Wonka the ultimate maniacal industrial goblin. It may be no coincidence of his substantial physical resemblance to Harpo Marx — another Id monster — with the same clothes, cane, hair and unpredictable movement.
3. 4 out of the 5 children are just no damn good. And by extension, so are their parents and everyone else. A cycle of greed, entitlement, and general wretchedness is present in about 80 percent of the people in this movie. People are Grotesques very much in the manner of Sherwood Anderson’s inhabitants of Winesburg, Ohio: set in their ideological ways, incorrigibly hardwired to look out for number one. The lessons they’re meant to learn will likely be lost on them — the children seem to feel no remorse for their excesses even during the act of suffering their consequences. The world we see and hear about on TV broadcasts and in cutaways — apart from Charlie’s English-speaking Bavarian neighborhood strangely populated only by Americans and Brits — is a place that cynically makes the terrifying, unknown world of Wonka’s factory-nation look purposeful. It has a kind of pure, unspoiled allure to outsiders. The prospect of a visit has the appeal of a fountain of youth to motivate the populace with hope. An oasis untainted by unrestrained, berserk Capitalism.
This is all pretty dour stuff. True to the book. Maybe it takes a rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust supporter like Roald Dahl to come up with it.
4. The idea of the character of Slugworth (whom we technically never see) fascinates me. It might be edifying to make a movie from his viewpoint. I see him as the struggling Everyman entrepreneur. The idealistic little guy who went into business for himself after his schism with Wonka, probably for refusing to play to the deplorable ego mustered by Wonka’s supposed rugged individualism. Only to be forever held in stasis by Wonka’s ruthless apparent monopoly on sweets and ingenious conceptual marketing strategy. Still, he strives upwards against the corporate Goliath and succeeds against all odds. But the hubris of Wonka in hiring a man to impersonate Slugworth to set up a confidence trap for the children at the factory — a manufactured competitor brought about no doubt by Wonka’s guilt, such that he would need to essentially create his own Moriarty is pretty remarkable, no? We never see a Slugworth product. But people seem to know about him. How does he stay in the game under Wonka’s hegemony? Is there even a real Slugworth or Slugworth Chocolates? Did Wonka have him killed and replaced with a double so he can use Slugworth Chocolates as a shell company? Where’s Slugworth?! This should be the real mystery.
Wonka’s manufactured competitor, a personification of his guilt at the knowledge that no one will stop him.
Whether or not the real Slugworth will please stand up, it’s clear that Wonka is a member of some nefarious international cabal. Rothschild-Bildaburg-reptilian-renegade-Illuminati freakdom. The absence of any critical media scrutiny of his sick machine should be evidence of no surprise. In his office near the end, Wonka is annoyed at having to respond to repeated requests from the Queen of England.
Mike TV: Violent, self-marginalizing cosmonaut into the future of broadcasting
4. Of all the movie’s maimed children, Mike TV is my favorite. He’s a pretty spot on caricature of the Ugly American (who MUST be embodied by a child). Obnoxious and violent (“Wham! You’re dead!), he lives in a fantasy world, has ADHD, and just loves his TV. As I see it, he suffers the most humiliating fate of any of them. His own marginalization. He enjoys it enough to ask for a second helping (can you imagine?) because he’ll do anything to be famous. If all the fame the world could conjure up meant I was to be shrunk down to oblivion, could this ever be a fair tradeoff? Is the loss of freedom and autonomy for the chance of public adoration the defining goal of modern life? In Dahl’s world, I would say it is. As Dahl sees it, the masses voluntarily participate in their own degradation and are all but begging to be punished for their crass, consumerist desires and put in their place.
5. The happy, affirming ending is really of little consolation. The cycle continues: Charlie is told by Wonka in the glass elevator that he has to run things Wonka’s way. The child is rewarded for his honesty and kindness with a life sentence. It looks like a hermetic, lonely life for an individual. Enjoying unlimited power but apparently no autonomy. Wonka was never training a successor, but a surrogate. There was a consistent level of conviction in the diametrically opposed bitterness of everything depicted before that factory entrance scene. Then we get the smoke and mirrors. It seems like the audience escapes with Charlie from that drab world of avarice and deceit. But far from it, the perimeters of his confinement merely are shifted. And the prison bars are now harder to see. Before, the lowly disposition of the Bucket family was simple and discernible. And in the movie, there was an honesty about the dreariness of the world and the people who run it. Then Charlie’s problems become deeper. He will have to take on the mantle. Is being an old, weird, lonely, creepy, unmarried industrialist really what he wanted?
The pretty colors and the lights and whimsy of the factory are there to fool us. It’s the same deal inside of Paradise. You merely trade material problems for existential ones.
The build up to the factory tour, that’s what it’s all about. In glorious technicolor.
