Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Willy Wonka, Hippie Industrialist
[I went to see "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" a few weeks ago with my brother and his girlfriend. I was impressed. This is what emerged from our post-film conversation. Note that I never read the book, and although I did read the sequel, "Charlie and the Glass Elevator" and see the original film from 1971, "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory", I remember them only vaguely. So this post is really looking at the Tim Burton film in isolation.]
The film, aside from being visually dazzling and very funny, has interesting things to say about capitalism and alienation, industrial production, labor, globalization, and humanism. Burton's Wonka is a reclusive, aging bohemian, a time capsule from the mod London of the sixties to whom things are still "groovy" and "far out" and who suffers from an acid flashback in one scene; indeed, this isn't the film's only LSD reference, as one of Charlie's grandfather's own flashback scenes shows Wonka, overseeing operations at his original 1960's London candy store where Joe was an employee, placing a candy egg on Joe's tongue. Wonka's androgynous, flamboyant fashion sense cements the association with the mod London scene and contributes to the Michael Jackson vibe so many have pointed out: like Jackson, Wonka seems to be a product of cultural alienation, his paranoia and obsessive-compulsive hypochondria brought on by authoritarian parenting, immersion in high-stakes capitalist production, and personal seclusion. The rubber gloves that Wonka wears not only evoke Jackson but also serve as a marker of the alienation he inherited from his father; one of the most touching moments of the film comes when, toward the end, Wonka is reunited with his overbearing dentist father, and the awkwardness of their long-delayed expression of mutual acceptance is underscored by the sound of rubber gloves -- worn by both father and son -- squeaking nervously. Burton plays brilliantly with images of repression: the dental headgear Wonka wears as a young boy is a Foucaultean nightmare brought to life on the screen.
With the repressive parent, the rebellious androgynous child, and the creation of a private dream-world of cultural production, Wonka could just as easily be David Bowie as Michael Jackson. But the question of industrial production adds a dimension to the character that ends up dictating his main role in the film.
The film opens with images of industrial assembly-line production of chocolate bars, and images of industrial production are revisited regularly, from Veruca Salt's father's workers assembled at rows upon rows of tables (disassembling the same candy bars we saw assembled at the beginning), to the weird science laboratory of Wonka's factory, to the room where dozens of squirrels are employed as labor. Grandpa Joe narrates a prologue about the Wonka factory's closing: Wonka's panic over leaked intellectual property leads him to close the factory off, withholding his innovative genius from the rest of the world and laying off all his workers (I couldn't help but wonder if the MPAA had dropped some hints to highlight this part of the story). The factory eventually reopens -- staffed, we later learn, by imported third-world Oompa-Loompas, who are apparently treated with little regard by Wonka (he admits to turning "like, twenty Oompa-Loompas" into blueberries by testing his experimental bubblegum on them) despite his professed paternal love for them. Burton seems to be aware of the relevance of the Wonka's relationship with the Oompa-Loompas to our current debate over outsourcing and globalization; indeed, Wonka's attitude is exactly that of the modern colonialist capitalist, justifying his indifference to the welfare of his labor force by pointing out how miserable they were in the jungle, eating disgusting caterpillars instead of the chocolate that they craved. (The metaphor of candy to refer to junk consumer goods comes up several times in the film, notably during Wonka's nightmarish scheme to beam chocolate bars through the TV screen.) I can only assume that Burton's decision to have the Oompa-Loompas literally employed as galley slaves on Wonka's boat, rowing in time to a drum, was meant to underscore their exploitation and Wonka's indifference to it. (This issue of the Oompa Loompa proletariat has been written about before, in reference to the 1971 film. And P. Kerim Friedman, an anthropologist and contributor to the excellent anthropology blog Savage Minds, explores the possibility that Dahl may have put some of this subtext into the novel intentionally. In fact, many of the themes I talk about here are touched upon, again in reference to the first film, in Steve Champeon's satirical reading of it as a prophecy of the dot-com bubble.)
What's remarkable about Burton's film is how it manages to criticize capitalist alienation without entirely condemning it. Instead, he tells a story about the need for entreprenurial enthusiasm to be tempered with social connectedness and humanistic values. When Wonka invites five children to the factory to compete for his job, Michael Jackson transforms into Donald Trump as each child in turn gets "fired" for some basic character flaw which renders him or her unsuited to capitalist production. Violet is undone by her pride, Augustus by his short-sighted greedy, Veruka by her sense of entitlement, and Mike TV by something a bit more complicated. Mike is a kind of Nietschean superman: a brilliant hacker who defeats Wonka's golden ticket distribution scheme, whose parents sheepishly admit they have no idea what he's talking about most of the time, and who berates Wonka for inventing the technology of teleportation only to use it in an inane advertising scheme. Mike is right, of course; he's also a nihilist and an egomaniac who delights only in destruction and demolition, whether of video-game opponents, candy pumpkins, or the egos of the inferior human beings who surround him. Upon winning his golden ticket, he admits that he doesn't even like chocolate but just wanted to break the system. Wonka's disdain for Mike's perversity mirrors the relationship between, say, Microsoft and its hacker critics: when Wonka sneers at Mike as "the little devil who cracked the system", he's expressing not just jealousy and defensiveness, but also legitimate disapproval of Mike's counter-productive attitude.
Mike subscribes to a kind of means utilitarianism: he is always quick to point out the optimal solution to any problem, but his intelligence isn't directed toward any goal worth achieving. He seizes one of the golden tickets despite his disdain for candy, he smashes pumpkins when given free access to Wonka's candy fields, and he eventually uses Wonka's teleportation device to travel across the room, shrinking himself in the process. Mike's nihilistic pragmatism is put into relief against Wonka's childlike fascination with candy and consumerism by Wonka's proposed application for the teleporter: a TV commercial with real chocolate bars inside the television set so that viewers can just "reach out... and take it!" This vision of passive, knee-jerk consumerism, with obese TV-viewers slumped in front of chocolate-dispensing TV sets, is typical of Wonka's commercial mind: while his fascination with innovation and sensation give him a slightly more human bent than Mike, they are ultimately unstable values and have catastrophic consequences as long as they remain untethered from any humanistic concerns.
This is, of course, the role Charlie plays in the drama: he shares with Wonka a dreamy enthusiasm for candy, toys, and fun, remarking at one point in response to Mike's grumbling that "candy doesn't have to have a point -- that's what makes it candy." Wonka recognizes Charlie as a kindred spirit and chooses him as an heir toward the end of the movie. But he presumes too much similarity between them: unlike Wonka, Charlie is not socially alienated, and he rejects Wonka's offer when it becomes contingent on Charlie abandoning his family to live in the factory with only Wonka and the Oompa-Loompas. (Wonka-as-Michael Jackson makes an appearance again as Wonka tries to lure Charlie away from his parents while displaying Jacksonian hypochondria by holding his nose amidst the squalor of the shack where they live.) Wonka is stumped: he has no notion of human social connectedness, and his evaluation of Charlie's family is superficial, based on their poverty and uncleanliness. What follows is a typical subplot about reconciliation and the overcoming of alienation as Charlie reunites Wonka with his father. The final scene, set in the Bucket's house (transplanted to the candy fields inside the factory), shows Wonka eating at the table with the Buckets, showing significant socialization but still struggling with some of his knee-jerk shallowness and hypochondria: when Charlie's senile grandmother tells him he smells nice, he responds, "and you smell like... old people."
The film brings in generational and class issues as well, but they are touched on more lightly. Wonka is an aging baby boomer who never grew up, the product of a counterculture obsessed with consumption and sensation, and now cut off from a culture whose values he rejected long ago; Wonka's father is the dark side of the WWII generation, mindlessly prejudiced and sensually repressed, while Charlie's grandparents each represent some mix of that generation's strengths and weaknesses, most notably its ability to cherish simplicity and stability; and Charlie represents the hope that the children of the Boomers will prove themselves a golden synthesis of the warring generations previous: socially responsible while still in touch with his sense of wonder and experimentation. Class, which gets addressed on a superficial level by Wonka's attitude toward Charlie's parents and by the obnoxious sense of entitlement displayed by Veruka Salt and her father, gets a more sophisticated nod at the beginning when Charlie's more curmudgeonly grandfather evaluate's the boy's chances of getting one of the tickets. He points out that kids like Charlie don't have a chance, with their one Wonka bar a year, that the tickets will be snapped up by kids who buy dozens of candy bars a week. But as the narrator says at the beginning of the film in a knowing wink to the realities of class and the absurdity of the Horatio Alger myth: Charlie isn't particularly bright, or talented, or ambitious, or fast, or strong, but simply "the luckiest boy in the world". The curmudgeonly grandfather later delivers one of the most tellingly anti-capitalist speeches in the film: when Charlie's luck delivers one of the golden tickets to him and the boy proposes selling it to feed the family, the grandfather points out that ticket isn't fungible: new money is printed every day, he says, while there will only ever be five golden tickets. The speech ignores the realities of poverty, of course, but it has the virtue of taking a stand against universal commercial exploitation of natural resources, of human dignity, or of culture. It also informs the audience of the kinds of values that have shaped Charlie's mind; values that Wonka, cut off from the wisdom of earlier generations, has never been able to absorb.
I enjoyed the film on sveral different levels. It was visually spectacular, the jokes came right on schedule and had a light touch, the performances were spot-on (I particularly liked Missi Pyle in her usual role of the hypercompetitive southern vamp as Violet Beauregarde's mother), and the intellectual message was subtle but rich. I don't know how much longer it will be in theaters, but you should catch it if you get a chance.
The film, aside from being visually dazzling and very funny, has interesting things to say about capitalism and alienation, industrial production, labor, globalization, and humanism. Burton's Wonka is a reclusive, aging bohemian, a time capsule from the mod London of the sixties to whom things are still "groovy" and "far out" and who suffers from an acid flashback in one scene; indeed, this isn't the film's only LSD reference, as one of Charlie's grandfather's own flashback scenes shows Wonka, overseeing operations at his original 1960's London candy store where Joe was an employee, placing a candy egg on Joe's tongue. Wonka's androgynous, flamboyant fashion sense cements the association with the mod London scene and contributes to the Michael Jackson vibe so many have pointed out: like Jackson, Wonka seems to be a product of cultural alienation, his paranoia and obsessive-compulsive hypochondria brought on by authoritarian parenting, immersion in high-stakes capitalist production, and personal seclusion. The rubber gloves that Wonka wears not only evoke Jackson but also serve as a marker of the alienation he inherited from his father; one of the most touching moments of the film comes when, toward the end, Wonka is reunited with his overbearing dentist father, and the awkwardness of their long-delayed expression of mutual acceptance is underscored by the sound of rubber gloves -- worn by both father and son -- squeaking nervously. Burton plays brilliantly with images of repression: the dental headgear Wonka wears as a young boy is a Foucaultean nightmare brought to life on the screen.
With the repressive parent, the rebellious androgynous child, and the creation of a private dream-world of cultural production, Wonka could just as easily be David Bowie as Michael Jackson. But the question of industrial production adds a dimension to the character that ends up dictating his main role in the film.
The film opens with images of industrial assembly-line production of chocolate bars, and images of industrial production are revisited regularly, from Veruca Salt's father's workers assembled at rows upon rows of tables (disassembling the same candy bars we saw assembled at the beginning), to the weird science laboratory of Wonka's factory, to the room where dozens of squirrels are employed as labor. Grandpa Joe narrates a prologue about the Wonka factory's closing: Wonka's panic over leaked intellectual property leads him to close the factory off, withholding his innovative genius from the rest of the world and laying off all his workers (I couldn't help but wonder if the MPAA had dropped some hints to highlight this part of the story). The factory eventually reopens -- staffed, we later learn, by imported third-world Oompa-Loompas, who are apparently treated with little regard by Wonka (he admits to turning "like, twenty Oompa-Loompas" into blueberries by testing his experimental bubblegum on them) despite his professed paternal love for them. Burton seems to be aware of the relevance of the Wonka's relationship with the Oompa-Loompas to our current debate over outsourcing and globalization; indeed, Wonka's attitude is exactly that of the modern colonialist capitalist, justifying his indifference to the welfare of his labor force by pointing out how miserable they were in the jungle, eating disgusting caterpillars instead of the chocolate that they craved. (The metaphor of candy to refer to junk consumer goods comes up several times in the film, notably during Wonka's nightmarish scheme to beam chocolate bars through the TV screen.) I can only assume that Burton's decision to have the Oompa-Loompas literally employed as galley slaves on Wonka's boat, rowing in time to a drum, was meant to underscore their exploitation and Wonka's indifference to it. (This issue of the Oompa Loompa proletariat has been written about before, in reference to the 1971 film. And P. Kerim Friedman, an anthropologist and contributor to the excellent anthropology blog Savage Minds, explores the possibility that Dahl may have put some of this subtext into the novel intentionally. In fact, many of the themes I talk about here are touched upon, again in reference to the first film, in Steve Champeon's satirical reading of it as a prophecy of the dot-com bubble.)
What's remarkable about Burton's film is how it manages to criticize capitalist alienation without entirely condemning it. Instead, he tells a story about the need for entreprenurial enthusiasm to be tempered with social connectedness and humanistic values. When Wonka invites five children to the factory to compete for his job, Michael Jackson transforms into Donald Trump as each child in turn gets "fired" for some basic character flaw which renders him or her unsuited to capitalist production. Violet is undone by her pride, Augustus by his short-sighted greedy, Veruka by her sense of entitlement, and Mike TV by something a bit more complicated. Mike is a kind of Nietschean superman: a brilliant hacker who defeats Wonka's golden ticket distribution scheme, whose parents sheepishly admit they have no idea what he's talking about most of the time, and who berates Wonka for inventing the technology of teleportation only to use it in an inane advertising scheme. Mike is right, of course; he's also a nihilist and an egomaniac who delights only in destruction and demolition, whether of video-game opponents, candy pumpkins, or the egos of the inferior human beings who surround him. Upon winning his golden ticket, he admits that he doesn't even like chocolate but just wanted to break the system. Wonka's disdain for Mike's perversity mirrors the relationship between, say, Microsoft and its hacker critics: when Wonka sneers at Mike as "the little devil who cracked the system", he's expressing not just jealousy and defensiveness, but also legitimate disapproval of Mike's counter-productive attitude.
Mike subscribes to a kind of means utilitarianism: he is always quick to point out the optimal solution to any problem, but his intelligence isn't directed toward any goal worth achieving. He seizes one of the golden tickets despite his disdain for candy, he smashes pumpkins when given free access to Wonka's candy fields, and he eventually uses Wonka's teleportation device to travel across the room, shrinking himself in the process. Mike's nihilistic pragmatism is put into relief against Wonka's childlike fascination with candy and consumerism by Wonka's proposed application for the teleporter: a TV commercial with real chocolate bars inside the television set so that viewers can just "reach out... and take it!" This vision of passive, knee-jerk consumerism, with obese TV-viewers slumped in front of chocolate-dispensing TV sets, is typical of Wonka's commercial mind: while his fascination with innovation and sensation give him a slightly more human bent than Mike, they are ultimately unstable values and have catastrophic consequences as long as they remain untethered from any humanistic concerns.
This is, of course, the role Charlie plays in the drama: he shares with Wonka a dreamy enthusiasm for candy, toys, and fun, remarking at one point in response to Mike's grumbling that "candy doesn't have to have a point -- that's what makes it candy." Wonka recognizes Charlie as a kindred spirit and chooses him as an heir toward the end of the movie. But he presumes too much similarity between them: unlike Wonka, Charlie is not socially alienated, and he rejects Wonka's offer when it becomes contingent on Charlie abandoning his family to live in the factory with only Wonka and the Oompa-Loompas. (Wonka-as-Michael Jackson makes an appearance again as Wonka tries to lure Charlie away from his parents while displaying Jacksonian hypochondria by holding his nose amidst the squalor of the shack where they live.) Wonka is stumped: he has no notion of human social connectedness, and his evaluation of Charlie's family is superficial, based on their poverty and uncleanliness. What follows is a typical subplot about reconciliation and the overcoming of alienation as Charlie reunites Wonka with his father. The final scene, set in the Bucket's house (transplanted to the candy fields inside the factory), shows Wonka eating at the table with the Buckets, showing significant socialization but still struggling with some of his knee-jerk shallowness and hypochondria: when Charlie's senile grandmother tells him he smells nice, he responds, "and you smell like... old people."
The film brings in generational and class issues as well, but they are touched on more lightly. Wonka is an aging baby boomer who never grew up, the product of a counterculture obsessed with consumption and sensation, and now cut off from a culture whose values he rejected long ago; Wonka's father is the dark side of the WWII generation, mindlessly prejudiced and sensually repressed, while Charlie's grandparents each represent some mix of that generation's strengths and weaknesses, most notably its ability to cherish simplicity and stability; and Charlie represents the hope that the children of the Boomers will prove themselves a golden synthesis of the warring generations previous: socially responsible while still in touch with his sense of wonder and experimentation. Class, which gets addressed on a superficial level by Wonka's attitude toward Charlie's parents and by the obnoxious sense of entitlement displayed by Veruka Salt and her father, gets a more sophisticated nod at the beginning when Charlie's more curmudgeonly grandfather evaluate's the boy's chances of getting one of the tickets. He points out that kids like Charlie don't have a chance, with their one Wonka bar a year, that the tickets will be snapped up by kids who buy dozens of candy bars a week. But as the narrator says at the beginning of the film in a knowing wink to the realities of class and the absurdity of the Horatio Alger myth: Charlie isn't particularly bright, or talented, or ambitious, or fast, or strong, but simply "the luckiest boy in the world". The curmudgeonly grandfather later delivers one of the most tellingly anti-capitalist speeches in the film: when Charlie's luck delivers one of the golden tickets to him and the boy proposes selling it to feed the family, the grandfather points out that ticket isn't fungible: new money is printed every day, he says, while there will only ever be five golden tickets. The speech ignores the realities of poverty, of course, but it has the virtue of taking a stand against universal commercial exploitation of natural resources, of human dignity, or of culture. It also informs the audience of the kinds of values that have shaped Charlie's mind; values that Wonka, cut off from the wisdom of earlier generations, has never been able to absorb.
I enjoyed the film on sveral different levels. It was visually spectacular, the jokes came right on schedule and had a light touch, the performances were spot-on (I particularly liked Missi Pyle in her usual role of the hypercompetitive southern vamp as Violet Beauregarde's mother), and the intellectual message was subtle but rich. I don't know how much longer it will be in theaters, but you should catch it if you get a chance.
