My all-time favourite film as a child was David Wolper’s 1971 ‘Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory’ starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka . This was the film that I knew every word to and watched quite happily every single Saturday whilst dad got on with the D.I.Y. The film depicts Willy Wonka, the owner of a chocolate factory of which the sole workers are oompa loompas from ‘Loompa Land’, as he releases five golden tickets around the world for a tour around the factory concealed in ‘Wonka Bars’. Interestingly, it wasn’t necessarily the chocolate and sweets that made me enjoy the film, I bought into the fantasy of the factory as a paradise and Wonka as a kind and caring idolised figure. The oopma loompas added to the fairy tale world of the factory and to me were not only interesting but humorous.
When Tim Burton created a re- make of the film in 2005.... I hated it. Everything that I enjoyed about the 1971 version seemed to have disappeared. Instead of fairy tale creatures, the Oopma Loompas seemed more human, yet at the same time somewhat robotic. Wonka’s previous velvet coat and dickie- bow had been swapped for futuristic sci-fi goggles. Something that was once easy viewing, now just seemed awkward and slightly disturbing! It wasn’t until I began this module that I started to see the film in a different way and consequently understand my preference for the first, but also my strange dislike for the second
In the original 1964 book, the oompa loompas are depicted as black African pygmies who work for cocoa beans. This wasn’t seen as an issue until the NAACP raised criticisms about the racist nature. Dahl then changed them to hippies, with fair skin and low flowing hair. Talking about this change Dahl wrote; “I created a group of little fantasy creatures.... I saw them as charming creatures, whereas the white kids in the books were... most unpleasant. It didn't occur to me that my depiction of the Oompa-Loompas was racist, but it did occur to the NAACP and others.... After listening to the criticisms, I found myself sympathizing with them, which is why I revised the book”. Dahl might have changed the colour of the oopma loompa’s skin, but the explicit colonial ideas and discourse embedded in his expression I found quite shocking. Dahl took a real nation of people and degraded them to ‘creatures’, even more interestingly, these creatures to Dahl are ‘fantasy’ they don’t operate in a real, civilized society. They don’t work for money, but for food, in the same way an animal would work for its favourite treat. Dahl instantly creates the binary opposition of ‘them’ and ‘white’, for him, ‘they’ are so far removed from his white world that he can ‘create’ them to be whatever he wants.
When Tim Burton created a re- make of the film in 2005.... I hated it. Everything that I enjoyed about the 1971 version seemed to have disappeared. Instead of fairy tale creatures, the Oopma Loompas seemed more human, yet at the same time somewhat robotic. Wonka’s previous velvet coat and dickie- bow had been swapped for futuristic sci-fi goggles. Something that was once easy viewing, now just seemed awkward and slightly disturbing! It wasn’t until I began this module that I started to see the film in a different way and consequently understand my preference for the first, but also my strange dislike for the secondI thought it was important to look at something Dahl had said about the book, to gain an insight into the mindset behind its creation. After all, children’s books are the manifestation of the adult author’s mind, through a medium which will inevitably shape and influence a child’s. Children’s books are essentially a product of the ‘educational state apparatus’ Althusser identifies, ensuring the reinforcement and reproduction of ideology, in this case Colonial ideology.
In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Other Excremental Visions, Hamida Bosmajian argues “Children's literature is a complicated artistic, psychological, and social phenomenon, in some ways more so than adult literature because the author projects memories and libidinal releases through forms pretending innocence.”
When making the first film version of the book in 1971, the sensitivity surrounding racism evidently sent it in a different direction, it is well documented that Dahl was not impressed! Looking at the film from a new perspective it seems that the worry not to appear racist, actually embedded colonial ideology deeper into the discourse of the film, almost further under the surface, which becomes more dangerous as Bosmajian identifies because it is masked by “pretending innocence”. The oopma loompas in the film were played by dwarfs painted orange and sporting green wigs. Their love of chocolate and payment in coco beans in fact served to create a parallel between them and Wonka, he is portrayed as helping them and actually enriching their lives....very colonial!
When making the first film version of the book in 1971, the sensitivity surrounding racism evidently sent it in a different direction, it is well documented that Dahl was not impressed! Looking at the film from a new perspective it seems that the worry not to appear racist, actually embedded colonial ideology deeper into the discourse of the film, almost further under the surface, which becomes more dangerous as Bosmajian identifies because it is masked by “pretending innocence”. The oopma loompas in the film were played by dwarfs painted orange and sporting green wigs. Their love of chocolate and payment in coco beans in fact served to create a parallel between them and Wonka, he is portrayed as helping them and actually enriching their lives....very colonial!
I have already said children’s literature serves as a medium to reproduce ideology, but the literary world that surrounded Dahl and inspired his direction as a writer was traditional, Canonical, British writing. Put much more succinctly by Said “the works of even the most eccentric artist, are constrained and acted upon by society, by cultural traditions, by worldly circumstance and by stabilizing influences such as schools libraries, and governments; moreover, that both learned and imaginative writing are never free, but are limited in their imagery, assumptions, and intentions”
Even if Dahl meant the story to be a fantasy fairy tale free from the restrictions of plausibility and real life, he could not escape the ideologies embedded in his ideas. The ‘Cambridge Companion to Literature on Film’ identifies the reinforcement of these ideologies with “Intertextual references to highbrow literature”. Wonka is presented as almost the embodiment of Britain itself. He is an entrepreneur using people from another country to work and expand his chocolate empire, which in no way benefits them, under the guise of helper. Interestingly and also serving to reinforce this notion, to his white counterparts Wonka is viewed as a hero, a pioneer in the field of candy making, inventing things such as the ‘everlasting gobstopper’. (This is exactly the discourse that I bought into as a child)
A few examples of the intertexuality that the Cambridge Companion identifies in the film are
• Shakespeare’s As you like it; -- “sweet lovers love the springtime”
• Romeo and Juliet; -- “is it my soul that calls me by my name”
• Keats’ Endymion – “a thing of beauty is a joy forever”
• Wilde’s Importance of being Earnest; – “the suspense is terrible I hope it will last”
Songs in the film are an integral part of its happy, innocent facade and a part which children in particular will obviously enjoy. I was quite discerned when I looked closely at the lyrics I knew inside out and repeated as a child. As the children enter the factory for the first time Wonka sings ‘Pure Imagination’;
... ”If you want to view paradise,
Simply look around and view it,
Anything you want to, do it,
Want to change the world, there’s nothing to it”.
I am being told, that as a white person, my ‘white privilege’ allows me anything I want from life, White British supremacy made colonisation easy, there was ‘nothing to it’ and as result my life will also be easy.
Lyrics from the song ‘Cheer up Charlie’, (which Charlie’s mother sings to him because he is unhappy about not finding a ticket) include;
Deep down you know the world is still your toy....
Up on top is where you belong...
Just be glad you’re you.
Similar sentiments echoed in the voice of violet beauregard when she decides she wants one of Wonka’s gold- egg laying swans;
I want the world,
I want the whole world,
I want to lock it all up in my pocket,
It’s my bar of chocolate,
Give it to me now!
Reducing the world to a bar of chocolate and the metaphor of being able to ‘pocket it’ instantly suggests money, ‘pocketing change’ as it were. From a Marxist perspective then, the chocolate factory is a metaphorical representation of Capitalism and commodification, and the bourgeois Wonka a representation of the white coloniser, who sees the rest of the world as a commodity in expanding his empire.
Lawall, in Reading World Literature points out that “the fairy tale motifs of charlie and the chocolate factory are displaced, repositioned, within the framework of a modern technocracy, in which the individual is relegated to the role of consumer of non- essential goods, and in which an Angloid candy manufacturer controls the fate of a whole “third world” nation, those littler and less educated than the “old world” chocolate producer himself.” This “old world” that Wonka belongs to is an Imperial world, consumed by Capitalism and the direct result of Empire. Lawall also identifies the oompa loompas depiction in the film as “(not an uncompelling representation of those who labor without personal recognition and without clothes on their backs), the Oopmah Loompahs serve the research interests of their owner/handler, becoming happily expendable at any time for the greater good of all” Interestingly Wonka says “"Who can I trust to run the factory when I leave and take care of the Oompa-Loompas for me?" .....The factory only successfully operates because of the work of the oompa loompas but of course, they can’t be trusted to run it themselves, they are not educated enough, they need a white coloniser to organise them and reap the benefits. Personal recognition is an interesting point to be made, the oompa loompas are a representation of the general ‘Orient’ and the West’s ability to elide its “difference with its weakness”. Both their position as workers and their physical smallness equate their weakness. The representation of them as a collective echoes Saids outline of Laurence’s ‘Arabs’, an example of Oriental discourse which creates “definiteness, and collective self consistency such as to wipe out any traces of individual Arabs with narratable life histories”
Lawall suggests that “To reread it is to reexamine one’s own pleasures as a reader, indeed to encounter one’s identity as problematic, dynamic, multidimensional .”
This is exactly what I have done whilst looking at the film from a post colonial perspective. Earlier I said I didn’t like Tim Burton’s 2005 remake because it seemed to create a more sinister and strange effect, one which I couldn’t quite figure out. Now I realise that like Lawall points out, Burton purposely drew attention to the aspects hidden in the first film to make me re-examine my pleasures as a reader. Everything is the same in both films with regards to the main plot, but Burton creates a context for Wonka’s actions in his childhood creating overtly Freudian behaviours. Wonka is forced to repress his desires for chocolate as a child by his dentist father, forcing him to wear a full head brace. This “frightening experience” appears to be “the subject of the next game”, that is, the hiding and finding of golden tickets. This creates fresh questioning around lyrics such as;
“Willy Wonka makes, everything he bakes,
Satisfying and delicious,
Dip it in a dream
Separate the sorrow and collect up all the cream”
Wonka’s sci-fi goggles, and plain white clinical walls of the factory elude to the representation of some sort of dream world; A manifest of his ‘unconscious’ where things like dipping and collecting up cream are ‘satisfying’. Wonka’s mother is also absent in the film, he rejects each child in spectacular and bizarre fashion to assert himself as “master of the situation”.
Wonka’s sci-fi goggles, and plain white clinical walls of the factory elude to the representation of some sort of dream world; A manifest of his ‘unconscious’ where things like dipping and collecting up cream are ‘satisfying’. Wonka’s mother is also absent in the film, he rejects each child in spectacular and bizarre fashion to assert himself as “master of the situation”.
At the very beginning of the film Wonka is shown to visit India to build an Indian prince a palace made from chocolate, because of the hot climate the palace melts, the first drop to fall lands directly on the princes forehead. This, while most would view it explicitly racist, does more, it equates a religious tradition with something British, Burton makes something that has nothing to do with British culture, a direct result of it. Again these scenes serve to portray British supremacy and dominance, the chocolate mark is a metaphor; 'their' traditions and identity, are actually something 'we' gave or allowed.
Wonka exerts much more control over the oompa loompas and the factory, unlike the original film much more time is taken to portray him as the coloniser figure. Burton chooses to elaborate on his travels to loompa land and depict him as an explorer, the explicit contrast between terrain and the creation of a savage uncivilized environment entirely positions Wonka as the coloniser. Burton explicitly subscribes to the orient of indigenous populations in his depiction of the oompa loompas, they initiate him with a ritual, and he is expected to eat caterpillars, which they think is a delicacy. The soundtrack to this part is what I would come to know as ‘tribal music’ and the binary opposites just keep on coming; savage/civilized, caterpillars/chocolate, East/West, Them/Us. In the background of this picture the temple is just about visible, the same colonial ideology that games such as ‘lara croft’ engage with. Wonka is putting his own life at risk in order to change the oompa loompa’s lives for the better and become a ‘pioneer’ in his field.
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Rather than creating a generic fantasy ‘other’ like the first film, Burton specifically describes his oompa loompas as living in loompa land, off the African ocean. Associating their homeland with a place steeped in colonial history and scarred with the memory of slavery yet again serves to position Wonka as coloniser, Burton brings to life the realities of the colonial ideology embedded and silent in the original book. Here, the colour of the skin explicitly insinuates the oompa loompas to be black or Asian and Burton uses special effects to replicate the same man into what looks like hundreds, they are well and truly effaced and subordinated to colonized, stripped of any individuality or value. By portraying loompa land and the oompa loompas the way he does Burton has mastered the “paradoxical mode of representation” by connoting “rigidity and an unchanging order as well as a disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition”, creating the “fixity” imperative for the discourse of colonialism. Burtons depiction of Wonka andthe oompa loompas is reminiscent of the original African pygmies Dahl described. (I think the picture on the left is reminiscent of Wonka and his oompa loompas)Macherey in his identification of the spoken and the unspoken would argue that what is not said is as important as what is said; in the first film the things that weren’t said where perhaps just as important in creating our overall understanding. It was obvious that Wonka had been to loompa land to fetch the oompa loompas, they didn’t appear by themselves, but the silence meant we could imagine. Loompa land, like the Orient, became a creation “dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited” to whatever you wanted it to be.
Although it may seem strange I chose to look at a child’s film it is one that as a child meant a lot to me, it is interesting to reflect and accept that I was consuming ideologies without even realising, but perhaps more interesting is the reflection on me, that as an adult, and having re-examined the films from a postcolonial perspective, I still prefer the ignorance of the original.
