Willy Wonka: Chocolate, Marxism and the End of Days
In Roald Dahl’s classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we are presented with the vivid and memorable character of Willy Wonka, confectioner extraordinaire. On first glance, or a liberal glance for those who’ve already figured out where I’m going with this argument, Wonka is a paragon. He is a successful business owner who has earned his place as a highly influential figure in society through the successful marketing and production of a highly desired product — his seemingly magical chocolate and sweets. He’s cultivated global trade links, primarily employing dreamers who have moved to the UK (or the US, in the movies) to seek a better life, earning a higher wage than they would have back at home. He is our Richard Branson, our Elon Musk, our Steve Jobs, and his products are far more delicious than any of theirs too.
Now let’s switch that lens up a bit. Through the eyes of a Marxist, the image of Wonka changes rapidly. Why are the workers shipped in from a faraway land? Why are they paid in cacao beans instead of actual money? Why is it that 80% of those who discover the truth about Wonka’s factory meet a grisly fate and those who unquestioningly support him are inducted into positions in the company of great prestige? This massive shift in perspective is curious, so I’ll be approaching the rest of the essay through this lens.
Before we dive into the need for world revolution, we should also look at how Wonka is a figure of almost holy influence. He is the man who vanished; holed up inside his factory for years, deploying candies on to the market that seem to make no sense. To children he is magical, an inspiration, much like our first understanding of him. To his competitors, to the adults, Wonka is at best to be distrusted and suspicious of, and at worst to be feared. We are beginning to unravel the notion of the Wonka myth and the chocolate factory built on the exploitation not just of the workers but the cultural understanding of society at large.
But not all children’ stories aren’t about Marxism and slavery, sometimes they’re about chocolate. The plot of Charlie starts off with five golden tickets randomly dispersed around the world, the winners earning a special tour of the factory. Dahl’s ability to portray a child’s interpretation of the adult world comes out in spades here as seemingly the entire world is desperately trying to figure out what lies within the factory, as golden tickets soar in value and desirability. This childlike innocence in the interpretation, where we see the world much like how 10 year old Charlie would be, is rapidly cast aside as we see the class character come back immediately as a result of this. Factory owners have their production lines halted and devoted to unwrapping tickets, and the gluttonous wealthy consume so much they simply find one through sheer determination. Inheritance and class plays an important role in determining who exactly gets a golden ticket with only one character — our protagonist Charlie — actually getting his ticket through the original and fair method of randomly finding one in a chance purchase, as well being the only one of a working class background. Remember, all winners lives in a suburban home or a mansion but Charlie lives in a shack.
But why not push this just a bit further?
As well as being of bourgeois background, the other 4 winners of the golden tickets are embodiments of not just bourgeois decadence but also of traditional Christian sins and they suffer as a result. While their class character gets them into their position of suffering of meeting some kind of terrible fate at the hands of the factory, it’s their inherent vice and Christian sin that gets them into those situations into the first place. Charlie, however, is innocent and has seemingly no sins of any kind (except for the 1971 movie with the fizzy-lifting drinks scene, but I refuse to talk about that movie because it derails my narrative and I’ve got you this far in already). He is the lamb, the pure, the innocent, he is the Christ figure of the story. Charlie atones for his sins at the end of the tale and as a result, he inherits material joy in the form of the factory as well as paradise in inheriting the world, where Charlie’s world is chocolate. The factory is literally the material world he receives but for chocolate-obsessed Charlie, it’s also his spiritual world.
In such a relationship, Wonka’s spectacle and image translates to that of an Old Testament-style God figure, omnipotent, mysterious and seemingly working at random, but he is also just a man with a chocolate factory. Roald Dahl has shown us through this combination of Christian and Marxist analysis how God and religion themselves are ideals constructed by the bourgeoisie in how Wonka himself is just a man who likes to make chocolate, the fear is generated by everyone else. Wonka’s character is one of a spectacle constructed by the middle and upper class outside the factory who desperately want to get in and seize his assets for further profit exploitation of the proletariat.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a Christian-Marxist tale of how the bourgeoisie will construct ideals of religion and capitalism to uphold and justify the inherently exploitative nature of modern labour and commodity production, constructing morality that they hypocritically refuse to uphold. This leads to the destruction of themselves and their class as a whole, paving the way for the proletariat blessed by Christ, embodied by Charlie, to control the Earth. It is a reflection not just of the socialist utopia that we can expect in the material world but also an ideal of how just as the rich can pass through the gates of heaven as easily as a camel passes through the eye of a needle, so too will the working class receive paradise on earth and in the afterlife. The story is one which merges the concepts of the end of history, where the socialist state consumes the world and is able to satisfy the material needs of all people thus bringing an end to conflict and “history”, as well as that of the end of the world itself when the biblical Rapture commences and history quite literally ceases as humanity joins in peaceful eternal paradise while those who are sinners are cast aside. Roald Dahl has, in effect, predicted the end of days for the bourgeoisie and for all of humanity (and its suffering) in a story about a magic chocolate factory.
Now some of you might be wondering how I came to these conclusions, what the purpose of this is, and why I thought this essay was a good idea. To that, I raise you the words of famous French literary theorist Jacques Derrida:
“Stop asking questions, yeah? Just fuck off, yeah??? It works as a metaphor, and you CAN’T STOP ME.”
In the face of such sage post-modernist advice, we have no options but to conclude that ha ha, I win.
