“The WOndeRful WoNka woRld of Willy Religion”
Step inside to a situation that is both comic, tantalizing to the taste buds and where every possibility is exploited to its ends. There’s a feeling when your eyes first crawl into the room; a feeling of unspeakable elation with the flow of desire trickling down near those Cadbury covered eggs.
Of course, there’s no shortcoming of being transported with other delights when you enter the literary world of chocolate abundance; that is, the one and only, Charlie’s Chocolate Factory. There is enchantment hidden in this childhood book, of dreams hitched so close to elation that every mouthful of confectionery goodness becomes a taste of indulgent allegory.With the Golden Ticket in their hand, the reader is buckled in for a ride towards rapture and a deliciously-looking heaven — the factory.
There are inconceivable landmarks in a believed to be conceivable world — meadows full of sweetened buttercups and mint-like grass, ‘Everlasting Gobstoppers’ and corridors that dangle in edible wallpaper and fizzy-like drinks [1]
Look into the mirror of this allegorical land and soon the appearance of a Biblical reference to the Garden of Eden or — to seep a little further, the ‘Garden of God,’ — becomes apparent. Of course, if there is paradise inherent in this invention, there must be a God-like creator that resides at this level of sweet gratification, and to the reader’s intrinsic delight, it is none other than Willy Wonka himself.
The sugary air is pervaded by the sweet resonances of the angels- or as they’re more widely professed in the literary work, the Oompa-Loompas — singing verses:
“Oompa Loompa doom-pa-dee-da You will live in happiness too Like the Oompa Loompa doom-pa-dee-do” [1]
— that reverberate like the bliss of heavenly hymns in endorsing the neoliberal presentation of an elite Wonka.
How many fervent Christian followers actually discover their Golden Tickets in a Wonka Whipped Cream Marshmallow Delight [1] is certainly, of contentious debate , but lest, when one is in the presence of life-sized chocolate animals and row upon row of chocolate men, you simply cannot resist the temptation to conceive the possibility of such a Eden-like place.
Though, the ticket does not come without expenditure; perhaps, there is an element of chance intertwined in the literary version against the probabilities of a million or so chocolate bars but certainly, not a free entry way into the allegorical-like heaven.
To keep the prized winners under mandated restrictions, Wonka enforces their signatures to a contract-like document, entitled “RULES” for keeping compliance to Wonka’s word. If the capital letters aren’t enough to prove the need for preserving order and obedience, perhaps it is of enough merit to extend the notion towards the instructive guide, the Biblical Ten Commandments, meant to conserve the ‘sacred’ mandate — similar to the ‘sacred order’ that is replicated in Snowpierecer[2]. It privileges, then, a satirically cohesive use of the functional definition of religion in creating the existential, yet ‘communitas’ encounter that, in part, is permeated with a sense of transcendence.
However, to read this presentation entirely as a raw commodification of a child-like favourite is to read as a religious literalist would in unwinding an interpretation that is yet, open to the subjective authority through which Christian advocates participate and interpret Biblical references. We must be cautious as to how we approach such inclinations without trying to undress what may simply be a child-inspired creation as a highly capitalist product selling the same appeal for the literal that fundamentalists pursue in their hunt for a personalization with God.
Nevertheless, whether its religious scriptures or the visual indulgence of a confectionery factory — both outline the wandering complexity of trying to negotiate through commodified articles of interpretation that ultimately, blur the divisions between the allegorical and the affinity towards what Richard Santana and Gregory Erickson describe as a “literal truth” [3]. It would be ignorant, however, to completely refute the operation of both elements under the same marketing edifice that manufactures off of these rhetorically- interpretative desires for reconciliation, belief and even sweet indulgence.
Charlie’s Chocolate Factory, needless to say, is unspared to this participation of selling an implicit yearning to connect with a childhood nostalgia, generating a commercially-filled void for the metaphysical or the mere other.
After all, where does the virtue in popular culture lie if it refrains from shaping what may be simply an childlike construct as inventory for conditioning a false sense of the inconceivable in prey of the resonances that operate in the dialect with ourselves?
References:
[1]“Oompa-Loompa.” HarryConnickJr. Lyrics. Web. http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/harryconnickjr/oompaloompa.html
[2] Harris, Jennifer. “Snowpiercer.”Religion and Popular Culture. Web. September 13 2014. https://medium.com/religion-and-popular-culture/snowpiercer-cb4f0fdef8d0
[3] Santana, Richard and Gregory Erickson. “Consuming Faith: Advertising, the Pornographic Gaze and Religion Desire.” InReligion and Popular Culture: Rescripting the Sacred, 57. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.
