Last week I had the opportunity to see a children's production of Willy Wonka. I've always found the story interesting and read Roald Dahl's original novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) to my sons years ago. The character of Willy Wonka has multiple layers, and in this post I want to analyze him, and by extension the story, through the lens of Comparative Religion.
Gene Wilder famously played the part in the 1971 version of the movie.
Johnny Depp took on the role in 2005, though with much less impact, as I will discuss below.
The story itself is an obvious morality play. The children who tour the faculty are all guilty of some sort of vice of excess. Augustus Gloop is gluttonous, Violet Beauregarde is obsessed with chewing gum, Veruca Salt is materialistic, and Mike Teavee watches too much, well, TV. On the other hand, Charlie Bucket, the impoverished and goodhearted child, is rewarded for his honesty and virtue. In this way, the story is a morality play, much like other famous works, such as Everyman, a Medieval play that espoused good deeds as the only thing that lives on after you die.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory also has similarities to that towering epic of Medieval poetry, Dante's Divine Comedy. In that work, specifically Inferno, sinners dwell in Hell, embodying their sins with contrapassos, punishments that act out the offense. The Lustful are blown about in violent winds, just as they allowed themselves to be blown around by passions; those who bred Schism and Discord are cut apart by blades, just as they cut apart society; and so on.
The vice-ridden children are unable to resist temptations in Wonka's factory that lead them to expose their latent flaws. Augustus Gloop, who cannot stop swallowing food, is swallowed up by chocolate.
Violet literally becomes the bubblegum she is chewing.
Only Charlie emerges from the journey unscathed. The fact that the story is a journey from spot to spot in the factory, each with its own lesson to impart, resembles not only Dante's journey through the levels of the tripartite Medieval Christian afterlife, but also some other religious works. In the Buddhist tradition, the Gandavyuha Sutra (just one chapter of the longer Avatamsaka Sutra) describes the disciple Sudhana's journey from teacher to teacher, learning one lesson at a time as he approaches awakening.
Aside from the larger story, the character of Willy Wonka invites even more scrutiny. There is a reason why Gene Wilder succeeds in bringing Wonka to life where Johnny Depp failed: Wonka is both whimsical and sinister. He is a jester-like, trickster-like chastiser of wrongs as much as a rewarder of virtue. He rests on the border of dream and nightmare. Wilder captures this paradox while Depp just comes across as an emotionally-stunted eccentric. A figure that tests and punishes children has to have a touch of madness to him, and even revel in it. To see what I mean, check out how he delights in tormenting his guests during the boat trip scene:
Willy Wonka's costume also communicates his dangerous stature, especially, oddly enough, his trademark hat.
Far from standing for refinement or urbaneness, as one would suppose with a top-hat or bowler hat, such headwear often signifies its opposite, namely the intention to undermine the prevalent social order. Think of Baron Samedi of Vodoun (discussed in an earlier blog).
Or Alex from A Clockwork Orange.
How top- and bowler hats became signifiers for rebellion and madness is not clear, although one promising hypothesis deals with "erethism," a nervous system disorder that can be caused by repeated exposure to mercury. Erethism is sometimes known colloquially as "mad hatter's disease" as those who worked with hats back in the day used mercury to attach the felt.
Wonka is also set apart by his diminutive, orange-skinned, green-haired minions, the Oompa Loompas. They are curious creatures who do not fit into any set classification. They work for Wonka, do his bidding, and take turns announcing the moral failures of each respective child after he or she has been revealed as a glutton, television addict, and so on.
The Hindu god Shiva, also a category-breaker and challenger of the social status-quo, has a band of small-statured followers (called ganas) who form his entourage.
Mara in Buddhism also has an army of misshapen beasts, primarily seen when he attacks Gautama at Bodh-Gaya. Here they are in a carving on a railing at the Sanchi Stupa in central India.
In at least one instance, Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, the Batman villain the Joker employs tiny, violent creatures to do his evil will, as seen in the excerpt from the comic below.
If you look in the bottom lower right of the image above, you'll see the Joker himself, wearing a purple suit, a hat, and holding a cane. To make the resemblance obvious, here again is Willy Wonka.
What all the foregoing comparisons reveal is that Willy Wonka does not function as a benevolent children's character, but inhabits a space closer to the category-breaking trickster figures of religion and mythology who dish out pain and punishment far more than rewards. He is an embodiment of Victor Turner's concept of "liminality," also called "anti-structure." Turner used those terms to describe how societies used ritual to move individuals through different life stages. Adolescents, for instance, exist in a liminal (i.e., uncategorized) state of not-child but not-adult, and are thus ritually moved to adulthood by coming of age ceremonies. The psychedelic world of the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa Loompas, and Wonka himself (in dress and behavior) exemplify the uncategorized nature of liminal anti-structure.
The book and the movie(s) follow Turner's ritual structure. In the beginning, the world is the inverse of what we would hope for: the bad people are prosperous (the "naughty" children) and the good (Charlie and his family) are poor. We enter the Chocolate Factory, the liminal space, and chaos reigns and the usual rules are suspended, allowing for unconventional means to punish vices of excess and affirm virtue, in the form of Charlie Bucket. Leaving Wonka's Factory, the world is now ordered much closer to our moral expectations. Wonka's anti-structure has actually been invoked to defend social structure: Madness has been employed in the service of sanity, and our guide has been Willy Wonka.
Such is my reading of the character and the story. What are your thoughts? Feel free to share.
Until the next time, take care.
