Do you remember going to movies as a kid, expecting colorful, fun adventures; a gripping, if not especially meaningful story? And do you recall those films whose lulls in exciting action, featuring longwinded dialogue (by my youngest standards, that meant all dialogue besides the phrases “look out!” or “we’re running out of time”) that left you confused, or bored, or possibly disturbed? Some stories, books or films, deposited ideas that I failed to grasp when I was young, but they left residues that my mind later absorbed, reorganized, and therefore put to different uses. Like…
I’ll eschew a Jungian pretense, a scholarly attempt to know the cross-cultural and time immemorial derivatives of modern storytelling. If Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the first ever film my parents took me to see (that I recall) is based upon, or is meant to parallel some Biblical or otherwise mythical antecedent, I was and still am ignorant of such information. When I saw the film when I was four, or maybe five, circa 1972 or 73’, I came away from the experience, like many other children I think, delighted by the color and mischief of the story. The rainbow images were childlike psychedelia, and an apt reflection of the candy ephemera I and most kids seem to fall in love with. The characters and story of Willy Wonka seemed fun and mildly comic; I was inclined to smile, laugh or even squeal at the playful action. At the same time, however, I recall feeling oddly disoriented by the menacing character that was Willy Wonka, and vaguely concerned for the sympathetic hero, the “honest” Charlie Bucket.
The morality aspect was not lost on me, even as a four or five-year-old. I was, after all, supposed to be downloading guilt around about this time, so a timeless cautionary tale about honesty or greed was actually, uh, well-timed, developmentally speaking. I recall the theme of gluttony being most impactful at the time. This may have been because I was at a movie theater, where candy snacks will have been (as they are still), with no sense of irony, sold in oversized portions to parents and children. I may have been more conscious, via experience, of greed and gluttony issues. Lying or treachery versus faith and honesty were likely not yet my cutting edge concerns. Maybe for me life was more about what I could do, when I could do it; when it was time to play, to stop playing; when is it time to notice too much of a good thing. The theme of patrimony, of passing down a legacy—notions of continuity and mortality—to a worthy heir, was lost on me.
It isn’t today, of course, but as I watched Willy Wonka recently over the holidays (it somehow seems an appropriate Holiday feature), I considered that the themes that resonated with my five-year-old self, that were implicitly deposited then, and which lingered thereafter, are still the ones that resonate most today. An addict is someone who is drawn by a figurative candy store; is seduced by an anticipation of pleasures: if not color or adventure, then of joyful affiliation, like-mindedness and play. The consequences of eating too much, of being self-centered, entitled or arrogant, are observable, but more so by onlookers, not the actors, save for a hero, the one survivor who will be redeemed, and rewarded with a happy ending. As a kid, I didn’t fully understand Charlie Bucket’s happy ending—that piece about inheriting the kingdom, whatever that was about. I just thought he’d been rewarded for not being too greedy. I might have looked at my mother to see if she were directing my attention, hoping I’d get this message, and thus I’d pick up my empty wrappers and not ask for more.
When people taste freedom for the first time, or for the first time in a while (going off to college, life after a separation), there is a sense of loss, one that may be felt palpably or tacitly, like the original losses. Buried. Not Buried. This is when the candy store opens its doors.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 