Review: "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"

 - The text of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory refers to pictures, and the audiobook follows suit even though there’s manifestly nothing to look at. I went downstairs and checked two editions of the book in our collection. The famous Quentin Blake ones aren’t even standard, so this is a bit odd. (I wonder if the Blake was original?) 

- The reader really performs this text, and there are even sound effects. Normally I have some qualms about reader choices inflecting my view of a book, but feels appropriate for a child-focused production. Yet for as big as the actor goes, he will not sing the Oompah Loompahs’ songs at all. He just oddly—says them. Won’t even chant. It’s a bit weird.

- Wonka dismissed all his workers, and the Buckets, who live quite near the factory, are poor as hell. Did Wonka destroy the local economy in his effort to prevent sabotage with imported Oompah Loompahs?

- Interesting that the British mid-century imagination drifts to an Indian prince of fabulous wealth asking for a chocolate palace. The UK had just gotten through strip-mining a huge chunk of the sub-continent’s material wealth, and any such monarch must have of necessity been some client king of the UK’s, but go off.

- Wonka’s wanting an heir is like when an ascended cultivator’s inheritance requires one; I guess you can level up in the chocolate dao.

- “All of them will be given enough chocolates and sweets to last for the rest of their lives—“ Which may be very short, honestly.

- Dahl hits you with such great chapter titles as, ‘The Family Begins to Starve’.

- Here we are in 1964 with a chunky German child. Dahl is way more baseline resentful of fat people existing than he is lingeringly ill at ease with the memory of World War II.

- All the Buckets moan about ‘what a terrible child’ Augustus Gloop is, when all they know about this boy is that he’s fat, can afford to eat, and that his mom is relaxed about it. She thinks he eats because he needs nourishment, and that eating’s a better than hobby than stirring up trouble. When the Buckets start to model your reaction to Augustus and his mom, really they’ve yet to do anything reprehensible.

- Children’s Britlit is generally very wedded to fatphobia. I love Dianna Wynne Jones, but she can also be vicious about it

- But then the chubby shopkeeper is a nice man, so we’re not dealing with unadulterated hatefulness.

- Why don’t two people come with Charlie? They want to, and the invitation allows for it. Odd.

- A great thing about both film adaptations is that they think Wonka is a freak. He is a freak: we should say it.

- “I am preparing other surprises—in your wildest dreams, you could not imagine that such things would happen to you.” Right on the ticket, Wonka levels with us, announcing that this is Annihilation for kids. You’re going to die, and how will truly surprise you!

- Chapter 21: “Goodbye, Violet”—he’s not even hiding his desire to kill again, on my life.

- The Oompah Loompahs—smuggled over in boxes with holes, with no secure immigration status—are high-key colonial in a kind of slippery way. Wonka’s ‘saves them’ from their subsistence life of misery with his offer. They can live and work in his factory (and never leave it) in exchange for cacao beans. They keep getting called ‘doll-sized’. I know we all know it’s weird, but it is: weird. Wonka also uses them as test subjects, and has made 20 Oompah Loompahs into blueberries before Violet Beauregard is punished for the vast crime of… gum chewing. 

- Violet’s problem isn’t even being a brat—she’s a bit of one, but the book doesn’t flag that at all. It’s literally just—her fixation on chewing gum. Dahl has such “Shockheaded Peter” energy.

- Mike Teevee has decent questions, like “if you think gum is so disgusting, why do you make it?”. Wonka ignores him and thinks him a terrible child, but that’s manifestly fair.

- This book has an intensely punitive, Christian moral framework, but it’s been totally divorced from those substantiating logics. We’re thus just left with floating judgement. ‘Don’t be spoiled—or fat—or… chew gum.’ It’s as if mildly annoying fussy people who ought to mind their own business is equal to the active moral crime of Veruca Salt’s powerful capitalist entitlement, or the threat that underlies Mike TeeVee’s fascination with violence.

- It’s quite important to two of these kids to be the first person ever to do something. It feels like ‘man on the moon’ mania.

- The Mike TeeVee finale devolves into a smug, desperate plea to buy books and sustain the children’s publishing industry that even I, a vast nerd, find intolerably annoying.

- Honestly Charlie is a little sociopath, totally unaffected by the hunger games deaths of his peers. Just still happy to be here, enjoying the spectacle! His grandfather is seemingly not much more affected than he is. 

- I didn’t realise the question regarding Charlie’s morality, and that little hitch in the plot, was film-exclusive. 

- In the moral world of this book, the Good Child trusts whatever candy-coated Tony Stark does, even if it seems unsafe or runs counter to what the child understands about science or reason more generally. This character is absolutely Elon Musk’s ‘what I think I do’ meme square.

- Ultimately, the smug grossness of Wrinkle in Time’s Calvinist nerd elite is no less present here, really. What sustains this book in the face of Dahl’s relentless hatefulness and patent insufferability is the visuality and vigour of its imaginative conceit. I know a lot of the violence is on an unreal register (and I’m not seriously blaming Wonka for economic crimes). I loved James and the Giant Peach and Matilda as a kid. I’m entering into the book on its terms, and Dahl still peeks around the pages as a great force of wanker-energy. What are these children being tortured-good for, Dahl’s under-justified, conservative, prim sensibilities? What are these fantasies of greater parental control in aid of? 

- Tragically, I now have 2.7k of notes for a quick, cracky SVSSS fusion AU.