ThatKidInTheCorner

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July 15, 2005

Wonka Industries, Banglore

How Willy Wonka might evolve in a post-industrial world

That Roald Dahl's Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (1964) continues to enchant children some 41 years after its initial publication is certainly a testament to both the timelessness of the book's themes as well as the charm of its prose. There's magic in those pages, and something about this parable packaged in a fantastickal romp (be a good little boy and maybe you too will win a candy factory!) genuinely resonates with young children. For a dude from the 60s, Willy Wonka is still pretty cool.

Of course, while the core themes of the story continue to enchant young readers, a more detached examination of the text clearly demonstrates the obsolescence of most of the elements of the narrative. Even if the reader is not inclined to contextualize a children's fantasy story in a strict geopolitical and/ or economic framework, it is difficult to ignore the obvious influence of the author's background and as well as the political and business climate of the time. For Roald Dahl, as a consummate twentieth-century citizen of the West (and a descendent of Victorian England), there really was no better way to structure such a parable (mysterious factory owner plus poor child who can't even afford a single candy bar) -- those were simply the tropes that would be most familiar to a 1960s audience in England.

Put another way, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory is a socialist allegory for an industrial age. That is, Willy Wonka is the consummate capitalist/ industrialist. He owns a vertically intergrated confections manufacturer and employs an army of devoted laborers from the developing world (whom he tells us he has "saved" from far worse fates in their native Loompaland, where they were apparently tree-dwellers) to pump out various product lines from his smoke-spewing factory. As the sole owner of the capital in question (the privately held Wonka Industries), Mr. Wonka has no responsibilities to any board and can thus indulge his own delusional fantasies in factory construction (no public company would tolerate the chocolate room -- a completely gratuitous cost center if there ever was one), public relations (Wonka does not communicate with the public and has no investors to speak of) and consumer promotions (the Golden Ticket contest).

Enter proletarian Charlie, who lives in a one-room shack with his mother and four bedridden grandparents. Both Mom and Charlie labor day and night to put food on the table for their extended working-class family: cabbage soup most nights, unless Charlie splurges for a loaf of bread. Charlie has mostly resigned himself to a long life of unrelenting physical labor (he certainly isn't a dazzling student), at least until he is lured into the cruel clutches of Mr. Wonka via a manipulative large-scale consumer promotion. By virtue of his Golden Ticket, Charlie has at least guaranteed himself sustenance for the forseeable future (via the alleged "Lifetime Supply of Chocolate"), but once he enters the Wonka factory, it is clear that this prize will come with a price.

Inside the chocolate factory, proletarian Charlie (along with the other winners) exist only on the whims of the industrialist Mr. Wonka, whose ownership of the means of production has granted him almost unlimited power. Drunk on this power, he all but executes four children for their character flaws (as interpreted through the worldview and values of a man who has lived surrounded by no one but his toadying indentured servant employees for the past X years) before deciding that Charlie has "won" the prize -- Charlie will be delivered from his life of proletarian hardship and will enter the class of industrialists who actually possess capital and the means of production. One might be inclined to argue that it is Charlie's big heart and solid value system that earn him this prize (and thus the book becomes a parable for children to be generous, honest and kind, because they just might get a candy factory out of it!), but really, aren't all values extremely culturally biased and subjective? That is, what really earns Charlie the factory is that he is the boy that the older single male factory owner liked best. And make no mistake about it: Charlie didn't actually earn the factory, it was a gift. That is, without a violent revolution, the only way the proletariat could hope to escape their miserable circumstances is via the whimsical largesse of powerful capitalists.

Such an interpretation certainly made sense for its time. In the midst of the Cold War, Europe's governments were dealing with the tail end of industrialization and increasingly socialist public policies designed to provide a safety net for their post-War populations. So of course we got a working-class hero triumphing in a story involving a factory. But a lot of time has passed since 1964: a lot less Cold War and industrial production in the West, a lot more globalization and mobile phones. What might be a more appropriate tale for a post-industrial world where these socialist tropes no longer match the realities of the global economy?

Let's have a go.

Willy Wonka would head a global technology and entertainment empire based in some trendy dotcommie retreat in the the United States (think Skywalker Ranch). His "factory" wouldn't be a factory at all, but rather a sprawling corporate campus/ research center that produced virtual reality and special effects for movies, video games, amusement parks, and other pop entertainment distribution channels. He would be a master illusionist, able to craft entire imaginary worlds inside his crazy corporate campus.

Of course, given the cost pressures inherent in managing any large enterprise, he would have long since outsourced significant parts of his back-office operations (accounting, customer support, and many elements of software design and development) to various data processing centers in southeast Asia. Additionally, he would use various Chinese and Taiwanese contract manufacturers for the actual production of Wonka-branded hardware items -- it's really the only way to stay competitive.

Willy Wonka himself would maintain a fondness for purple, but he would definitely wear jeans to the office and insist that his employees address him by his first name.

Instead of Golden Tickets hidden in chocolate bars, Wonka's massive consumer promotion would involve hidden codes scattered on secret web sites around the Internet, and the first five people to find the codes (and enter them on the mini-site created for the project by Mr. Wonka's online promotions firm, with creative direction from the ad and design firm that handles his corporate branding and identity work) would earn a trip to his main corporate campus and have a chance to help create an entire fantasy world (to be embedded in the game or film of their choice) of their very own. Essentially, all of the vast resources of the Wonka corporation would be devoted to a single child's imagination -- the ultimate personlization experience.

The five children would still be drawn from around the globe, but from distinctly different locales -- and an updated set of stereotypes!. Augustus Gloop would be an obese American child from Dallas who eats lots of trans-fat snack foods and has sampled every promotional Happy Meal since 1996. Violet Beauregard would be a young Chinese girl who is being groomed to take over her father's fake-purse and shoe factory outside of Shanghai and who excels at competitive exams and rhythmic gymnastics. Mike Teevee (who is apparently a video-game addict in the new film, so let's go with that) would be a champion Korean video game player who subsists on soda and snack foods and sleeps only four hours a night -- the better to perfect his online gaming skills. Veruca Salt would be a 14-year-old heiress/ tabloid mainstay from Monaco who has already appeared in an Internet sex tape and who hopes to soon move permanently to Los Angeles to launch her handbag and clothing line.

And, of course, Charlie would be a young Indian boy from a small village outside Bangalore who excels at school but whose caste will likely condemn him to a life of shoeless misery. Chalie can only dream of some day landing a job at the Wonka call-center whose razor-wire fence he can see from a hole in the side of the thatched hut where he lives with his extended family. Little does he know that his big heart and considerable programming skills will earn him a position on the Wonka board and eventually majority control of the company. The story would close with Charlie and Willy Wonka floating above northern California in Wonka's secret aviation product -- a personal anti-gravity hovercraft.

There would still be Oompa Loompas, though. You pretty much have to have the Oompa Loompas.

Posted by thatkid at 1:29 PM | Comments (1)

July 11, 2005

The Three (3) Slowest Days Of Summer

Lauding and lamenting the three slowest Sportscenter days of the year

Despite the fact that I am most certainly a regular Sportscenter viewer, I can’t remember the last time I uttered the phrase, “I really need to be home for Sportscenter tonight.” There are a lot of reasons why I (and I would guess most viewers) can be rather relaxed about not keeping our appointments with Sportscenter: the show is replayed a half dozen times after its initial broadcast, you can get all the highlights on ESPN News anyway, the Internet is a ton more efficient for checking scores, and so on. This is not destination television. You don’t need to record it or check the episode guide on the web site to keep up.

Nope, Sportscenter is filler TV. If I’m in front of a television during a Sportscenter timeslot (6-7 pm, 11pm-1am, all morning) and I’m flipping channels, Sportscenter will be in the rotation. I do not maintain a committed relationship with Sportscenter; but if we see each other at a party, there’s no reason we can’t hang out. And that’s cool. We know where we stand. I get my kicks from following Sports, and Sportcenter is a big part of that.

Which leaves me with absolutely no excuse for the fact that I’m already dreading the next three days; that is, The Three Slowest Sportscenter Days of the Year; that is, the MLB All-Star Break. Through a confluence of factors unique to these three days (and literally no others), the Major League Baseball All-Star Break is literally the slowest sports news period of the year, rendering this annual Mon-Tues-Wed trifecta the worst three days of Sportscenter on the calendar:

Batting .250 w/r/t American Pro Sports: with apologies to Major League Soccer, the PGA and pro tennis, the summer sports calendar belongs to baseball. In fact, July (between the end of the NBA season and the start of NFL training camp) is the most barren month of the sports year. If you’re looking for highlights, all you get is baseball (with a little golf and the occasional tennis or soccer moment on the weekends). Oh sure, you can try to get a fix from NBA free agency or coaching changes, a bored 90 seconds from some schlub at the Tour De France, chitchat about the British Open, or even lengthy reports in re: potential NFL training camp holdouts, but it’s all filler. And you know it.

No, No, Tell Us More About The Home Run Derby: in lieu of actual sports news and/ or highlights, nothing is more insulting than the extended coverage/ hype about the non-events like the Home Run Derby, the announcement of the All-Star Game batting orders, and this nonsense about Kenny Rogers. (Note to sports media: the only people who remotely care about this Kenny Rogers thing are the sports media. Seriously. No one else cares.)

One More Goofy Soccer Marketing Idea: if there's one TV show that America really really really gets behind, it's Monday Night Football. Major League Soccer, why not hijack this idea for summer? MLS Presents Monday Night Futbol! (At least there'd be something on tonight.)

I Can't Even Fake It With Channel 124: mid-July, ironically enough, is essentially the one month out of the year where big-time soccer really isn't being played (save for the out-of-phase leagues). Most leagues go August to May, with June and maybe the first week of July reserved for international competitions. Even the second leg of the Libertadores isn’t until Thursday. The best I can hope is a moment of Copa Oro highlights tomorrow night. I mean. Okay. It’s something. It’ll make Sportscenter. (I hope.)

Where Will Larry Brown Coach?: since I end up watching anyway, allow me to complain in advance about how the absence of actual news allows non-stories to become headlines. Thus, we have to listen to the latest rumor about Larry Brown's impending decision to maybe choose what option he might investigate over the next few weeks. I haven’t heard what Phil Jackson thinks about anything in a few weeks. Oh wait, was that Drew Rosenhaus profiled for ten minutes last night? If the hockey guys were smart, they could have hijacked this entire week with an announcement about the upcoming season this afternoon. Unfortunately, the hockey guys have long since proven the opposite. Sigh.

(I've been listening to too much sports-talk radio this past week, haven't I.)

Posted by thatkid at 7:16 PM | Comments (0)

July 5, 2005

Who G8 All The Pies?

In which I share some thoughts on proper decorum and etiquette at the Gleneagles Hotel

Over the next few days, eight of the most powerful people in the world (go ahead, call them the "G8") will gather at a resort in Scotland to parley on the great geopolitical and economic issues facing the world today. What began in the 1970s as a set of informal meetings between the leaders of the Western World has developed into one of the most highly anticipated and closely watched political events on the planet. The protestors have been in Scotland since before the weekend, looking for ways to "clash" with police and security personnel whilst alerting the world (or at least the TV cameras poised to cover said clashes) to the importance of their chosen causes. Meanwhile, our brothers and sisters in the entertainment community organized a bunch of concerts to try to cure poverty in Africa. And the blathermonkeys will now have something to talk about that isn't Iraq (boring), Michael Jackson (mercifully over), or the Supreme Court (too many details).

Which is all well and good. We should all play close attention to the events of the next few days -- this is all terribly important stuff. At the same time, my big response when I first heard mention of this summer's G8 meeting was, "Wait, they're having it where?" That is, it turns out a few years back that I had the unique and quite serendipitous pleasure of spending a couple days at the Gleneagles Hotel, site of this year's conference. Without naming names or giving too much away, I visited said hotel because my employer at the time had just been sold off by its parent company. Said parent company also owned said hotel and agreed to let us have a little soiree on the premises as a thanks-for-playing-now-get-the-hell-out parting gift. The whole thing was a win-win: it didn't cost said parent company too too much, and we all thought it was pretty impressive.

Appropriately enough, we trashed the place. Classy.

While ThatKidInTheCorner certainly has opinions about many of the issues to be discussed at the coming conference (Did Dubya actually admit that maybe something is fishy with the climate? Can we really expect poor developing nations to pay back piles of loans that were mostly stolen by corrupt officials? At the same time, can we trust that our aid dollars are working without transparent, accountable and stable local partners in the developing world?), on these questions I shall defer to the blathermonkeys. In the meantime, I'd like to offer just a few tips on how to properly rawk out at Gleneagles:

Get A Caddy And A Spotter And A Bright Orange Ball: man, was the round of golf I got to play at Gleneagles ever wasted on me. I mean, I'm not very good at golf to start with, but this was one of those tricky pseudo-links courses where if you don't hit the fairway, you've essentially lost your ball. Right. I lost more than a few balls. Mercifully, the other folks that played that day weren't very good either, so mostly we had a pretty good time of it hoofing around the course and whacking balls out into the Scottish sunset. All things considered, I still think it was a better idea than the ATVing or horseback riding (the other entertainment options).

Perhaps Something With DDT Will Suffice: my other big memory from the round of golf was that July must be the month for lovers in Scotland (if you're a mosquito). I guess it only gets warm for a month or so out of the year, and the bugs don't have much time to mate. Or something. All I remember was that it was kind of swampy and there were insects everywhere. And they couldn't help me find my errant golf balls either.

If You're Going To Wander Around Half-Naked and Blind Drunk, Try To Be Discreet About It: so "apparently" one of my coworkers had a few too many lemonades and was sent to bed early. She "apparently" was later found wandering the halls of the hotel wearing only half of her underwear (and not the half you'd expect) by a colleague. Generally speaking, this is the sort of thing you'll want to keep relatively quiet, what with it being a work-related event and all. Not so much. By 11:30 the next morning the entire company knew. Sigh. Not so impressive (but, then again, other cultures aren't as uptight as we Americans about this sort of thing...or something like that.)

That Potted Plant Is Not A Urinal: in addition to the alleged nekkid sleepwalking incident, there was "apparently" an incident involving someone urinating into a potted plant as well as the theft of laundry that some of the hotel's other guests had left outside their door. Again, or something like that. I didn't know any of this had happened (I was jetlagged out of my brain as I had come in from Asia for this), but "apparently" it made the London tabloids two days later. Better not let Dubya have wine with dinner!

If You Had To Pick One: I've been on semi-vacation for the past week or so (as well as the coming month!), so I didn't get a chance to weigh in on the whole Vladimir Putin Super Bowl Ring thing. Firstly, let us all agree that is pretty awesome, the sort of real-world equivalent of that scene in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta disdainfully addresses Bruce Willis as "Punchy": you might think that being a boxer makes you pretty tough, but I kill people for a living. Same thing here: you might think it's pretty impressive to win three Super Bowls in four years, but I'm in charge of the world's largest kleptocracy -- if I want your ring, I'll take it, and you won't say a word about it. Secondly, said incident allows me to trot out my favorite line in re: Putin versus the rest of the G8. That is, take a gander at a photo of the G8 leaders and ask yourself, "Which of these dudes is most likely to have killed a man with his bare hands?" Right. That's why Bob Kraft said it was a gift.

Coming Soon...well not a ton, since I'm going to only be sporadically online over the next couple weeks. Still, I have some longer things lined up, as well as some delicious old chestnuts that I unearthed during my move out of my apartment last week. The best way to stay in touch here is, as always, through the wonders of RSS.

Posted by thatkid at 4:28 PM | Comments (0)