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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 July 15, 2005 1:29 PM under Stuff To Buy

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Posted by: Reetha at March 27, 2006 5:37 AM

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