We Are Family

Under normal circumstances, this would be a “Snap Movie Apostrophe,” but there’s something about the process I underwent in order to see Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that I feel would get lost in the overly stylised snap apostrophe form.

I’d never read the source material before getting an IM inviting me to a viewing of the movie in a private theater in an apartment building. I knew I didn’t want to see the movie without reading the book, so I found 90 minutes that were free, and I drank it down. The book infuriated me for obvious reasons: Wonka is never even close to criticised for his awful labor policies, and the critiques of class really aren’t. They’re critiques of ancillary products of class power (arrogance, selfishness, etc.). Veruca Salt isn’t bad since she’s rich or since her father exploits his workers to get her a ticket. She’s bad since she’s a whiny brat. I wouldn’t expect Dahl to have marked an allegiance between poor-ass Charlie and the Oompa Loompas and/or the Salt peanut sorters, but he avoids bridging those gaps at his peril. He ends up with the class mobility of one—where Charlie, as a result of his inborn virtue, somehow not stifled after years of class oppression, manages to advance into the bourgeoisie. Yes, this is the plot of 8 Mile.

But Burton’s movie, by adding what it has, has managed to completely rework the politics of Dahl’s novel, leaving us, I wonder, with perhaps a document that is more pernicious.

The family structure has long been a tool of normativisation, of enforcing hegemony, of stifling dissent. The myth of the nuclear family is stretched out to be an allegory of the nation, as well as a justification of class stratification. Just as a family has a putative head, the father, so must society have a ruling élite. Just as a family has misbehaving immature children, so does society have people who are culturally backward, due to the unfortunate realities of their racial makeup. This power of the family, to serve as this always present allegory, relies on the myth of the fixity and permanence of the nuclear family form. If the nuclear family has a genealogy, in Foucault’s sense, then we can’t use it as an Ideal Form to explain away other uncomfortable features of our society.

Family takes on an importance in the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that is nowhere as present in the novel. Perhaps a lot of the added script Burton drew from the sequel; I don’t know. But he made four vital changes to the plot of the story that re-worked and centralised the importance of family.

1. The entire Wonka backstory is provided. Wonka had Saruman as his dentist father, who refused to let the child eat any candy and left his head in retainers through his youth. Even before we get the flashbacks, Wonka is tripping up in his tour whenever he has to say the word “parents.” Whereas the original Wonka seems to be a slightly whimsical magician with a carrot and stick, Burton’s Wonka is a psychological disaster.

2. Instead of having each child bring two parents, Burton has each child only bring one. This makes better movie sense, but it also shatters the family form within the factory. Wonka, without a family of his own, refuses to allow any families into the factory.

3. Upon being offered the factory, as Wonka’s protégé, Charlie refuses it, should that mean that he is separated from his own family. That the novel and movie both enact crises of reproduction is obvious from a mile away (the factory is the womb that is constantly pregnant, but birthing nought but chocolate), but the movie provides an edge on it by making it clear that Charlie is to be Wonka’s heir at the cost of abandoning his biological family.

4. Charlie’s grandfather is no longer just an expert on Wonka lore, but is now actually a former employee, thereby connecting the poverty of the Buckets with the awful labor practices of Wonka.

Of these, it is the fourth point that we see first in the movie, and it totally confused me. By making the connection along the factory, the movie highlights the economic disaster being laid off by management is. The book is silent on why the Buckets are dirt poor. The movie never blames Wonka, but it suggests it. The family’s continued reverence of the lord of the manor down the street underscores this class dynamic—the Buckets are serfs who have fallen out of favor. Bucket père works in a competing industry (tooth care instead of tooth decay), and suffers the punishment of not having a collective bargaining agreement there, too.

Burton’s visual of the factory workers leaving their job is so wrenching, I felt, that it needed justification—and the justification came in making Wonka insane. Only the insane would layoff an entire factory, Burton suggests.

Of the Oompa Loompas, both much and little can be said. Dahl’s treatment of them is offensive—little jungle people whom Wonka lures to work in his factory for merely food—but the CGI effects of the same actor as every Oompa Loompa is perhaps more offensive. The former is a relic of overt racism. The latter is well-hidden evidence of class antagonism. Wonka’s casual attitude with his staff in the novel is already marked—he tests stuff on them, etc.—but now he can test without conscience; they are all the same and are mechanical reproductions of each other. In fact, Wonka’s staff of carbon copies is a gesture to the crisis of reproduction in a very lazy and simplified Benjaminian sense: the Oompa Loompas are devoid of aura, and Wonka needs an heir with aura. Why couldn’t he just leave the factory to his workers?

So again Burton has changed a plot point that seems to be good (take the racism out!) but converts it into something that feels more crushing (all factory workers are inherently replaceable and have no coherent individual souls).

But we still get the crutch of Wonka’s insanity via his frigid father. And that’s how the movie ends: Wonka reconciles and invites the Buckets to be his family. Now that Willy feels the love of a family, the movie suggests, he will no longer exploit his workers, terrorise children, or be trapped in a solipsistic loop of an unexitable womb. He is free to leave the womb of the factory now (see with what glee he presses the button on the elevator that launches the contraption out; that is Wonka’s rebirth as a functioning member of society as well as Charlie’s birth as the son of Wonka).

The flipside, then, is this: only the insane (or those without loving families) exploit their workers.

That’s Burton’s ultimate message, sadly. The disaster of economic exploitation, he suggests, is a result of unloving families. If the family unit was understood better and considered as more important, then class distinctions would remain, but they wouldn’t be as dire.

To call “bullshit” on that is to waste air.

To be fair, Burton does gesture to a different way out, and that’s by noting that Bucket does not live in a nuclear family. Rather, he lives in the extended family that, as my old roommate Tim says, is an anathema to white people in the suburbs. No one wants grandma movin’ in, much less all the grandparents. And the argument could go that the family form being idealised here is a wider, broader form that becomes more inclusive. I don’t buy it, though. It still presents the focal center of a family, and that means that it reëmphasises the importance of heterosexuality and reproduction (does this mean that part of Wonka’s crisis of reproduction could be a response to the fact that he feels pressured to reproduce but inhabits a sexuality that inhibits reproduction? Maybe; Depp didn’t play Wonka as gay as I thought he would, settling more for an eerie, illegible sexuality more in the Michael Jackson vein, but MJ has allegedly reproduced multiple times. Furthermore, the TV glasses and white room call to mind both Warhol and the guests in Rocky Horror Picture Show—two things with illegible sexualities and the latter with its own crises of reproduction on numerous levels).

So as long as the family remains the redeeming force of the film, it carries with it the technologies of exploitation that the idealised family form justifies. Does this mean that the movie leads us to a different place than the book? I don’t think so. It just takes a far cleverer path. This could possibly be a feature of most of Burton’s work—everything I can think of takes a creepy path to end up, basically, with a very safe moral, which could be something like: “families are the most important social structure, and it’s important to stop their erosion no matter what.” That’s a politics I can’t get behind, no matter what possibly worse things it might clean up on its way to dominance.