Move over, Michael Moore. There’s a more subversive director in town, and his name is…
Tim Burton.
I don’t care what anybody else says. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory isn’t about candy. Nor about cute woobies who look like pirates. Nor, ultimately, about children (though, hey, I appreciate Dahl’s unvarnished take on childhood as much as anyone, and I dearly loved the Beauregarde-Salt moment and wish it had been followed up on).
Er, if you don’t want to know what this movie is about, you probably want to stop reading this post now.
Right. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? The Tim Burton movie? Is about labor, abuse thereof.
I don’t need to do a close-reading on the Bucket establishment and how labor exploitation made it the way it is; that’s clear enough. (I’m definitely amused by the toothpaste factory hiring Mr. Bucket back at an advanced salary to fix a machine that did the work Mr. Bucket used to do at a crap salary. Heh. Nice hit at automation and computers. Perhaps straight from the book, too; I honestly don’t recall.)
Nor I don’t need to comment on Mr. Salt’s legions of low-paid pink-clad panopticonned women, neither.
Of course the Oompa-Loompas don’t exist; Mr. Teavee is quite right about that. They can’t exist. They’re the perfect worker. They’re all identical, so none of the friction caused by clashing egos and ladder-climbing and all that jazz. They live on a byproduct of the factory, so they’re cheap. They’ve been rescued from (what they considered to be) squalor, so they’re infinitely loyal. They’ll do whatever Wonka wants, from rowing galleys (wow, that was just… blatant) to arranging to have his guests offed in sundry unpleasant ways while singing and dancing to spare him the blame. And they don’t have to sign consent forms to be used as experimental subjects.
Not to mention that they’re foreign. Outsourcing, anyone? Mm-hm.
And then there’s the squirrels. Highly-trained, my fanny—what squirrel needs to be trained to open nuts? Wonka is simply taking advantage, binding the mouths of the kine and so forth. Where else is a squirrel going to work?
As for young Charlie (spoilers ho!), he is faced with the same choice tons of American workers face: your job, or your family?
You can watch the whole movie this way, and in fact I recommend it.
I knew this reading was something the crew intended when the camera got close on a pair of scrapbook pages near the end of the movie. You’ll know ’em when you see ’em, yep yep.
The odd thing is, I think Dahl would have loathed this reading, and loathed the movie because of it. But it works beautifully. I tip my hat to Burton and August. Love a good bit of subversion, I do.