Wonka & the Myth of Meritocracy
Wiki Commons: Marcus Quigmire from Florida, USA
The prequel to the famous Roald Dahl story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is about the titular Wonka (played by Timothée Chalamet) as he pursues his dream of being the world's best chocolatier, specifically by owning a store at the prestigious Galeries Gourme. Starting at the bottom, Wonka teams up with a ragtag group of outcasts to defeat the bigwigs who control the current chocolate industry.
From its special effects to its silly characters, this movie was fun to watch. The feats Wonka manages to achieve are downright impossible and yet feel emotionally real. Wonka is a fantasy where our aspiring chocolatier uses mythical ingredients such as bottled weather to make his candy. The movie is not meant to be practical, so it's perfectly fine for it to be impossible: that's the whole point.
Yet all narratives are trying to say something, even if they don't have the best execution or make unintended messages in the process, and part of our job as viewers is to imbue and debate meaning from the works we see. It's worth asking ourselves what this fun movie was trying to say. Not everything was sunshine and everlasting gobstoppers. When we examine the emotional core of this movie, we come across some interesting messaging that seems to uplift the very businessmen it initially lampoons.
The making of an entrepreneur
From a marketing standpoint, it would have been challenging in an age of rampant wealth inequality to tell a story that glorifies a wealthy entrepreneur without ruffling a few feathers. A lot of people are tired of seeing billionaires justifying their fortunes. If this had been a story about an upper-class or even a middle-class person building his financial empire, I am not sure that the child-like awe and whimsy of Wonka would still be there.
So Wonka smartly reworks the source material to add a tragic backstory, where none had existed in the books, to tell a classic "rags-to-riches" tale before Wonka was rich and powerful (the only stories about wealthy people Americans tend to like). Wonka now grew up poor, with only a single mother (Sally Hawkins) to raise him. He had to work hard in his young adulthood as a cook on a freighter ship to both learn how to make chocolate and gather all of his mystical ingredients. He is a hustler of sorts who has put in his time and is now branching out on his own.
On the one hand, the film parodies the hustle culture that Wonka ascribes to. The opening song literally refers to bootstrapping ("Gotta drag myself up by my one good bootlace"), a reference to the impossible feat of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. A phrase that has since been adopted in earnest by aspiring entrepreneurs. Wonka learns almost right away that this viewpoint of going at it alone is naive. He is quickly taken advantage of, losing all of his savings by the end of this initial song.
Throughout the movie, his efforts are disrupted by corrupt cops, politicians, and unscrupulous businesspeople. There is even a running bit where one of the main antagonists, Felix Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton), gags whenever he hears the word "poor." The villains of this movie are out-of-touch rich people and their aspirants, whom we are supposed to despise (and rightfully so, as they are awful).
Wonka, conversely, cares for the "poor." He charges a fair rate so that even lower-class people can afford his candy, and he ends up redistributing stolen chocolate to the community. He is a nice person, a good capitalist who is trying to help who he can.
However, it bears stressing that Wonka never stops being a hustler — in fact, his core demeanor and motivations never change. Even during his lowest point, he is still able to pour chocolate out of his hat and create an automatic laundry machine using dog-powered labor. It's not that he doesn't have barriers — he has plenty — but he's no longer hustling alone. He partners with a team of outcasts, primarily the orphan girl Noodle (Calah Lane), and there is nothing that he and his compatriots can't achieve with a little hard work. The hustle archetype has not been challenged so much as expanded. You can't conquer the marketplace alone, the movie seems to suggest, you need a team.
With Wonka, we see someone who builds his life around laws and contracts. He isn't willing to steal, even when at his lowest, and puts all his efforts into honoring his agreements, not just with his business partners but with everyone. He is honorable to a fault. Wonka is ultimately manipulated into leaving town due to a deal he establishes with the movie's villains in exchange for his business partners being able to get out of a bad contract. It's a deal Wonka would have honored if not for the villains breaking it first.
It's honoring a contract that ultimately saves Wonka's life. He and Noodle find themselves drowning in chocolate via a James Bondesque death trap devised by the devilish Arthur Slugworth (Paterson Joseph). Before meeting his fate, Wonka requests that these villains bring a container of chocolate to an oompa-loompa named Lofty (Hugh Grant), with whom Wonka has been feuding. This action would fulfill a debt Wonka owes. It's his only request — a feat that compels the oompa-loompa Lofty to rescue the trapped Wonka and Noodle.
One of the things that makes Wonka such a good guy is that he honors his contracts while the baddies break them. These corrupt businessmen have not only watered down their chocolate, lying to all of their customers in the process, but have used that excess chocolate to bribe the local chief of police so that they can shut down any and all competition.
They are nasty, unscrupulous, cutthroat individuals, and it's this perspective that leads to their downfall. The oompa-loompa overhears their decision not to deliver Wonka's chocolates to him (these villains eat them instead), and Lofty decides to rescue Wonka, saving our protagonist's life and sealing our villain's fates. Wonka promptly exposes the trios' corruption, as well as the crooked chief of police (Keegan-Michael Key), and we see the system immediately work for the young entrepreneur. The police act on the information and arrest the film's villains promptly.
With the barriers of corruption removed, the exceptional Wonka is able to rise to the top of the chocolate-making world — a nostalgic "Pure Imagination" sung as the viewer sees a montage of his factory rising to the surface: the origin story complete without any complications that would place our capitalist in a negative light.
A bittersweet conclusion
Wonka was, again, a delightful movie. It had a lot of good humor in it, and the special effects really do make you feel like you have been transported to a world where "magic is real" (also, side note, Hugh Grant's oompa-loompa character was the highlight of the entire movie for me).
Yet, despite making a few jabs at detached rich people and bootstrapping, it does not appear to be a text criticizing hustle culture as much as it criticizes people who do not honor the rules of the marketplace. What unfolds is a morality play where the hero is someone who respects the law (at least toward non-rulebreakers) and always honors his debts, while the villains are lecherous cheats who are not playing by "the rules." People who eventually are removed — a small hiccup on the way to a fairer, more equitable marketplace.
It's a nice fantasy, and that is all Wonka ever promised to be anyway. However, as we navigate a society where the Arthur Slugworths of the world are not just a barrier to the marketplace but its architects, we must reflect on how far from reality this fantasy is.