Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

directed by Mel Stuart

Emma Ben Ayoun 

You’re not supposed to hate autumn in New York. I live in Los Angeles now; last year, a friend and I went to see the Zoe Leonard exhibit at MOCA. Leonard is probably most famous for her “i want a dyke for president” piece but I love her collection work: dozens of teal suitcases lined up in a row, careful stacks of the same old postcards from Niagara Falls, photographs taken in the same spot on a hundred different days. One set of photographs, in particular, struck me immediately, in its neat rows and columns on the gallery wall: a brick building, A/C units in the windows, the powdery, faint silhouettes of birds drifting off the roof like smoke. They are taken in the dim glare of early morning or late afternoon. It’s clear, just from the light, that it’s cold out.

The photos looked to me, the moment I saw them, exactly like Queens, where I grew up, in the supposedly magical months of September and October, which in my memory are not golden and crisp but instead mostly grey, pale, as if someone in the sky forgot to turn all the lights on, dark brick and beige aluminum siding, treeless fluorescent boulevards, the overpass creaking above. It’s my least favorite time of year: the moment when the chill sets in, when the warmth leaks out of the air, and night crawls faster and faster up the clock. And so all this is to say that when I was little, and maybe even more sensitive to atmosphere than I am now—isn’t that sort of what it is to be a child, constantly vibing—I was never in the best mood by the time Halloween came around.

I still don’t think any film has ever scared me the way Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory did, and still does. The whole movie—inside and outside the factory—seems to unfold in that unsettling half-dark, the harsh bright of an overhead lamp while outside a chilly dusk creeps in. When I mention my fear to my friends now, most of them mention something about the boat scene, which, upon rewatching, I admit is pretty scary in a kind of Easy Rider acid trip way, but that never bothered me too much. And of course there is the fact that it is about a group of children being punished by (basically) murder, one by one, until the final one is forced into a job, but that wasn’t it either. There was just something about it, something rotten, some feeling that I had seen something I shouldn’t, a weird itchy guilt I couldn’t quite place. In actual horror movies, “figuring it out” is always the thing that, at least temporarily, helps to quell the characters’ panic; maybe writing this will work for me.

I’m probably most disturbed, still today, by how it looks, garish and ragged at the same time. Watching the movie again (and as a film studies grad student, ugh), I’m struck by how far away the camera is from so much of the action, how few close-ups there are, especially of the set. We’re always hovering from a middle distance, panning back and forth, hoping and failing to get closer. It is, after all, a film about candy, which promises you everything but the taste itself. There’s almost no movie magic, no quick cuts, even (especially) when they would provide much-needed relief. Remember, you wanted this, the film seems to say, to us and to the five children, so here it is.

(And certainly some of what stresses me out is Gene Wilder, who plays Willy Wonka with a little smile permanently at the corners of his mouth; sometimes he looks like he’s sharing a secret, other times like he’s keeping one. Watching it now, I am overwhelmed by his fragility. No one seems more scared than he does, or sadder; his loneliness radiates off him. His wide eyes dart around the labyrinthine rooms he built, in search of a way out he hasn’t thought of yet. Even his voice sounds faint, tinny with disuse.)

The musical numbers—and there are way more than I remembered—are tediously long, painfully devoid of any razzle-dazzle, just actors walking around, singing. And every part of the set, especially of the chocolate factory itself, feels aggressively, painfully, built: you can see the plasticky sheen on the props, the clumsiness of the special effects, the sticky gooeyness of all the candy, like a warped school play you can never leave. When Willy takes the children (minus Gloop) on the infamous nightmarish boat ride through the tunnel, the whole scene is, I think, made infinitely more frightening because you actually can tell what’s going on in spite of the characters’ cries of confusion: a projector is messily casting images across their faces, the lights are turning on and off, the boat is clearly, insistently sitting still. It’s worse, maybe, to know. That means there’s nowhere else to go.

Whenever I find myself a little too scared, watching a movie, I usually use the same trick: for just a second, I imagine a fuzzy boom mic lowering slightly into the frame, someone yelling “cut!”, a middle-aged man in a mustard-stained tee shirt fiddling with the camera’s knobs, someone cracking open a window. But that doesn’t feel possible here. Long after the lights are turned off, I imagined at eleven years old (and still now), the objects (the copper machinery, the giant ceramic mushrooms, the papier-mâché trees, the wallpaper) are still there, in their lingering, tactile object-ness, smeared with paint and foam, and the only thing that makes them frightening is the fact that they existed in the first place, and that you looked at them, and you were scared.

As a kid, I would often get up and hide in the hallway after I was supposed to be in bed, crouching behind the half-open door of the living room to sneak peeks at whatever grown-up stuff my parents were watching on television, always tense with both the knowledge that I might be caught and the knowledge that I might see something that was too terrible and, worst of all, that, if that were to happen, I couldn’t even tell them because I wasn’t supposed to have been there to begin with. That middle-distance gaze again, the shy, embarrassed straining to see; the film opens with children clamoring for sweets at the local candy store while Charlie waits outside, palms against the glass.

Which brings me to the scene that messed me up the most: the moment Charlie gets in trouble. The other children have all failed, and only Charlie and Grandpa Joe are left in Willy Wonka’s windowless office, all of the objects sliced perfectly in half. Willy Wonka suddenly grows cold, distant, tells them to see themselves out. Grandpa Joe asks about the lifetime supply of chocolate and Willy Wonka flips out: they broke the rules, he screams, so they get nothing at all. It’s not the fact that he gets yelled at, although, as a tragic rule-abider since day one, I’m sure that caused me a certain grief. It is the moment right after, when Charlie passes the test, choosing to leave his Everlasting Gobstopper behind (rather than give it to Willy’s main competitor). Willy lights up, spry again: now Charlie has proven his righteousness, now he can have the whole factory. This is framed as the film’s joyful resolution, the moment when all of Charlie’s gentle goodwill is finally rewarded. But for me it confirmed all my worst fears, much more constant and inescapable than any haunting: that the adults in my life were all hiding something from me, even—maybe most of all—how they truly felt about anything, and that they knew more about me than I could have possibly imagined, and that even when I could sense their anguish I would only be able to find out about it through my own inevitable transgressions.

I was the kind of child who craved adulthood from the minute I found out about it, probably in large part because I was terrible at being a kid—neurotic, anxious, shy, bad at playing, fearful of mess. All of the kids in Willy Wonka are bad at being kids too, either because they’re too childish—sloppy overeaters (Augustus Gloop) or TV addicts too attached to TV fantasies (Mike Teevee, of course) or tantrum-throwing brats (Veruca Salt)—or too adult: the obnoxiously self-assured Violet Bauregarde, who is dressed like she is about forty, or even sweet Charlie himself, who is too responsible and thoughtful to have a good time, who gets genuinely elated about being given a long scarf for his birthday. One of the weirdest things about being a kid, especially one who is eleven (like Charlie, and, if I remember correctly, like me when I first saw this movie), is that there’s no clear way to do it right, and you’re always falling on one of the wrong sides somehow.

To return then briefly to my own depressive young Halloweens: I lived in an apartment on a street full of six-story apartment buildings, so I would meet up after school with all the other kids on the block and then, freezing in our costumes, we would methodically make our way down the street, going up to the top floor of each building on the elevator and winding our way down the stairs under the buzzy fluorescent lights, stopping at each level to see if anyone would open the door, filling up our plastic pumpkins. At the end of the night, like most trick-or-treaters, we would eat until we felt sick, until no amount of brushing would remove the thin film of sugar from our little teeth for days. I would wake up on November 1st with a headache, and with a certain strange relief. It’s terrifying to get what you want, to have to consider what exists beyond that threshold of desire, to feel your imagination rub up against the hard surfaces of the world. And it’s terrifying to fully feel the moment go from sweet to sickly, from delight to disgust.

“Is this some kind of funhouse?” Veruca Salt’s dad asks, as the adults rush, breathless, back out of a door they’ve just passed through to find a completely different room beyond it. “Why?” Willy Wonka replies. “Having fun?”

Emma Ben Ayoun lives in Los Angeles, where she is an editor, writer, and adjunct professor of film studies. She is currently completing her PhD on sickness and film theory.