"To Whom I Can Tell My My Precious Candy-Making Secrets": The Ending of WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (1971)
A compact on creativity, in brief
When I was four years old or so, my family got a VHS player. This wasn’t nothing in 1982. VHS players were rare in my friends’ houses but rarer still were places where you could rent VHS movies (Blockbuster video didn’t open until 1985, for example).
I don’t remember actually renting videos for several more years, around 1986 or so, but I do remember two movies in our VHS collection, and they might have comprised the entirety of it. The first was The Empire Strikes Back, which was a bootleg copy that our neighbors gave us. I have no idea where they got it, but I do remember that someone had written the title of the movie in delicate calligraphy on a sticker on the edge of the tape. I watched the movie hundreds of times, usually skipping Luke screaming and his hand getting lopped off.
The other movie we had was Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971). My uncle taped it off HBO for us for reasons I also don’t know, though perhaps he just knew it was a kids’ movie, and it was something he could do for us.
He started recording a little before the movie came and so he captured two stray bits of video. The first was the music video for “Man-Eater” by Hall & Oates, in which a woman transforms into a panther—and whose central metaphor was lost in me. It seemed like some sort of PSA for adults: there are shape-shifters out there who might well devour you while recording yacht rock. Useful!
The other thing was a movie trailer (I think) whose principal attraction was a woman taking her top off. No metaphorical close-reading required there. I was careful to fast-forward to the opening credits of Wonka while my parents were in the room. This was material that needed preservation.
Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory itself is a ton of fun. A tour of a quasi-magical candy factory led by an enthralling inventor-genius-circus ringleader as played by Gene Wilder still is enough to get through 90 minutes.
Roald Dahl wrote the source material, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, with inspiration from the chocolate wars of his youth, in which rival candy companies would indeed try to infiltrate each other's factories to learn their trade secrets. What was behind those doors after all? What would be the most exciting version of that? That’s more than enough enticement for the kinds of short books Dahl wrote. And paired with Dahl’s willingness to seed his stories with the creepy and macabre, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory is a sort of Se7en for the under 7 set, with the sins of each kid taking them out of the tour one by one, until only Charlie remains.
In the book, Charlie inherits the chocolate factory as the only child without a deal-breaking character flaw, for the whole ruse of the golden tickets and the tour is to find a kid to whom Wonka can pass on the factory. That is that. Charlie didn’t break the rules, so he wins.
This is not exactly what happens in the movie. The other kids still exit the stage because of their various appetites, but in the movie Charlie can’t help but try one of the delights, even if he and his Grandpa Joe know it is forbidden. They sneak a spoonful of fizzy-lifting juice, but manage to belch their way back to Wonka before being discovered. Or so they think.
As the tour comes to an end, Grandpa Joe asks about the lifetime supply of chocolate that was part of finding a Golden Ticket. Wonka berates him and says that the chocolate is forfeit because they broke the rules: you get nothing!
And it is here we come to the reason this scene is my first post for Kinda Genius. This scene, and the set-up for it earlier in the movie, were the additions of screenwriter David Seltzer. (This was his first screenwriting credit, and he would somewhat incongruously become best known for creating The Omen series.) Seltzer adds a test within a test, making the story, Charlie, and Wonka each richer than their book counterparts.
You see, Charlie has a gobstopper up his sleeve. He has been offered, prior to the tour, a vast sum of money if he will provide one of Wonka’s rivals, Mr. Slugworth, with an Everlasting Gobstopper, Wonka’s rumored killer-sweet that can be enjoyed forever. Faced with Wonka’s rebuke, Charlie has a choice to make: hand over the Gobstopper to Slugworth to stick it to Wonka and get his family out of some very gray poverty or return it to Wonka. This is the real test, for Slugworth’s itself offer is another of Wonka’s inventions—a final hurdle for Charlie to clear.
When Charlie quietly sets the candy on Wonka’s desk before leaving, Wonka is genuinely moved and exhilarated (Wilder is particularly electric here) and gives Charlie the good news: you’ve won.
What I find so inspired here is the subtle shift from Charlie merely following the rules and not doing anything wrong in the book to him choosing to do something right. Wonka doesn’t care that he broke the rules, in fact the whole tour is set up to make it nigh impossible for the kids to resist breaking the rules.
What Wonka wants to know is this: do they get it? Do they have some inner sense of right and wrong? Might they believe in something other than their own desires to eat and own and consume? In short, do they think making something special is more important than having something special? And would they sacrifice something to protect that?
In my imagination, each of the other kids were given an opportunity, after they were juiced or stretched or otherwise restored, to return their gobstoppers before leaving, and none of them did. Roald Dahl hated how the movie turned out, with his main beef being that the movie focused too much on Wonka and not enough on Charlie (Dahl had other bad opinions too).
But even at age 6 I knew he was wrong. The Charlie of the movie gets something to do, not just a series of things not to do. This matters when you are a kid. Following the rules might not be easy, but it is straight-forward. What is not straight-forward is what to do when there are no rules. Or the rules are unfair. Or you are the one making the rules. What will you do then? If, in addition to being creative, you are kind and fair and generous, maybe, just maybe, you can make something magic.