Confessions of a Chocoholic

Why I can’t get over Paul King’s ‘Wonka’

This week I interrupt the thematic trajectory my articles have taken in order to share this essay I wrote a few months ago. The film ‘Wonka’ has many themes consistent with the holiday season. If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to watch it. Regardless, I hope my perspective resonates in some way.

I will also use this opportunity to share that I am now working with an organization here in Wilmore called Creo Arts. I will be curating an online publication, writing essays for them about the arts and finding writers to contribute articles. I am thrilled to be part of the Creo team. If you are interested in following along, please subscribe to their newsletter.

-Michael

---

When I first heard about Paul King’s latest Wonka film, I was pretty skeptical about it. In general, I am critical of Hollywood’s dependence on spin-offs, remakes, and other ventures to squeeze out as much profits as they can from already successful movie franchises. It reflects a cultural malnourishment, an artistic failure, and a lack of trust in our most creative minds. I suspected Wonka to be one such film. I honestly don’t know what got me into the movie theater. But I’m glad I gave it a shot.

I haven’t been able to get the movie out of my head ever since. I’ve watched it a few more times and it has yet to fail in delivering me the same chocolate-flavored delight. Nearly a year later, the songs still get stuck in my head and I laugh when I remember many of the film’s clever lines. I suspect that my particular enjoyment of the film has some to do with personal taste—admittedly, I’ve always had a sweet tooth myself and felt my preferences in fiction were more reminiscent of one of Peter Pan’s lost boys than of a former film student—but there are certain features of the film that I want to highlight for their particular potency in our cultural moment.

In September, Ted Gioia published a Substack article in which he examined why “the pop culture audience today craves darkness and dysfunction.” He used the Joker phenomenon as a case in point, considering how the more violent, cruel, and inhuman the batman villain has become in popular narratives, the more audiences have loved him.

I remember one scene that particularly grieved me when I watched Joker: the Joker violently murders two mobsters on screen and lets a third one go. Something about the moment was so shocking and off-beat, those in the theater around me were rollicking with laughter—but I couldn’t laugh. In fact, I was in tears because the moment felt prophetic in the worst way imaginable. Is this what culture has become? I wondered. Have we grown so desensitized to violence? Truly, it is a question worth pondering: What will become of a society that glorifies its villains more than its heroes?

My experiences with films like Joker recently have confirmed for me many of the disturbing trends Gioia identifies. While there are multiple factors that have contributed to our culture’s descent into darkness, Gioia is careful to point out that “the culture is not just an effect—it’s also a cause.” It is important to recognize that we still have agency in directing our society’s cultural trajectory. Though we live in dark days where the love of many has grown cold, perhaps the church has an opportunity to defy our culture’s decline into despair by celebrating and telling stories of hope.

That is what makes Wonka such a potent film. At a time in which most of our heroes are antiheroes, Willy Wonka stands as a man of virtue. Although the market craves violence and gloom, Wonka serves us merriment and whimsy. And though darkness threatens to swallow up our culture whole, here we have a film that provokes with songs of joy.

Willy Wonka shows up to a city with “a hatful of dreams.” He is young, naïve, and hopeful, determined to find the fulfillment of a promise his mother made to him by selling the world’s most wonderful chocolate. When wicked and corrupt people try to crush his ambitions, he persists, even to the point of being threatened with inevitable demise— death by chocolate. But deliverance comes, and he rises again.

Jesus, similarly, showed up to a city at a time rife with political tension, economic uncertainty, and overwhelming despair. His message must have sounded silly to those who heard him: The Kingdom at hand? Here? Now? With these people? Paul writes that “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise….” It takes a holy fool to believe in Christ’s promise of resurrection, after all.

The stories we tell one another are critical for framing our expectations of what is possible, interpreting our circumstances and persisting in hope. Wonka struck me as one film whose whimsy and color has the potential of brightening otherwise dark days. Like Noodle so eloquently puts it in one song in the film, when I watched Wonka, I almost forgot to be sad.