Thursday with Jen: I am hate watching "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"
On my hatred for Charlie Bucket.
Warning: The following is a pretty pointless newsletter.
Dear reader,
Like winter becoming spring, like snow dissolving into spring water, like Houston sports teams semi-succeeding only to inevitably fail in a traumatizing fashion, I engage in a ritualistic cycle each time I walk on a plane. I hate-watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
It does not matter how long the plane ride is, where I am going, or who I am with. Whenever I see that movie poster on my airplane entertainment system – that visual of a top hatted Gene Wilder with his arms stretched to the edges surrounded by all his tiny child victims – I select “play” every single time.
When I say “hate watch,” what I actually mean is “hate-love-hate watch.” Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and its literary source material Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are two of my favorite childhood works. I do truly love Willy Wonka the movie – the oddly satisfying opening montage of candy being made in a factory; the way that Charlie opens his chocolate first with the right corner of foil, then the left, then a pause, and then the JESUS CHRIST IT’S A GOLDEN TICKET tear down; the wild characterizations of Germans, and Americans, and British people; and the wondrous scene where they enter into a candy paradise of absolute pure imagination.
Ugh, I love it.
When I say “hate watch,” I mean I despise Charlie Bucket, that undeserving asshole. I was recently cleaning the notes app on my phone and saw my written thoughts from the last time I hate-watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory aboard a plane to Hawaiʻi. I did not hold back:
Why the hell is Charlie’s favorite grandparent Grandpa Joe for no discernible reason? Grandma Georgina is LIT and has probably been through some shit
Charlie enables Grandpa Joe’s tobacco habit
Why doesn't this kid take his own mother to the chocolate factory, she works in a literal SWEAT SHOP
Loser Charlie had to wait until he won a Golden Ticket to fix Grandpa Joe’s paralysis
He wasn’t supposed to drink those Fizzy Lifting Drinks, what an entitled jerk
Charlie’s outfit to the chocolate factory is lame, especially compared to Violet who is on brand
Charlie gets the factory by process of elimination. INEQUITABLE.
On that last point, the way I watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as a child was through a VHS recording of the movie. Since I didn’t have enough tape to record the entire movie while it played on television, the movie cut off right when Mike Teavee was “eliminated” by the Oompa Loompas. For years, I had no idea how the movie ended until adulthood when I watched the final scenes on a plane. The moment I saw that Charlie Bucket got the factory, I remember gasping, turning to my the girlfriend-now-wife and saying:
“DID YOU KNOW CHARLIE BUCKET GOT THE FACTORY? THAT’S SO UNFAIR.”
She didn’t care and probably thought I had some kind of psychological issue, which isn’t...incorrect. But, I was PISSED and surprised even though I had read the original Roald Dahl book and its ending many times.
You were warned that this would be a fairly pointless newsletter, so I thought I would end with an equally pointless character map of Charlie Bucket that brings together all my feelings at a fourth-grade level:
See you in a few Thursdays,
JTVN
PS – I definitely vibe with the internet: