If the good parents of Glasgow wanted to do right by their children, they wouldn’t have called the police on Willy’s Chocolate Experience. Granted, the image of cops confronting a bunch of underpaid actors dressed in cheap Oompa Loompa costumes, all to the tune of sobbing kids; this is enough to tickle our thirst for the absurd. When pictures of a drab warehouse decorated with oversized lollipops and candy canes rocketed round the internet, it was guaranteed we would squeal with schadenfreude.
As it looks now, Willy’s Chocolate Experience is bound to be a minor entry on the growing list of spectacular events that fail spectacularly in the post-Fyre Fest cultural landscape, another experiment in real-life world-building down in flames. It’s got all the hallmarks: a production company in way over its head (as if anything named House of Illuminati could ever know what it’s doing), a reliance on internet buzz that outweighed any ability to deliver on its promise, hired staff that can see the train crash coming a mile away, viral images of a final product that leaves us asking how the organizers thought they would ever get away with it.
It is still unclear which angry mom or dad called the fuzz, but officers didn’t show up until after Willy’s Chocolate Experience had been abruptly shuttered. Most everyone had gone home, which must have been a relief for the actors. Dealing with irate parents is harrowing enough.
Nobody likes to see children cry, much less their own. But one must wonder what exactly parents thought they were getting their kids when they shelled out £35 for each ticket to Willy’s Chocolate Experience. That the organizers very pointedly left off the “Wonka” should tell us everything we need to know about legal permissions and, ergo, the budget House of Illuminati was likely working with.
Then again, the whole idea of selling experience has always involved a certain amount of hucksterism. As Benjamin Schneider wrote for Real Life in 2019, the whole notion of an “experience economy” brings with it unsettling implications. Namely, unless we are prepared to part with a certain amount of cash, we will be deprived of the very essence of experience. Philosophically and psychologically speaking, experience is not something that starts and stops, but in the context of the attention economy and virtual reality, production companies see an opportunity “to lay claim to our sense of having lived.”
Even as this economy branches out, worming its way into our lives via social media and apps, the “immersive experience” continues to play a central role. The prospective audience for companies like Meow Wolf, Factory Obscura, and Otherworld are prime examples of manufactured desire, but it’s hard to imagine that audience being so large if everyday life were satisfying on any emotional, intellectual, or creative level. The sticking point is that in seeking to meet the needs of us disaffected masses, they rely on the most generic and watered-down versions of the experience they are attempting to produce.
That’s the nature of the commodity. Its subjects and meanings are abstracted and decontextualized – even (and especially) when rooted in real history, as with the immersive experiences of artists like Vincent Van Gogh or Frida Kahlo. Our physical senses and grasp of the possible are more assuaged than expanded, let alone challenged.
That’s what’s so maddening about parents’ reactions. Unlike so many others, Willy’s Chocolate Experience actually challenged its attendees’ preconceived notions. When families showed up to the event site in Glasgow, they were no doubt expecting something that riffed off all the contemporary stories of Willy Wonka the kindly eccentric chocolatier who thrilled and dazzled children with his magical concoctions, beloved character of several movies and other intellectual properties. What insipid dross.
Go back and read the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: you’ll see that Willy Wonka is a textbook megalomaniac. It’s not that he doesn’t like children. He doesn’t think about them enough to have much of an opinion at all. All Wonka cares about is candy, and in a perfect world, he would be able to hawk it with no consideration for the youth. But because kids are always the prime market for sugary treats, he has to deal with them somehow. That Veruca Salt and Augustus Gloop are maimed and tortured by his factory is utterly incidental to him.
Roald Dahl was and is notorious for the way his children’s books treat children. They’re full of adult characters who delight in abusing and torturing kids.1 Moral crusader types would have us believe that these portrayals should be softened or removed altogether because cruelty toward children isn’t funny.2 What they seem to deliberately sidestep is that there is nothing more cruel than false hope. Refusing to let kids reckon with the sheer harshness of life, depriving them of the unique experience of laughing at its worst excesses; this not only insults children’s intelligence, it denies them a chance to use their imaginations to reckon with the world.
Willy’s Chocolate Experience didn’t do this. It doesn’t matter that it was by accident. If most immersive experiences temporarily soothe the pain of a disappointing world with cheap tricks and shallow pabulum, then the Chocolate Experience showed these tricks require more disappointment, more bleakness, more of that empty feeling. You want magic? Here’s two jellybeans and a half cup of lemonade. Try not to drop them in the parking lot.
There is, of course, nothing out of pocket about wanting to inhabit a world different from our own. Children’s imaginations are wondrous, vivid places. Letting them be captured by slick imitations is a travesty because it forecloses the possibility of turning one reality into another.
This isn’t just the purview of children, or at any rate, it shouldn’t be. Just outside Glasgow is the village of New Lanark, a cotton mill town of 2,500 founded in the 1780s by the industrialist David Dale. Operated by utopian socialist and philanthropist Robert Owen, New Lanark reinvested all its profits into compulsory education for workers’ children (child labor was banned) and provided free medical care. Sprawling garden cities were planted, providing workers with spaces to enjoy ample free time. Say what you will about the paternalistic shortcomings of the utopians, but the mere example of New Lanark refutes, on a very practical level, that the world necessarily be a nasty and brutish place.
Back up the River Clyde, Scotland’s once-prime industrial hub shares the fate of many cities like it. Most of the old ironworks are gone, as are the steel mills, shipbuilding operations, and warehouses. Many sat empty for a long time before being torn down. Others were converted into trendy lofts or offices.
Two weeks ago, one of them was rented out by a band of unscrupulous producers, who thought they could transform it into a world of cheap wonder that would wow stupid children and their equally stupid parents. It didn’t work. Not just because nobody is that stupid, but because there’s no level of futurelessness and devastation you can cover up with brightly-colored candy floss.
Don’t cry, children. Just learn to point and laugh.
There is, of course, plenty to be disgusted by in Roald Dahl the man. He was an inveterate colonial racist, misogynist, and antisemite. But despite what many argue about his portrayals of abuse and cruelty, this is not someone with a flippant regard for these. While at boarding school, he was bullied and physically beaten by classmates and teachers daily. To take the humorous portrayals of a man like this at face value seems, at best, hasty.
The most annoying and stupid aspect of this argument is that it assumes representation equals endorsement, a logic that, should we take it to its conclusion, essentially makes all art impossible. Along those same lines, it insists that to make something funny is to make light of it. Anyone who has spent any amount of time with comedians will confirm that they are some of the most tortured human beings on the planet, staring into the void in the futile hope that maybe the void will understand. The comedic and cathartic live far closer to each other than we might assume.