Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
1971 · Mel Stuart · Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Wonka's first steps out of the factory gate. (performance)
He hobbles out on a cane, catches it in the cobbles, tips forward, and turns the fall into a somersault. Gene Wilder made that entrance a condition of taking the part.
Payoff: After it, nothing he says can be checked, and the film keeps him unverifiable for the whole tour. In the reading: le faussaire (the forger). The reading calls him a forger: not a liar hiding a truth, but a man for whom true and false are working material.
Look at the color of the town before the factory. (light)
Arthur Ibbetson shoots the streets gray-brown and flat, with poverty filmed as restriction. The moment Charlie steps into the chocolate room the palette detonates into saturated primaries and every candy surface is lit to glisten.
Payoff: A change of color does the work of a change of world, the way the door does in The Wizard of Oz. In the reading: affective color-image. Color that absorbs the feeling of a scene instead of decorating it is what the reading calls the color-image.
Notice where Wonka walks in relation to the group. (staging)
He stays a half-step ahead, turning back with information whose relevance arrives late or never. He recites contracts nobody can read. He belongs to these rooms in a way the visitors never will.
Payoff: His relation to his own space does the characterization. He is giving a show the entire time.
Watch how each child is introduced eating or demanding. (performance)
Augustus eats, Violet chews, Veruca wants, Mike watches television. Each is played as one appetite rather than as a person, with the stylization of a morality play instead of a drama.
Payoff: You can predict the shape of each child's exit from their first minute, and the film means you to.
Listen for the little vaudeville song after each mishap. (sound)
Bricusse and Newley write the moral verdicts as music-hall numbers, cheerful and scolding at the same time. The songs stop the story to tell you what happened and whose fault it was.
Payoff: Judgment arrives as entertainment, which is the film's uneasy tone delivered in one device.
Once you have seen it
Watch the tunnel sequence and count what it tells you. (cutting)
A centipede on a face, a worm crossing an eye, a chicken losing its head, cut fast over Wilder reciting while the boat music warps and degrades. None of it advances the story.
Payoff: The film opens a pocket of pure nightmare inside a children's musical and shuts it again without explanation. In the reading: onirosign (dream-image). The reading calls it an onirosign: a run of images loose from the plot, working by association alone.
Look at what each child reaches for before their exit. (setting)
The chocolate river, the gum, the room full of golden eggs, the television camera. Each is the one thing that child cannot leave alone, and each is placed within reach.
Payoff: The factory is arranged as a series of temptations fitted precisely to individual appetites.
Track what Slugworth offers and when he turns up. (structure)
A second test runs underneath the tour. Charlie gets deceived so that he can be tried, and the deception is arranged by the man he is being tested for.
Payoff: The film never settles whether that kind of managed deception counts as care or as betrayal.
Watch the last scene against everything before it. (staging)
The glass elevator rises over the town and the tone goes unambiguously warm. Dahl's own draft ended elsewhere, and the change was among the ones that most annoyed him.
Payoff: The uplift arrives late and clean, sitting oddly on a film built out of ambivalence.
Carry this in: Watch the limp. Everything the film does with trust is already in that first entrance at the gate.
A Deleuzian reading of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory →