History Will Remember The 'Willy Wonka' Experience Kindly
It's called being ahead of your time.
A lot is being said about the Willy Wonka Experience — an “immersive” approximation of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory that took place in a sparsely decorated Glasgow warehouse before being briskly called off. Some people are calling it Scotland’s answer to the Fyre Festival, with others lamenting how many children it made burst into tears.
But has anyone taken a moment to consider why they were crying? That perhaps it was because they were having a deeply felt experience? Because they were so struck by the event’s realness that they gained a new sense of what it meant to be human, despite feeling that we’re all being consumed by an increasingly powerful technocratic elite?
Yes, the event organisers, known as ‘House of Illuminati’ used some garishly coloured AI-generated images to promote the event – images that were very different to the warehouse full of… artfully placed poop that the event ultimately was. But to see that as a problem is to completely miss the point.
I don’t know who needs to know this, Imagination is one of the main themes of Roald Dahl’s beloved Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, and that’s just a fact. Remember Gene Wilder’s haunting rendition of ‘Pure Imagination’? The point of that song is that everything is boring, and if you want to “view paradise” then that’s on you. All Dahl was saying is that fun will not be handed to you in this life, you know? You have to make use of your “imagination”, by which he probably meant drugs.
Now, look: some of the families who bought £35 ($60 AUD) tickets were unhappy that the event took place in a dirty, industrial warehouse – but I’d describe the choice of venue more as gritty and character-building. When are we going to stop coddling our children? It sounds like the whole thing was just offering kids a hearty dose of reality, and parents who take issue with that are quite frankly part of the problem.
Besides, everyone received a single jellybean and a quarter cup of lemonade. Do you know how small children are? That’s extremely generous, and if you think otherwise, you need to grow up.
I actually can’t see any better way to teach your children that nothing in life ends up being as good as you’d expect, in a way that’s kind of dark and Lynchian, than taking them to this Glaswegian shitscape. Remember Charlie freaking the hell out when he finally got to peer behind the magic curtain for himself? Well, guess what you guys: Veruca Salt was killed in a furnace, August Gloop was fat-shamed, and Willy Wonka? Probably a paedophile.
The best part was the personification of life’s uncertainties through the creation of a wholly new character, ‘The Unknown’, an evil chocolate maker who “lives in the walls”. A symbol for everything in your life that you’ll never figure out, whether it’s the true nature of your childhood trauma, that ever-present feeling of dread, or the reason for your morning panic attack, it’s the amorphousness of The Unknown that makes him so compelling.
Unfortunately, we live in a culture where no one was ready to receive the meaning that the Willy Wonka Experience was offering. Not in today’s PC landscape. Not with COVID and the so-called tolerant left. And China. But anyone with a brain can see that this exhibit was a wake-up call.
A wake-up call that it’s time to stop telling kids that they can “do anything” or “be whoever they want to be” and time to prepare them for the pain, disappointment and climate catastrophe that almost certainly awaits them. Considering what happened to the characters in the original story, parents should be grateful that their kids got out alive.
We salute the House of Illuminati – not only for what really is a sick name, but for stepping up where parents have so woefully failed.