Charlie and the Chocolate Factory should be read and seen as a story about hunger. It details how all family members “especially little Charlie himself - went about from morning till night with a horrible empty feeling in their tummies.” Charlie a growing boy suffered most from this terrible feeling of hunger (8) Yet in his town and “within sight” of his house was the biggest chocolate factory on the face of the earth. The story tells us about how little malnourished Charlie would savor the smell of the chocolate that rose in the air from the chocolate factory reminding us of the ability of capitalism and new Liberalism to create global “hunger amidst abundance.” Araghi argues that,
The contemporary food problem is rooted in the increasing global commodification of food, rather than being a consequence of a lack of sufficient food.” (1995:155)
He adds,
Currently there is a global surplus of food, and we can safely assume that people are willing to eat; it is therefore people's inability to purchase food as a market commodity and the loss of their direct access to the production of their means of subsistence i.e. depeasantization that explains the global character of hunger today” (ibid)
This is directly applicable to Charlie's story. His parents own no land and live in an urban environment. They can no longer produce their own food by cultivating it and are forced to buy food as a commodity in the market. The father whether unemployed or employed but underpaid was unable to buy food or the chocolate that is produced in abundance within his sight to feed his family and his growing son despite the fact that his father has worked for the chocolate factory. Yet the story accepts these horrid predicaments without criticism or even questioning. The story takes urbanization, hunger and inadequate housing for granted. Nobody is to blame for them but luck which is about to change in the fairy tale.
The story and the film use commodity fetishism, an aspect of the free market, which creates consumerism,
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use value there is nothing mysterious about it..' (Marx, 1867: 230-231)
The description of the chocolate in the story elevates it to a fetish,
Charlie could see great slabs of chocolate piled up high in the shop windows, and he would stop and stare and press his nose against the glass, his mouth watering like mad.. and that of course was pure torture (8)
The candy bar, meant as nourishment, assumes many other qualities. It is associated with joy, fulfillment, pleasure and wealth. The chocolate is fetishized like any commodity in the capital society. It assumes a life of its own,
The whole family saved up their money for that special occasion and when the great day arrived, Charlie was always presented with one small chocolate bar to eat all by himself..etc (8)
“The mystical character of this commodity does not therefore arise from its use value,” says Marx. (231)It is just food. Yet, Charlie and his entire family exhibit the mind of the consumer of the capitalist economy which creates needs that seem so urgent and need to be satisfied. What is even worse is that the commodity is priced above its use value. It has an aesthetic appeal because of the colorful wrapping. It is therefore priced above the means of the family of the worker, Charlie's father. The Capitalist economy creates the need and unfortunately does not provide the worker with an income to satisfy this need.
A bigger fetish is created in the story with the tickets that enable five children to get into the factory and receive candy to last a life time. This chocolate bar is now more enticing because of the ticket that creates a new need that drags the very poor family into another cycle of spending to satisfy this need while Mr. Wonka is doubling his fortune selling more chocolate globally. In terms of exchange value, why should the chocolate be more expensive than the cabbage soup.
The power exercised by the chocolate is now separate from its producers, the Oompa Loompas. Their work in the production of this commodity is de-emphasized. They are just workers who get cocoa beans for subsistence. They are not chocolateers. Only Mr. Wonka is. He makes the chocolate using their hands.
The story book and the film are also commodities in the free market exported like the chocolate to many countries supporting US imperialism through exporting a new US culture within their culture. The story and the movie are commodities that belong to the culture of the West invading third world countries,
The commodities that circulate domestically are the product not just of different nations but of different cultural orders and bear upon them the mark of this difference. Imported commodities that come from metropolitan centers represent the cultural orders of these nations (Coronil, 1997:15,16)
In other words western culture and in this case specifically the capitalist American culture as a children's story written with the philosophy of the free market upholding capitalist and Eurocentric ideas is sold in third world countries where the youth are beginning to adopt the westernized way of life.,
In third world countries, commodities have thus become profoundly charged symbols social things that carry their worldly life inscribed in them (16)
Because all that is western is imported in third world countries and thus expensive, it becomes a sign of wealth and is thus adopted by the wealthy elite in these countries to show wealth, power and social status. The film, a commodity, is fetishized and so are its products and memorabilia . The story is fetishized enough to be produced twice for the movies, with the last one a Warner Bro's production. Warner Bro's whose parent company is Time Warner, a huge US corporation, has a record of global success and growth, with CNN and Cartoon Network and other subsidiaries like AOL. The production of the story as a film shows how,
Powerful states/cultures have sought to colonize the world with their singular vision.” (McMichael, 2005)
The movie managed to invade the world with the capitalist free market vision and with the film as a fetishized commodity.
Another capitalist free market deception employed in the story and the movie is that of the misrepresentation of nature and the ecology needed to sustain the capitalist production,
If nature and the spatial phenomena associated with it were once treated as the material stage on which modernist dramas depict history's fateful progress, they are now brought to a debentured stage as ethereal bodies on which history's representability and advance are acts in doubt (Coronil1997: 26)
In Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, the fields or the forests that yield the cocoa beans are invisible and non-existent. The interior of the factory is turned into a beautified industrial jungle which displaces nature. In other words, the natural world is totally dispensed with in favor of the man made interior of the factory which now houses the Oompa Loompas and Charlie's home. Nature is totally ignored in the equation of production and in life itself.
The book and the movie show no appreciation for nature and no understanding of its exhaustibility. It shows the capitalist attitude which sees nature as available for immediate use and gain. It uses the resources of nature in a mindless consumption of fetishized products.
In the movie and the book Wonka talks about endless coco beans that can feed the Oompa Loompas and make chocolate forever. The northern English speaking country chocolate producing country has to import the cocoa beans from the South or from hot countries highly likely Latin American and the Amazonian forests. The mindless consumption of these beans is encouraged. Wonka tells the Oompa Loompa's that they can “gorge themselves silly on the cocoa beans.” The destruction of nature is accepted because nature is depicted in the movie and the book as unable to sustain the Oompa Loompas. While Wonka the “magician” is able to recreate in his factory a landscape that surpasses in its beauty, its productivity and its ability to sustain people the rain forests or the natural environment. His water falls and rives are made of chocolate and his grass is candy: all good nourishment for the undernourished Charlie, his grandpa and the Oompa Loompas who could only find a few coco beans a year and had to survive on the reviling worms. Mitchell Bernard in “Ecology, Political Economy and the Counter Movement” asserts that the ecology is threatened by industrialism because of the strain that it puts on the natural resources, sometime through over-harvesting, or through the pollution caused by waste dumping. (1997) In the story the factory's noise pollution is turned into a welcome fascinating sound of production. The factory's waste is just seen as garbage, no more no less, that will be recycled. Even the four other children who are discarded “are said to “come out in the wash” safe.
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