»Every good thing in this world, started with a dream. So you hold on to yours.«
Ms. Wonka
Wonka is perhaps the most important movie of the Century, and quite possibly even more than that.
I haven’t spelled the detailed plot and twists of the movie out, but there is enough here painted in broad strokes to qualify as spoilers. Ironically, I believe if you haven’t watched it yet, whatever you lose in novelty from reading this, you will get back twentyfold in significance and meaning, and more importantly the significance and meaning of YOU.
That said, the movie is about Chocolate and more specifically our relationship to it. In the movie, chocolate is a metaphor for something that is essential to our Soul, but not considered essential to existence, something we only learn the difference of by direct experience.
In a word, it is wonder.
It is the way we held onto dreams as a child. It is the way we believed we could make a beautiful mark in this world and that the world itself could be full of invitation and wonder.
It was our sense of pure imagination, and the limitless field of beckoning that kept inviting us deeper into life.
These are ways we felt once—feelings that have since died, been stuffed into boxes, been ridiculed, cauterised, and threshed out of us through our modern educations and the necessity of growing up, to take part in the industry and consumption of the world.
The movie reignites a sense of wonder. It is the sense of delight we can get from something we deem non-essential, and only when we taste it, tasting how it should be made—from a sense of deep Calling and devotion to Craft—are we brought into undeniable relationship with the reality of how utterly essential, how utterly significant it actually is and always has been, and that we simply, somewhere along the line forgot. And in that, it dawns on us, sadly, that we have somehow been complicit in that forgetting.
Anything that does not light you up is too small to invest all your energy and attention into.
Watching this movie rings a bell that echoes in a place deep inside your soul that has long been cold and silent. It evokes the spirit of your inner child, waking up a long-lost feeling you had come to believe was dead.
The movie is a prequel, touching on the beginnings of Wonka as the eccentric Imagineer he becomes in our later encounters in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We follow his escapades of fortune and misfortune in his journey to actualise into the enigmatic and wondrous character Roald Dahl regales us within his books.
We don’t tend to think of Roald Dahl as a dystopian satirist alongside Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, but if we look closely, we notice the characters are all archetypes. The villains are archetypes of our world of authority, corporate greed and soullessness, and the supporting characters are recognisable from a thousand other stories, aspects of ourselves and people we know and live beside every day. When read with a certain eye, one can always pick out of Roald Dahl’s stories a tongue-in-cheek critique, poking fun at some of the silliness we allow in our effort to fit in and belong. The satire in his work is so very subtle, pointing delightfully to the daft ways we have become conditioned to behave, dressing up juvenile games of control as ever-so prim and important.
The villain archetypes of Roald Dahl’s stories are always driven by greed or simply a self-awarded sense of belonging to positions of authority and control over other people, by which they subvert their will through manipulation, cruelty, coercion and deceit. For these villains, the thorn in their side is always a child or someone who is carefree, willful and full of dreams and imagination.
In this way, Wonka, as is almost all of Roald Dahl’s work, is a Gnostic story. To really understand Wonka, it helps to understand what Gnosticism is and how that way of regarding the world describes why the world feels the way it does and what our place is in all of that.
Not many of us are likely to be familiar with the term Gnosticism and what it implies. To help provide a quick understanding I asked ChatGPT to explain Gnosticism to a 5-year-old:
Imagine you're playing a video game where you're stuck in a maze. The goal is to escape, but the maze is tricky and full of illusions. Gnosticism is like having a secret map or cheat code that helps you see through the illusions, find the hidden paths, and understand how to escape the maze to return home, where everything is peaceful, wholesome and perfect.
In Gnosticism:
The Maze is like the world we live in. It is full of challenges and distractions, and it is not always easy to tell what is true or important.
The Secret Map or Cheat Code represents special knowledge (called “gnosis”) that helps you understand the true nature of the world, most especially yourself, and how to escape the cycle of challenges and distractions.
The Goal is to escape the maze (the world and its limitations which we help make and yet cannot feel like we belong to) and return home (to a spiritual, peaceful state) by awakening the part of you that belongs there.
The Game Players are us, humans, who have a spark of something divine or special inside us, but we have forgotten it because we are caught up in the maze.
The Tricks and Illusions in the maze are created by a lower power who thrives on keeping us here, forgetful of our true home.
The idea of Gnosticism is that there are actors and forces that are incentivised to keep us all in a prison, locked in dramas and drudgery, that live off our desperation and our fear.
This is precisely why scholars referred to the movie ‘The Matrix’ as a ‘Gnostic narrative’.
Wonka is a Gnostic narrative, and profoundly, the more we understand about the paradigm of Gnosticism, the more significance we can draw from the movie. Even so, one does not need to understand anything about the Gnostic paradigm, to not only enjoy the movie, but to deeply appreciate it, in a way that will change you, and sit with you for a very long time.
The movie manages to capture the charm of the earlier instalments without detracting from their stories. It is reverent to the earlier movies, whilst leaving them completely alone, telling its own story.
The entire theme of the movie is one of how easy it is to fall under the ugly spell of modernity and enterprise, how the cosmopolitan shine of the modern world lures us with promises of opportunity, and when we arrive, we realise it is every person for themself, and lots of rules, control, thankless service and drudgery. To arrive full of hope and dreams, with only wonder in your heart, leaves you gullible and prey to people and organisations who have made their business to dominate the game by playing it deftly on two different levels. On one level, they know the dream of opportunity is a lie, but they dare not dismantle the lie, because the lie of it is how the fly is pulled into the honeytrap. So they pretend to be playing the game at this level, where everyone’s smile means a smile. At the other level, they know they are only pretending, and that their real business is far more cynical. For anyone who arrives fresh-faced, with ‘a Hatful of Dreams’, their hearts will inevitably be broken as they discover the cost of their naivety. When they hit rock bottom, their last layer of illusion is rudely stripped away, whereby any appeal to civil authority like the Police or divine authority like the Church leads them to wake up to the truth that both of these do not stand for what we thought they stood for, rather are just instruments of the same spirit of greed and control of the ones who rig the game.
To the pretenders’ mindset, wonder is a dangerous disease for which the only safe cure is disillusionment.
We all arrived here today via this experience.
We once believed our parents were one thing, and then woke up to the truth that they were deeply flawed, often petty in their authority and ignorant of their true charge.
We once believed in church and religion, only to have our hearts broken by the tragic reality that this was all just another house of cards and that so many people were bluffing and expected you to bluff too, to help them save face.
We once believed in education and a career, only to arrive at the grindstone of that reality and have to witness and eventually participate in the elaborate game of Emperor’s New Clothes, and have all our dreams systematically taken from us, to be replaced with a sense of hustle to get ahead, and fear of it all being taken away.
We once believed in our countries, their stories, and by extension, our politicians.
We once believed in the miracle of the internet, and the marvel of social Media.
And slowly the urgency of life defined our urges, and the drama defined the roles we played on the stage of life, and what emerged was defined by emergency.
We once believed in Love.
We believed our relationships would fulfil us and meet us at the windows we were happy to open, about the wishes we carried about what we wanted from life, and saw in us what we most valued about ourselves. These were the relationships with friends, lovers, colleagues and neighbours. And presently, as everyone had their hearts broken too, and together we silenced the voice of our imagination, like a child told to be quiet when the grown-ups are talking. Together we became blind to the wonder of the world, seeing it as more traps for the gullible, and not wanting to be made the fool of again.
Together we imprisoned the inner child in the dungeon of mundanity and told ourselves to grow up.
Everyone who was once a teenager, has had their heart broken by an inevitable clash with reality, a ship they board without preparation and initiation, in which, they are stowaways of their own uncertain future. The young who join the journey in this rude fashion are expected to find their way forward without a map, and then held to an unwritten rulebook composed by the generation before them. The older generation who in turn have no compassion for what the young stowaways are left to face and who are not even remotely interested in their dreams or what they ever have to say.
We gave up on our dreams. We sobered up to the harsh reality of the world, and we eventually started to play the game at the level of the ones who enjoy the rigged status of the game, for whom imagination and willfulness are a challenge to the order of things. And slowly we became complicit in doing their work for them, allowing imagination to be dismissed and wonder to be stamped out like a fire, lest it catch and run.
Wonka takes you back through those moments of dashed hope and the ‘waking up into’ of a more browbeaten version of ourselves into a grown-up world that is so much more uncompromising than our younger selves once imagined, but this time, it takes you down another fork in the road. It opens and widens a door of possibility again. It rings a bell which causes a part of you to stir that you thought perhaps had died, and in one instant, reminds you and keeps reminding you of three things. The first is that we get to reignite that spark of wonder and pure imagination, and we get to fan that ember into life, the light of which may yet illuminate a future that our inner child would want to belong to. The second is a mixture of remorse and deep sadness, knowing that on some level we were responsible for allowing our dreams and our imagination to die and that we became like the jailors of our own hearts. And the third thing, is an invitation, a furious debate that happens deep in the psyche, where we wonder if we dare dream again, afraid to have our dreams dashed a second time.
For each of us, that question will be answered, or left hanging, in a very different way. But the point is that now there are two voices, whereas before there was only one.
The aim of this post, and much of my work, is to try and boost the signal of that second voice, which if we think about it carefully, was always actually our first voice.
Come with me and you'll be In a world of pure imagination Reach out, touch what was once Just in your imagination. Don't be shy, it's alright If you feel a little trepidation Sometimes these things don't need Explanation. ... Therе is no life I know To compare with pure imagination Living thеre, you'll be free If you truly wish to be. —Excerpt from Pure Imagination, Joby Talbot & Neil Hannon
Watching the movie, made me realise I was in the presence of pure genius.
The idea and with it the feelings that belong to that idea came rushing back and kept filling my heart in a way for which the word ‘overwhelm’ had no meaning. (Overwhelm is the language of the part of us that is ill in this world.) My heart opened again, in a way it had not been for a very, very long time.
‘Soul’ is what is missing when Life feels wrong.
The idea and the feelings that belong to that idea, was that each of us, and then collectively together all of us, can imagine our own inspiring truth that transcends the state of ugliness we keep trying to look away from in the world. We can create a world of our own, and based on our choices and how infectious we can make our ideas and our dreams, we can share them, let them catch fire, and eventually realise them. This is actualisation.
We are in desperate need of Myth-Weavers, Bards and Storytellers, who can help us weave a myth of our own—right from where the road has to begin, at the broken ground of troubles beneath our feet—who can help us make the right kind of stories stick—so that we might have a map to follow towards a far brighter and more wondrous Tomorrow.
We are in great need of Dreamers.
But first, we need to value the value of Stories, and imagination again. And to do that we need to make space, again, for that one inside of us that once had the courage to dream.
A world of our own, A place to escape to, The world of our own, Where we can be free, Wherever you go, Wherever life takes you, This is our home, A world of our own. —Excerpt from A World of Our Own, Joby Talbot & Neil Hannon
There is no reason whatsoever, no limitation of biology, psychology or physics, that suggests that we cannot among us, foster shared dreams and that we cannot through our investment in those dreams, create the expansive reality that we want to live, for ourselves and for our children.
We are in great need of Dreamers.
We do not want to be listening to tech bros, or to politicians, to public intellectuals and celebrity personalities, because, despite their individual merits and charms, they are all part of the illness we want to wake up from. We want to be making platforms for the dreamers among us, the ones with beautiful ideas of where we might get to, and how we might make our way there from here.
This is our golden ticket.
The secret of chocolate, we are told, is that it isn’t even the chocolate that matters. It is the people you share it with.
This is our home. A world of our own.