Whether encountered as a movie or novel, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a childhood staple of postwar Anglophone culture. Originally published in 1964, Dahl's story of "Willie Wonka" is a morality tale for our times addressed by the present essay in relation to the precariousness, violence, intergenerational faith, and materialist fantasies reflective of contemporary life in the early twenty-first century. Compensating for the precarity of contemporary life's impoverishment as assumptions of societal stability are overthrown, this chronicle of the Bucket family details: envious desire validated by large group chosen trauma; authoritarian enslavement of inferior, colonized peoples with murderous, industrial-level human experimentation; toward gratification of the greedy fantasy of unlimited sweetness under the sway of lethal identification with the aggressor.
CITATION STYLE
Miller, I. S. (2018, June 1). Reading Willy Wonka in the Era of Anti-Thinking. American Journal of Psychoanalysis. Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-018-9139-4
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