Charlie Bucket was the Final Girl

It’s over fifty years since Violet Beauregarde encountered Willy Wonka. She still covers her purple skin with a veil, has done ever since it happened, hiding from the paparazzi. Sometimes, she’s chased down by Youtubers and streamers. Clips of her, trying to escape the attention.

As a young girl, Beauregarde was obsessed with being famous. She was interviewed by local news for her attempts at ‘the world gum-chewing record’. As foolish as that was, she didn’t deserve what happened, the fame she actually achieved.

Beauregarde was wrong to snatch that piece of gum, particularly when Wonka warned her not to go near his ‘Gastromolecular Unicellulose Mouthmosh’. But, whatever other people say, it’s obvious that Wonka placed The Great Gum Machine in the middle of the Inventing Room as a trap for Violet. Like with Mike Teevee, Violet’s fate was crafted for her.

Wonka’s Magic Chewing Gum replicated the tastes and sensations of eating a three-course meal. Were it not for the side-effects, Wonka’s gum would have been his masterwork. It even supplied the same nutritional value as the food it was designed to replace. Wonka imagined this gum bringing about “the end of kitchens and all cooking”. He wanted a world where people lived only off Wonka gum. The world he envisioned had no washing-up or mess, no plates, no rubbish. A world without restaurants, where you would not go for a meal with friends; evening meals, a family glumly watching each other consuming their strip of gum. The saddest automat would be better than that.

At first, the gum worked perfectly. Beauregarde described the sensation of swallowing hot tomato soup, creamy and delicious. Then the ingredients of a full roast dinner: tender and juicy roast beef; crispy baked potato skin, dripping with butter. She said that you could “actually feel the food going down your throat and into your tummy.”

It was only with the gum’s final flavours, blueberry pie and ice cream, that it went wrong. Starting with the tip of her nose, Beauregarde’s skin turned purple. Her body swelled, expanding until she was a tiny pair of legs and a tiny pair of arms sticking out of the great round fruit, and a little head at the top.

Beauregarde was rushed to the ‘de-juicing room’. Wonka had established a protocol for those suffering from the gum after running multiple trials. It was far from the first time this had happened. Wonka boasted that he had “tried it twenty times in the Testing Room on twenty Oompa-Loompas and every one of them finished up as a blueberry”. Wonka said that this was ‘annoying’.

What happened to Beauregarde was awful, but her fate has eclipsed that of those twenty Oompa-Loompas – some of whom suffered from early, less controlled prototypes of many-flavoured gum. There were other experimental series too. Wonka had trafficked more Oompa-Loompas into the country than anyone realised and barely bothered recording the results of some of his experiments. He’d make the most minor change in the formula of his sweets before inflicting them on the next victim. He wasn’t even ashamed of it - his biographer, Roald Dahl, records Wonka’s early experiments with Fizzy Lifting-Drinks, which caused anyone drinking them to float into the air. They would keep rising unless they belched to release the gas build-up. Wonka never reported the unethical experiments, even one performed outdoors, where an old Oompa-Loompa rose into the sky and disappeared from sight.

There was the StickJaw, Wonka’s Extra-Sticky Toffee – so sticky it would seal the Oompa-Loompas jaws shut. They were be fed through tubes until their teeth rotted away enough for their mouths to open once more.

Every wonder Wonka ever made had its shadow side. Cavity-filling caramel was produced at great cost. Not just those who suffered from the failed prototypes, but others whose teeth were rotted away by induced decay – Wonka being too impatient to allow cavities to appear naturally among his workforce.

We cannot know the fear that led the Oompa-Loompas to submit to these experiments. Wonka is portrayed as a genius, as hero, but to the Oompa-Loompas he was a murderous tyrant. Even now, there’s a gap where the Oompa-Loompas should be telling their stories about Wonka and how they survived.

Background

You don’t have to stray from Dahl’s actual text for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to see Willy Wonka as a horror story. The text itself – quoted in the story above – features Wonka boasting about his unethical human experiments. Re-reading it this month, I’m amazed at how stark and nasty the book is.

I read the ‘classic’ text, the one defended by luminaries such as Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, and Ricky Gervais. This version was amended by Dahl himself from the original published text, the racist overtones of which were too much, even for the 1970s. I will now have to re-read the 2023 text to see how it compared to the version I read as a child. Apparently some of the human experimentation has been removed, replaced with Wonka testing candies on himself.

I’ve continued to write about Willy Wonka, with about 4,000 words of first draft, along with a few thousand words of notes. I’m taking this project slowly, but enjoying it. Wonka is a fascinating character and the more you read about him, the darker the whole affair seems. The details about the gum and the Fizzy-Lifting drinks are pretty much straight from the book - it’s only the last three paragraphs where I invent my own details.