The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [165]
I think that we need this, we do not get enough of it, and what we get is in the form of absurdity in art. Complaining about culture having random, intense rules of conduct is like complaining about the inconveniences of gravity. All we can do is try to find a way to alleviate the pressure now and again. That is what topsy-turvy does. Our arts reflect our hunger for it. Often they do a great job of providing it for us, singly and in communion with others: we share our love for the topsy-turvy by citing our love for artistic expressions of it. Think of the special kind of allegiance people have to films that are absurd: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for example, or Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, Pink Flamingos, Being John Malkovitch, or Donnie Darko. We need play, and the play has to be daring; it need not scatter all meaning, but it does have to turn things upside-down.
We get our wild festival and carnival topsy-turvy at the movies. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is perhaps the greatest film of food abundance, a brilliant enactment of the Land of Cockaigne for the industrial age: the delicious factory. Wonka presents his guests with a river of chocolate running through an edible Garden of Eden. There are also “everlasting” candies, a stick of gum that tastes like a multi-course meal, and soda pop that can make its drinker fly. Along with showing us all the abundance, the film is something of a scold, which is a combination we are used to from carnival. The unusual and unexplained abound, from the Oompa Loompas to Wonka’s office where everything is only half of itself—half a clock, half a desk, half a coatrack. The tropes of topsy-turvy and food paradise are kept in tension by the sour charm of Wonka. The boat trip he takes his guests on is menacing: they enter a dark tunnel, accelerate roughly, and Wonka sings:
Not a speck of light is showing,
So the danger must be growing.
Are the fires of Hell a-glowing?
Is the grisly reaper mowing?
A mean song sung sweet, perfect for a carnival night. Wonka’s acidity demonstrates that he is not a foolish man being careless, but rather a serious man being absurd. As he puts it, “A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.” The film’s fairy-tale ending is that Charlie gets the factory and is to bring his whole family to live there.
Willy Wonka: Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted.
Charlie: What happened?
Willy Wonka: He lived happily ever after.
We know how you end up living happily ever after: you start from too little to eat. But no matter what they start from, most people like to daydream about abundance, and loyalty to an absurd film is a small rejection of common reality.
When films champion wildness, they help us to see our domestic arrangements in ways that fit with our culture’s longtime fantasies. Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck (1987) is a nice place to see this acted out. Written by John Patrick Shanley (Pulitzer Prize winner for a brilliant play with a great title, Doubt), the film enacts our conviction that only dangerous love is real love. Lorretta—Cher—had true love once, but her husband was killed by a bus, and after that she was alone for a long time. Then she dated mild, doughy Johnny. When Loretta tells her mother (Olympia Dukakis) that Johnny has proposed and she has accepted, her mother asks if she loves him. Loretta says no, and Mom responds, “Good. When you love them, they drive you crazy because they know they can.” That this is the essential quality of true love is acted out in four wolf scenes. First there’s the liquor store at the beginning of the film, when the older couple behind the counter argue: Lotte accuses Irv of looking at a some woman “like a wolf.” Irv teases his wife that she’s never even seen a wolf, and Lotte retorts, “I seen a wolf in everybody I ever met, and I see a wolf in you.” Irv gets us out of this by