Et in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory Ego: How Timothee Chalamet Became A Neoclassical Icon
An analytical essay on Neoclassicism, recycled IP, and the state of propaganda and art
Jacques Louis David overlaid with an image of Timothee Chalamet, Maxine Martin (CW69), 2024
âThere! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.â
â Virginia Woolf, âMrs. Dalloway"
The year is 1971. Charles Manson is convicted of murder. The Nasdaq Composite makes its debut. Led Zeppelin performs in Belfast, for the first time live, âStairway to Heaven.â The New York Times begins publishing the Pentagon Papers. President Nixon declares the War on Drugs. For the second time in history, the US dollar is devalued. The Indo-Pakistani war begins. Jim Morrison dies in Paris. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is adapted from Roald Dahlâs 1964 childrenâs book and released to critical success but box office mediocrity.
At the time of its release, Willy Wonka stares down the barrels of several easily identifiable assailants: global unrest, distrust in governments both domestic and foreign, a drug epidemic, âHelter Skelter,â nuclear proliferation. The zeitgeist is pulsing under the sedative thumb of the Nixon administration and the tail-end of MK Ultra. Drugs are plentiful and encouraged through quaaludes and hallucinogens; John Lennon is crooning, âYou may say Iâm a dreamer/ but Iâm not the only one/ I hope someday youâll join us/ and the world will be as one/â Young people across the world are reveling in the glory of political opposition while anaesthetized out of their minds by whatever low-growing fungus they can scrape off a fallen log and into a plastic baggie. The era becomes inseparable from its joint reputation of triptastic flower power and anti-war demonstrations calling for an end to the Vietnam War. There is a mushroom cloud hanging over the head of the malcontent adolescent in the West while death proliferates in the growhouse of the politician. It is La Belle Epoque for the wasted and disillusioned youth of America.
May Day flyer, Georgetown University Archives, 1971 https://library.georgetown.edu/exhibition/most-influential-protest-you%E2%80%99ve-never-heard-may-day-1971)
There is a lingering cupreous quality to the air that belies the state of Western life, with peacetime lasting no longer than a cigarette after sex. The American psyche is ravaged by more than half a century of consistent conflict, and the byproduct is art that evokes the quiet hysteria of a regularly beaten child. As in Virginia Woolfâs masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway, life and art seem affected by a persistent spectral quality; something that effervesces through temporalities. This phenomenon, exacerbated by continued conflict, is what Jacques Derrida calls hauntology, a term that has largely evaded sufficient definition in its varied use across multiple disciplines. For the purpose of this article, let us defend the definition of hauntology as such: the continued presence of an unreal past, an undefinable present, and an uncertain future within the cultural spirit, particularly as it relates to the production of art. In the scope of hauntology, time is enigmatic and defies proper containment. Essences of a phenomenological experience of temporality bleed into one another, warping the objective with the subjective.
Mark Fisher describes haunting as âintrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenization of time and space. It happens when a place is stained by time, or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time,â (Fisher 19). This is the very root of nostalgia, built from the ancient Greek words nostos and algos, meaning âto returnâ and âpain,â respectively. Like the phantom pain of an amputee, the intrinsic quality of nostalgia, or the pain of returning, is one that violates the laws of linearity. Neoclassicism, then, is a kind of necromancy pulling at specters of the past and reworking them into new monstrous forms.
Parallel to Neoclassicism in the visual arts was the Gothic style in the rhetorical arts. Thirteen years after Jacques Louis Davidâs Napoleon Crossing the Alps is finished, Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus in 1818. Therein lies the esprit de corps of early 19th century western Europe: the resurrection of the past and its ideals, and the consequences of such. Frankensteinâs monster says, âWhen I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?â (Shelley, 1818). His monstrosity, then, is not defined only by the superficial qualities of a beast (insatiable hunger, carnal lusts, etc) but of his damnable imitation of man. The monster recognizesâthough ironically man does notâthat he is a perversion of man. The dead do not belong with the living. This is a common theme in Gothic literature. Consider Bram Stokerâs Dracula, or Emily BrontĂŤâs Wuthering Heights. Both deal in the essential wrongness of relics from the past; Dracula induces an ageless fear, while Catherine and Heathcliffâs temperamental spirits plague the estate. The only way to defeat a monster is to banish it back to its own time. Thus temporality is essential to the ghost story; cannot function without the discomfort of timeâs disjointment.
Why, then, do we endeavor to return to the pain of the past? What compels us backwards, to resurrect the ghosts of history and culture? Neoclassicism is an Enlightenment-era philosophy, though the idealization of a supposed lost history is far older.
Willy Wonka, along with other recycled IPs, are iconological to the contemporary consumer. Just as a lily was a recognizable symbol for the Virgin Mary, Wonka is an effigy evocative of a familiar narrative. Neoclassicism is largely seen as a cultural reaction to the rising popularity of the Rococo and Baroque styles, which were both novel and characterized by extravagance and emotion. Two opposing philosophies fighting for cultural dominance: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The greater telos of art history is cyclical or, more accurately, reactive. Styles, though perhaps not necessarily in execution, are at least seminally responsive to its predecessor and incubated by the political environment.
The year is 2005. Twenty days into the new year, George W. Bush is inaugurated for his second presidential term. Three weeks later, North Korea announces it possesses nuclear weapons. Pope John Paul II dies and is succeeded by Benedict XVI. Hurricane Katrina kills over 1,000 people and causes over $100 billion in damage. YouTube is launched on Valentineâs Day in Silicon Valley, and two days later the Kyoto Protocol goes into effect. There are coordinated terrorist bombings in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan. Stephanie Meyer publishes Twilight. Amidst a version of western culture so mired in the War on Terror, Johnny Depp stars in the second film adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
From the original source material of Roald Dahl, âA little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.â And nonsense it is. From the original title, three variants: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to simply Wonka. Like much of the culture industryâs production line, each new attempt on the source materialâs intellectual property is more derivative than the last. We cling to these familiar palimpsests like tattered and drool-ridden blankets. It is not only the aesthetic culpability of industry insiders panning through the cultural backlog for flecks of a goldmine. From retelling to revival, there is nothing new under the sun; consumer behavior indicates what sells is refurbished goods. Millennials squak over nostalgia collections and flock to online queues in order to claim their status as 90s Kid cognoscenti in the form of a lip gloss or a backpack. But this is not the preservation of culture, it is a golem created from the clay of consumer fetishism and the incantations of Neoclassicism: take me back, damn you!
At the nucleus, Neoclassicism and its variantsâsimple pastiche and palimpsestâare ghost stories. They are moral tales of what has been lost and what might still be gained. Nostalgia makes for an effective marketing strategy; it demands none of the risk associated with new IP, and acts as the guarantor for easy money. Art is especially lazy lately. It seems like most writers are interested in mining trends in order to sell their work; directors and screenwriters seek to work smarter by adapting instead of creating; musicians are so indentured to the volatile whims of streaming platforms and algorithmic success that most new music is produced for the purpose of TikTok dances. Art has always been relational to its sociopolitical and cultural environment. Michelangeloâs Sistine Chapel was a four-year-long project in which he complained incessantly of neck pains and the extortionate demands of the Papacy after initial refusals of commission (of course, there are and always will be cowboys). But now there is no God but Capital, and art suffers in its light. Even the greatest creative act, the act of sex, is sterilized by the ability or inability to market its charms.
In his article âWhat is Hauntology?â Mark Fisher states, âThe actual future would not be popular modernism, but populist conservatism: the creative destruction unleashed by the forces of business on the one hand, the return to familiar aesthetic and cultural forms on the other,â (Fisher 18). This is the essence of Neoclassicism.
It is the psychology of the Neoclassical mind that yearns for an imagined past. The Southern Renaissance, in its Greco-Roman fetish, did not spawn from centuries of bleak, artless life; on the contrary, medieval European art was vast and often just as luxurious. In fact, the Renaissance receives its name retrospectively by Vasari in the 16th century, nearly two hundred years after the supposed rebirth of culture. But the narrative surrounding this purported aesthetic diaspora prevails in spite of truth. In some ways, this is a stratagem of hope. Our world has gone to hell, but we can RETVRN. Traditionalists espousements of such ahistorical nonsense predates the Peloponnesian War. Even the ancient world had its own Golden Ages of yoreâthe Deleuzian Urstaatâimmortalized in the tales of Homer or Virgil.
Et in Arcadia ego, Poussin, 1637-38
Et in Arcadia ego: Even in Arcadia, there I am
Even Paradise I am alive. The memento mori is one of the oldest iconographic traditions that poses an essential dialectic: life and death. One cannot exist without the other. But the epitaph of Poussinâs grave does not only connote the inescapable mortality found even in paradise; it speaks to the inability of all paradises to cure all wretched and lovely elements of humanityâwhat Hegel would call Dasein. Think of the opiate-user who chases a high that can remove him from the bounds of consciousness, only to find it temporary and insufficient. There is no abandoning life fully, even in madness.
Yet the masses seek indelicate oblivion, to be coddled as shaken infants into bliss. War wounds another world, yet it bleeds onto us in this one. I want my mind transformed by fantasy and to escape through a portal into an otherworldly niche. Yet even submerged in the Dahlian nonsense, we arrive back at ourselves, back to mortality. Nostalgia is a narcotic, an intentional shift in time and space, to the malleable and primordial clay of memory, to paradise. It feels more grounded in reality than fantasies of the future, which are of course untold, though it is similarly distorted by our own projections. Cope and seethe.
The subjects of Poussinâs imagining of Arcadia retreat to an eternal paradise not functionally dissimilar from Willy Wonkaâs Chocolate Factory in their shared edenic splendor far kept from the vices of man. It is Charlieâs traditional values that proves his superiority over the other golden ticket winnersâ lack thereof. It is more a trial of moral convictions than a charitable tour, and one that results in Charlieâs promotion to Wonka successor; his future title is conditioned upon upholding such traditional values. In admonishing the behavior of his entitled peers, he is awarded the prize not just of factory ownership, but of ushering the past into the future. Even in paradise, the golden ticket winners cannot escape the foibles of man.
Neoclassicism, then, is a wish fulfillment. It is a balm to the open wound of instability when propaganda is the cauterizing knife, the individualâs aesthetic propaganda.
Propaganda, Christopher Lasch writes in The Culture of Narcissism, âseeks to create in the public a chronic sense of crisis, which in turn justifies the expansion of executive power and the secrecy surrounding it.â But propaganda is multifaceted, and especially adaptable to its contemporary political needs. Particularly in a period of history where the public is more attuned to political machinations but also more susceptible to them, there is more striation in the latitudes of acceptance. In order to demonstrate these subtleties, let us compare several works of propaganda.
Napoleon Crossing the Alps, Jacques Louis David, 1801-05, oil on canvas
In Jacques Louis Davidâs Napoleon Crossing the Alps, a series strongly associated with French Baroque Neoclassicism, Napoleon is depicted in the heat of battle, fierce atop his righteous white horse, gazing directly at both his dissenters and supporters to arouse supplication in the face of his military indomitability. Of course, from a metahistorical perspective, we most commonly associate Napoleon with his short stature. But the image suggests a different story, one of virility and glory. It is a fearsome portrait, likeness be damned. The dynamism and direct line of his gaze would have been immediately compelling to the intended audience, which was not in fact French, but rather Spanish. Such flattery was commissioned by King Charles IV of Spain via proxy as a token of friendship between the newly allied France and Spain. In Bonaparteâs specifications for David, he requested he be depicted as âcalm, mounted on a fiery steed.â The product is quintessential imperial propaganda: the proverbial light of a tranquil, even-tempered leader in the dark madness of revolution. It is a promise and a threat in one. Intrepid and evergreen.
Consider the American tradition of Neoclassicism, the foundings of which were largely contemporaneous. Neoclassicism, as weâve established, is a reactionary movement to political and social unrest. Never has there been a more famous instance of unrest than the Revolutionary War and the subsequent creation of the United States of America in the late 18th century. It should come as no surprise that the founding fathersâ architectural inspiration for government buildings was sourced not only from Greco-Roman antiquity, but from the parallel Neoclassical movements of later Europe. Its dome and oculus, completed in the mid-19th century, are reminiscent of the Pantheon, which was and still is representative of the nascent technology of ancient Rome, while its body is stylized after the French Revolutionary style. The syncretism of past and presentâof empire and democracyâcemented, literally, the future reputation of the United States.
Instead of on horseback, contemporary visual propaganda consists of press releases of President Joe Biden standing erect before his constituency. Take, for example, the following image posted by Bidenâs official Instagram account on January 15, 2024 for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Instagram post, @joebiden, Jan. 15, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/C2IEDjGMzCz/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
By placing himself in shared center with a monument of Civil Rights leader Dr. King, he is emphasizing both his commitment to the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement as well as his strength. His second-in-command, Vice President Kamala Harris, defers to him in look and stance. While his lines are fairly parallel, Harris leans toward him in gentle contrapposto. She looks upon not MLK, but President Biden. It is a carefully constructed narrative that communicates authority and respect toward race issues: two weaknesses of both of Bidenâs election campaigns. One does not need to wonder why Biden is usually depicted in stasis when his health is a common concern. Light propaganda is the calamine lotion for the rash of Bidenâs frequent fallsâliterally and figurativelyâitched incessantly by his political opponents. His erect stature harkens to marble statues of Roman patricians, unyielding and immovable. This is the general stance of the Biden administration at large: to convey permanency in the wake of global uncertainty.
But these are much more overt tools of swaying public opinion, and as such are subject to scrutiny immediately upon viewing. This kind of propaganda is a late-stage tool, one that redirects public outrage and ennui to the right prescriptionâa specific politician, a political movement, or an entire political party. When an image of Napoleon connotes themes of the ancient world, it is leading the viewer not only to the reign of Bonaparte but to the spoils of imperialism. Such an association can only be made after it is carefully woven into the fabric of society.
Nostalgia is not just a violation of temporality, but a weapon and symptom both of state consciousness. This is not a schizoid conspiracy of cabals in Hollywood, but a scholarly observation of how historical trends cycle ad infinitum. Works of art like Wonka, in all the eponymous characterâs iterations, are comparable to what Reza Negarestani would call âxenolithic artifacts.â It is a palimpsest, but retains the phantoms of its predecessors as we Homo sapiens retain vestiges of our evolutionary ancestors. Reiterations of pre-existing IP is not just âkitschy retroâ per Fisherâs discourse on hauntology in film, but is an expected cultural reaction that coincides with familiar political factors. As market-friendly as it is to submit nostalgia-porn to the overall cultural demandâafter all, Hollywood is simply adhering to classic economic theoryâthis is not a new phenomenon; art has never been so commodifiable as it is now.
Much of art through the course of history was either plainly propagandistic or catered to the tastes of the wealthy, and regardless almost always had rich patronage. It is true that art has become infinitely more accessible in the last century, but it is not because of populist taste that we are witnessing the constant revival and revitalization of bygone eras. It is the response of the populace to access control over the future through a manipulated ideal of the past where such chaos was not yet begotten, irrespective of the truth to such a fabricated reality, and it is the response of populace to seek an interlude from the instability lest they be rent asunder by their witnessing great horror. The world is torn apart by the symbolic gesture of Super Bowls concurrent with the slaughter of thousands in Rafah; it is not enough to turn the other cheek, one must face another direction entirely. In the soil of uncertainty and seed of nostalgia, blooms the soporific rose of a Neoclassical revival. What a terrible price to pay for a Chalamet feature film.