Of the wealth of colourful and unforgettable characters created by Roald Dahl, I don't think there's one he ever did dirtier than Mike Teavee.
You'll recall how, in Dahl's 1964 novel Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Mike was the fourth child to uncover one of Willy Wonka's elusive Golden Tickets, and also the fourth to be eliminated in Wonka's gruesome game of moral knockout. His particular vice was that he worshipped the chattering cyclops and the salaciously violent imagery it dangled before him; his undoing sprung from his being so enraptured with the television signal that he wanted to become one with it. He jumped at the opportunity to be the very first human to be sent via television, using the sinister experimental technology in Wonka's lab, and was seemingly unbothered when it caused him to come out a whole lot tinier at the other end. The television dominated him so that he allowed it to consume him and to literally diminish him. As was by then an established pattern in Dahl's story, his mishap was succeeded by an interlude from the Oompa Loompas, showing up to be our Greek chorus and to reflect, with minimal sensitivity, on the moral ramifications of what we'd just read. They did so through a humorous polemic about the war between television image and literature for a child's soul, a war that Dahl evidently still deemed relevant 24 years later, when he wrote Matilda (I've long suspected that Matilda's brother, Michael, was so-named as a nod to Dahl's more notorious television junkie). In the words of the Oompa Loompas, this is what television does to the mind of a callow spectator:
"His brain becomes as soft as cheese!His powers of thinking rust and freeze!He cannot think - he only sees!"
It's here that I detect a certain disingenuousness in Dahl's rhetoric. In his eagerness to condemn the presumed effects of television-binging on the young and the impressionable, he does a terrible disservice to the character of Mike. The Oompa Loompas' insistence that television impairs the viewer's ability to think is not exactly borne out by Mike himself, who is actually quite a bright and perceptive young man. If you pay attention to Mike, you'll notice he has a tendency to challenge Wonka whenever the baffling old confectioner is telling the group something fishy or that blatantly doesn't add up. In particular, he is the one character who picks up on the disturbing contradiction in Wonka's ethos, and has the guts to call him out on it - when Wonka condemns Violet's gum chewing habit as disgusting, Mike asks him, not at all unreasonably, why he contributes to the problem by manufacturing gum in the first place. Wonka ducks out of answering by pretending not to have understood Mike, claiming that he is mumbling. I realise that the disservice Dahl does to Mike is not altogether dissimilar to the way Wonka regards him - he gets around the character's pesky inquisitiveness, and his willingness to challenge adult authority, by simply ignoring it altogether. Mike's problem, so far as Wonka was concerned, wasn't that he was unable to think, but that he was too much of an independent thinker. That's why he knew the little fucker was going down.
But therein lies a problem. Mike is a smart child, and as such he really should have known better than to transport himself via Wonka's broadcasting device. He'd already observed the effect it had on a bar of chocolate, and should have anticipated that it might do something similar to his own body. Yet somehow he couldn't help himself. The desire to forge a more intimate link with his precious television was too overwhelming. Mike might have been bright and perceptive, but the one thing he couldn't wrap his head around, I suppose, was consequence. At first, Mike doesn't care about his severely diminished size because, as he points out, it needn't interfere with his day-to-day aspirations of watching endless television. It's only when Mr Teavee, appalled at what the technology has done to his son, threatens to get rid of the family's set that Mike comes up against a consequence he actually understands. He reacts as any child his age would, by throwing a tantrum (of course, he doesn't have a lot of weight to throw around any more). Fundamentally, he is a child, and he's at his most comfortable living in a fantasy world - but it is, as Dahl is keen to stress, the wrong sort of fantasy that Mike occupies. His is a corrupted state of childhood make-believe, not the pure unleashing of imaginative wonder cultivated by Wonka and his creations. Dahl's distaste for the character of Mike is at its most salient in the implication that prolonged exposure to television has left him desensitised to violence. Mike not only watches a lot of television, he likes to emulate the violent spectacle he sees therein with his vast collection of toy guns, which he takes strapped around his body to the factory with him. All that savagery passed off as entertainment has led him to believe that such violence is fun and aspirational. Says Mike, shortly after finding his Golden Ticket:
"They’re terrific, those gangsters! Especially when they start pumping each other full of lead, or flashing the old stilettos, or giving each other the one-two-three with their knuckledusters! Gosh, what wouldn’t I give to be doing that myself! It’s the life, I tell you! It’s terrific!”’
What Mike says here is all bluster, of course. He's a 9-year-old child, he has no first-hand experience with such things and he couldn't possibly understand what he's talking about. If we're going to condemn any of the characters for their callous disregard for life, then I would be at pains to point out that no one in the story is more savage and brutal than Mr Wonka himself. Wonka is a psychopath of the highest order. Depending on what version of the story you're experiencing, he might be a psychopath with a wad of charisma, or a psychopath with a fantastical, child-like ability to make the impossible possible, but a psychopath nevertheless. He gets off on abusing children, and on scarring them both physically and mentally. They were really rotten kids, you say? Meh. What it basically comes down is he's obese, she's orally fixated, she's a daddy's girl and he has ADHD. Last time I checked those were not war crimes, Wonka.
I realise of course that such thinking would be terribly out of the spirit of Dahl's novel. It is a children's morality tale, committed and uncompromising in its ghoulishness, and it appeals to an especially visceral child's-eye comprehension of morality, one in which the various excesses represented by the bad nuts seem reasonably inviting of cosmic judgement. To consume it according to any level of adult scrutiny is to have missed the point. Wonka is a higher power who operates above the law, and all laws of the universe; he assesses children according to their childhood purity, and the degree to which they remain uncorrupted by the pursuit of worldly gratification and by the shaky examples of the adults around them. Only those who retain that purity can access the full, world-changing splendour the factory has to offer. Yes, I understand that. But I'm allowed to feel for those bad kids all the same. For me it was always the bad nuts, and not Charlie or Wonka, who were the real beating heart of the tale. Charlie was merely a cipher with an elongated sob story; it was in the cautionary examples of Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregarde, Veruca Salt and Mike Teavee that you could see bits and pieces of yourself, enjoy a giggle at your own expense, and maybe feel the sting of Dahl poking you a little too pointedly in the ribs. Let's face it - the overwhelming majority of us would not have survived Wonka's factory tour. I can only wonder for what vice Wonka would have judged and horrifically punished the younger me? Nail-biting, I'm guessing.
Which of the two big budget Hollywood takes on Dahl's book you prefer might well depend on which you grew up with, but in my experience, most prefer the 1971 Mel Stuart film starring Gene Wilder (Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory) to the 2005 Tim Burton film starring Johnny Depp (Charlie and The Chocolate Factory), which is a divisive beast all over. I see little reason to quarrel with that - in most regards I too prefer the 1971 film. And yet I will admit that, with all due respect to Paris Themmen, the 2005 Mike portrayed by Jordan Fry will forever strike me as the definitive take on the character. I always loved how John August's script and Fry's performance honed in on that very under-championed aspect of Mike - his shrewdness and his willingness to challenge Wonka - and brought it to the forefront of his characterisation. This Mike is a genius, and I am totally here for it. He is by far the smartest of the five winners, as reflected in the unconventional means through which he secures his Golden Ticket. But more than simply call Wonka out whenever he dispenses questionable information, Mike '05 presents a challenge to Wonka's very ethos, in that he vocally dislikes chocolate and dismisses the factory's various experiments and flights of fancy as the height of insignificance. I believe this was motivated by the fact that he survives the tour
longer than any other child besides Charlie, thus the idea was to
give him an arc in which he serves as a more direct antagonist to Wonka
(and by extension Charlie, although the two have little interaction).
From the start, Depp's Wonka appears to recognise a natural adversary in
Mike; he despises all four of the bad nuts (compared to the book, where
Wonka greeted all of the ticket winners with boundless
enthusiasm, here he's not disguising the fact that he doesn't want any
of these brats inside his factory), but there's a particularly sinister
deliberation in how he turns and acknowledges Mike as "the little devil
who cracked the system". Later in the film, it becomes apparent that Wonka's exceptional dislike for Mike is exacerbated by how reminiscent his candy aversion is of the stance his father attempted to impress on him growing up. In this version, when Mike meets his fate in the Television Room, he's basically getting Wonka's daddy issues taken out on him, poor kid.
Mike's nationality was not specified in the book, but adaptations have consistently portrayed him as American. Just as Veruca Salt works as a perfectly grotesque caricature of British privilege [1], so too does Mike serve as an appealing shorthand for an anger and destructive fascination baked deep into the bones of the American psyche. The 1971 film substitutes his fixation on gangster movies with one on cowboys and westerns, recalling America's violent origins, while the 2005 film has him hail from Denver, Colorado, a move obviously designed to evoke uncomfortable associations with the then-recent Columbine massacre. The 2013 West End musical relocates the Teavee household to a more nondescript American "suburbia", one evocative of mid-century sitcoms, in which Mrs Teavee's efforts to present her family as conventional and functional are persistently undermined by Mike's aggressively hyperactive outbursts, and her own ill-disguised admissions of the chaos she struggles to rein in on a daily basis. Here, the Teavees inhabit a world that, Mike's modern technological prowess notwithstanding, seems stranded in a vacuous nostalgia for a mythical America of the 1950s (in the song, "Strike That, Reverse It", Wonka even mocks Mrs Teavee for being "dressed for 1958"), clearly a facade designed to gloss over the violent disorder and general indifference that characterises their everyday reality. The Broadway version goes a step further, reworking the Teavees' introduction with a revised song, "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?", to make the character directly analogous to Donald Trump (poor Mike; he absolutely did not deserve that comparison). While I've no doubt that Dahl intended for his readers to see TV as the corruptive presence in Mike's life, with other depictions there tends to be more of a chicken and egg situation - did TV (and, in the more contemporary adaptations, video games/social media) make him so angry or is he simply using them to channel a rage that was already there, and possibly reflective of the broader cultural malaise in which he's been raised? A bit of both, maybe?
I have a particular sympathy for the Mike from the 2005 film. In my view, he's not such a bad kid. Rather, he's a highly precocious child, starved for stimulation and frustrated with a world that perpetually misunderstands him. Whereas Mike '71 was very much on the wavelength of the people who'd raised him - his
father had promised him a real gun as soon as he turned 12 and
his mother seemed inexplicably proud of the fact that he'd only ever
eaten off TV trays, never at the table - with Mike '05 there's a visible disconnect between himself and his parents. The very first thing we hear from his father's lips is, "Most of the time I don't know what he's talking about." We get no insight into what Mike's life at school is like, but it's obvious that at home he isn't getting a lot of affirmation and his parents don't know how to relate to him or to support him in using his talents constructively. Mike's intelligence has left him isolated and unable to connect with other people, and while I'm not saying I think the level of anger he exhibits is healthy, I feel that I can comprehend where it comes from. It's why the running gag of Wonka pretending not to understand Mike, though lifted from the book and present in most adaptations, strikes such a raw nerve with me in this version; I get the impression it's a variant on the type of response Mike's already come up against a lot in his short time, only much more knowingly taunting. Alas, due to the nature of the story, the film is on Wonka's side - Mike's intelligence is regarded as a liability, the thing that disqualifies him from getting to participate in Wonka's candy-coated utopia, and I find that just a little disheartening.
This, friends, is what I will henceforth refer to as The Sideshow Bob Effect. When a character is blatantly the
smartest one in the room, yet their intelligence is not valued, even regarded as a problem in itself, and everyone else insists on treating them like bloody shit...you can bet your bottom dollar that I am going to sympathise with that character. Call it a personal weakness. Bob and Mike might have opposing views on the worthiness of the chattering cylcops, but they are very much kindred spirits at heart. They each fought the status quo, and the status quo won. They are truly my people.
On the whole, my feelings toward Burton's version of the story can be described as ludicrously ambivalent. The parts I like about the movie (ie: Mike and the other bad nuts), I really, really like. The parts I don't like I find downright repugnant. For example, I do not like Depp's take on Wonka in the slightest. It is a singularly unpleasant performance, and yet, one that I can't claim clashes terribly with my own interpretation of the character. For Wonka is a singularly unpleasant person, and that is something Burton and Depp understood all too well. Their goal was clearly to bring out the nastier elements embedded in Dahl's novel, in contrast to the more whimsical approach of the 1971 film. And so they do. Tonally, it all goes a bit lopsided - sure, Wonka is creepy and evil, but you still need to balance that out with his enigmatic, visionary side. Otherwise, is there really any gratification to be had in watching Charlie embrace him and agree to follow in his footsteps? I don't want Charlie to emulate this Wonka. I don't think this Wonka should be allowed within 15 feet of any children, period (actually, no Wonka should, but this one's a particularly dire example).
What is lacking in the Burton film is fun. The 1971 film leans into the high camp of the scenario, and it works a treat - there, when Veruca goes down the garbage chute, having been judged as a "bad egg" (geese and not squirrels are Wonka's animal assistants in this version), and her dad wilfully throws himself down after her (inadvertently outing himself as another "bad egg" in the process), it's as hilarious as it is horrifying. Wilder's Wonka is easily the rottenest egg of them all, for his buoyant lack of concern about the possibility that the father and daughter might end up in the incinerator - and yet, you giggle, and you're gleefully aware of your own complicit nastiness in giggling. The 2005 film, by comparison, is high on cruelty and bitterness, light on any genuine twisted joy - there, when Veruca is deemed a "bad nut" and hauled off by a scurry of malevolent squirrels to a chute leading to the factory incinerator, I can't help but ponder what a profoundly horrible situation this is and wonder why Wonka does nothing to stop it. Is he really so unmoved at the thought of having this child's death on his conscience? Am I giving him too much credit in presuming he has a conscience at all? The Burton film is simply cold. Not helping matters is that I don't particularly like this take on Charlie either, even if it is closer to Dahl's text than the 1971 film. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I positively resent this Charlie. I do not intend that as a knock on Freddie Highmore, who does only what the script requires of him, but the requirements it makes are truly fatal. In giving flesh and form to Charlie's exaggerated goodness, and choosing to exaggerate it further, it teases out an element that may well have always been latent in Dahl's text, but becomes here impossible to ignore - that Charlie is a wildly condescending depiction of a child living in poverty, assumed to be angelic, uncomplaining and doggedly altruistic, as opposed to as imperfect and human as the rest of us. The Stuart film moved to make Charlie (played by Peter Ostrum) a little less innocent and a little more of a brat (but still recognisably a good nut, compared to the other contest winners), a move that reportedly angered Dahl, but that I personally consider quite prudent. Ostrum's Charlie feels real and relatable, a kid with just the slightest whiff of potential for wrongdoing, but who overcomes it and earns his happy ending. Highmore's Charlie feels cloying, manipulative and inauthentic, and I get no satisfaction from seeing him triumph. Team Teavee to the finish, I'm sorry.
Oh, but I loved the bad kids. The bad kids, and the talented young actors who portrayed them, were what really redeemed this picture for me. They deserved better. All of them. But especially Mike.
Isn't it weird how EVERY one of the winners happened to be an only child? I mean, what were the odds?
Augustus, admittedly, hasn't changed much - he's still Fat-Shaming Incarnate, with no attempt to add any new depth or dimension to his character (but then he doesn't last long anyhow). Veruca likewise isn't wildly different, in terms of what she does and what she represents, but I enjoy Julia Winter's more subdued, calculating take on the character (and I say that as a great admirer of Veruca '71, as portrayed by Julie Dawn Cole) - this Veruca has the face of a cherub, only showing her heated entitlement very intermittently. The way Burton's film was able to expand on Violet and Mike, bringing them more into line with kids of the 21st century, was a welcome move - here, Violet's gum-chewing is no longer treated as the problem in of itself, but rather symptomatic of a greater toxicity, and the extent to which her mother has molded her into a reflection of her own glory-seeking ego (something carried over into the 2013 musical, where Violet was a pawn in her father's aspirations for fame). As for Mike, he's now extremely tech-savvy, in ways that baffle his elders and put them to shame.
Mike explains to the press how he found his Golden Ticket:
"All you had to do was check the manufacturing dates, offset by weather, and the derivative of the Nikkei Index. A retard could figure it out."
Okay, I'll admit that Mike '05 did do one thing that was very wrong. He should not have used the "R" word, and if he were my child I would have had some harsh words for him there. That much does not reflect well on him, fine. But in all other regards this kid should be celebrated, not beaten down.
In defence of Mike '05, I will point out that he's seldom seen to take his violent energies out on anything that's actually going to feel pain. He gets incredibly worked up during his gaming session, but that's all against computer graphics, not real living things. He also destroys a candy pumpkin in Wonka's chocolate room; when challenged by his father, he indicates that this is how he's inclined to enjoy candy in lieu of eating it. But it's not like Mike is ever violent toward other children, or to animals (more than you can say for Wonka, who apparently has cows strung up and whipped as part of his production process [2]). Heck, he's not even verbally antagonistic to other children - he just doesn't connect with them, period. Whenever one of his fellow bad nuts goes down, he always looks concerned about it; he gets no sadistic pleasure out of watching people suffer. The worst we ever see him do is aggressively shove a couple of Oompa Loompas aside when he's running through the Television Room. And despite being the film's main antagonist, for all intents and purposes, Mike poses no meaningful threat to Wonka - he's not trying to get the factory shut down or anything, he just has strong reservations about the value of Wonka's product and isn't impressed with what he sees. Mike '71 was, in theory, more of an active threat to Wonka, since he and his mother were conspiring to smuggle secrets out of the factory and sell them to Slugworth (unaware that this was itself part of Wonka's morality test). In the end I can't help but feel that Mike '05 is punished for his vicious non-conformity more than anything - he's a kid who doesn't like candy, and boy howdy, what could be more abhorrent and unnatural than that?
A common charge I've seen made against Mike '05 is that, for all his
criticisms of Wonka, he isn't exactly accomplishing anything
constructive with his own brainpower. He calls candy a waste of time,
but mostly likes to fill his own playing gory video games. He revels in
destruction and understands nothing of the joy of creation, or of making
others happy. And that's true enough. But I would counter that Mike is only
9 years old [3], and this isn't the be-all and end-all of what he'll be doing with his life; he has plenty of time in which to figure out how to usefully apply his knowledge. No, I think
the movie's real problem with Mike is that he's lost touch with what it
means to be a child; his pragmatism and his tech-savviness have
distanced him from the kind of innocent wonder that gives meaning to
Charlie's being. This much is spelled out by Mr Teavee, who, far from
expressing pride at having sired such a brilliant child, laments that, "Kids these days, what with all the technology...it doesn't
seem like they stay kids very long." Compared to other depictions of Mike, who at least occupied their own deranged, media-fuelled fantasy spaces, Mike '05 insists on seeing the world through a dogged rationality that's presented as cynical and at odds with Wonka's particular brand of virtuosity. The escapism he seeks, in first-person shooter games, is all geared toward venting his negative emotions, not elevating his imagination to exhilarating new heights. Mike would like to be able to change the world for the better, as is indicated during the Television Room sequence, but his rationality, and his assertion that frivolity should never enter into it is what leads (not entirely convincingly) to his downfall. His total disconnect from the childhood sphere is epitomised in his having no palate for chocolate, prompting George Bucket to decry the very notion of this self-confessed chocolate-hater gaining access to Wonka's candy Xanadu in the first place. To some, Mike comes across as a dog in a manger, since he has no use for the factory's product yet insists on taking up a place in the tour anyway. One could argue that Mike doesn't have to like eating the stuff to have a legitimate interest in the technicalities of how chocolate is made, but I suspect that what's actually driving Mike is (not unlike Violet) the need to prove himself. Wonka's contest gave him the opportunity to demonstrate his prowess and to stand out, and he took it. Well, good for him. Something tells me he wasn't getting the challenge he craved from his prosaic home life.
It would be disingenuous of me to not acknowledge that a love of candy is obviously not enough to get you far in Wonka's Xanadu, as we observed in his treatment of Augustus. Augustus certainly did not believe that candy was a waste of time, and was eager to let Wonka know how much his product mattered to him, but Wonka felt only contempt for him. For Augustus it was all about the
indulgence of carnal desire, not the opening of the mind to fresh
possibilities, so as far as Wonka was concerned he misused the tremendous gifts he'd given to the world. The kid to whom Mike stands diametrically opposed is obviously Charlie, who embodies all of the essential childhood virtues that Mike himself has turned his back on - not only does he love candy, he regards it with a religious reverence. It takes a while, but this does eventually give way to Mike and Charlie's only two-way exchange of the picture (even then, they don't actually make eye contact). During the glass elevator tour, Mike hits Wonka with his ultimate challenge, and asks why everything within his factory is completely pointless; Charlie
responds with what is, presumably, intended as the film's big moral takeaway (aside from that stuff about family it tacked on rather awkwardly through its extended epilogue):
"Candy doesn't have to have a point. That's why it's candy."
Oh shut up, Charlie.
Burton's film would like for us to believe that Mike's lack of a sweet tooth is a sign of moral failing on his part. But...it's not. It really isn't. I suppose my sympathies for Mike are cemented by this one prevalent thread of cynicism I have - is the candy manufactured by Wonka really as sacred and as worthy of veneration as both Charlie and the narrative assume? I do not believe that Burton's telling makes out the case that it is. There is, very clearly, an ugly, less idyllic side to Wonka's production. By that, I allude not just to the fact that four children and one adult met with incredibly horrible accidents in his factory's walls, and that it runs on arguable slave labour and unethical experimentation (I'm not centring on the Oompa Loompas in this entry, but they are their own particular hornets' nest). Wonka's high-minded claims about his everlasting gobstoppers notwithstanding, he doesn't bestow his creations upon the world because he's a generous guy who's all about giving - at the end of the day, his is a business like any other, there's profit to be had, and his business is going to callously hurt the little people in pursuit of said profit. In the Burton film, the chocolate factory is explicitly linked to the same exploitative capitalistic system that's already caused the Buckets so much harm - Mr Bucket initially works in a toothpaste factory, but loses his job when the surge in sales of Wonka-brand candies leads to an increase in tooth decay, from which the toothpaste factory profits handsomely and then decides to replace a part of its workforce with upgraded technology. Wonka might have a deeper ulterior motive, in using the contest to locate an heir, but let's face it, the whole thing is also an ingenious means of increasing his own financial gain. Mike doesn't play by the rules of Wonka's game, and Wonka's early disdain for him is based on the fact that he "cracked the system", ie: he figured out how to get a ticket while contributing only the bare minimum in terms of lining Wonka's already deep-filled pockets. Wonka's candy, and the consumption thereof, represents the status quo; Charlie's devoted consumerism, and his unwavering trust in the Wonka brand, are equated with goodness and purity, while Mike is the one character who questions what it fundamentally achieves. I do not think he is wrong to do so. Unfortunately but unavoidably, he ends up paying the price.
It's here that Burton's film runs into an inevitable problem with Mike, in that it doubles down on the character's intelligence but the story ultimately still requires him to do the stupid in the Television Room and to transport himself via Wonka's device, despite his just having seen a demonstration of how it makes everything it teleports smaller. Book Mike and Mike from the 1971 film might not have cared terribly about this highly conspicuous consequence, but Fry's Mike is so smart and so serious-minded that it's harder to justify in his case. I remember watching this film for the first time back in 2005, and as we edged closer to that dreaded television sequence I was very consciously pondering how they were going pull this off. As it turns out, they attempted to make it into a matter of hubris - Mike '05 isn't motivated by giddy recklessness, but by his frustration with Wonka and his desire to demonstrate that his mind should be on more important issues than the proliferation of candy. Nice try, but I don't think it quite succeeds. It still requires Mike to disregard the fact that it makes things smaller, and we don't get sufficient insight into his thought processes, in this particular moment, to account for why he would do that. Mike '05 is, notably, the only version of the character who seems to immediately regret his decision to go through the transporter - most other Mikes at least enjoy the actual experience of appearing on Wonka's television, but for Fry's Mike it turns into an all-out nightmare from the get-go, as he is attacked and terrorised by the Oompa Loompas. Like all of the bad nut disposals in the Burton film, the sequence is ugly and mean-spirited without being much fun (ordinarily I would relish a Psycho homage, but not here - leave Norman out of this, please).
What do the Oompa Loompas have to say about Mike this time, as they jam up his skull with gratuitous trauma?
"His brain becomes as soft as cheese!His thinking powers rust and freeze!He cannot think - he only sees!"
Goddamnit, seriously?
The book's disregard for Mike's intelligence I can view as a curious foible, partially mitigated by the wittiness of Dahl's rhyme. Burton's film, I feel, has absolutely no excuse. It made Teavee's intelligence his most prominent trait; wherever his faults might lie (and to be sure, he does have them), it's blatantly more complicated than the same "TV makes you stupid!" hyperbole it ultimately still expects us to swallow. The lyrics that could be considered applicable to Mike '05 are the particular accusation that, "He can no longer understand a fairy tale, a fairyland," in reference to Mike's pragmatism and his unwillingness to indulge the fanciful stirrings championed by Wonka and Charlie. The rest of it refuses, almost wilfully, to take into account the specific ideas embodied and articulated by Mike, and as the character's pay-off, it merely aggravates. Like Wonka himself, it pretends it hasn't heard Mike and abruptly dismisses him.
So yes. Having expanded on Mike's character so intriguingly, and having awarded him with all that juicy extra nuance, Burton's film went on to do him even dirtier than Dahl. Fundamentally, it remained bound by the framework of Dahl's story, and struggled when it came to fudging his expansion into that pre-determined trajectory. It doesn't stop there, however. What happens to Mike next is also largely in adherence with Dahl's text - Wonka sends him to the taffy-puller to be gruesomely tortured and disfigured. And yet Burton's film still insists on making Mike the butt of the final joke involving the bad nuts, in a way not present in the source material. In Dahl's book, Wonka at least had the decency to assure us that the freakishly spindly Mike would be alright, since he would be sought after by every basketball team in the world. Such reassurance is denied to Fry's Mike. During the sequence where each of the bad nuts leaves the factory with their accompanying parent, I always found it so harrowing that Mike is the only child who doesn't exchange any words with his father. It felt like rubbing salt into the wound, a reminder that, on top of everything else, their communication issues remain unsolved and would likely fester going forward. In the meantime, what must be simmering in the mind of Mr Teavee? Well, we can speculate.
I'll profess to deriving greater satisfaction, in terms of how Mike ends up, from neither Dahl's book OR either of the movie adaptations, but from the West End musical. The Mike of the West End could be considered an amalgamation of the character's various manifestations over the years, with definite shades of the 2005 Mike in there - this version of the character also vocally dislikes chocolate, and Wonka, likes screaming "Die!" at the screen while playing video games, and obtained his ticket through unorthodox means that enabled him to circumvent the rules of brand consumerism (in his case, overtly criminal means; he twice admits to having found the ticket by hacking into Wonka's computers, although his mother insists these are "just allegations"). At the same time, he possesses the hyperactive recklessness of his literary counterpart (cranked up to 11), his favourite video game hero, Captain Knuckleduster of the futuristic rodeo, nods simultaneously to the respective obsessions of book Mike and 1971 Mike, and his love of toy guns has returned. This Mike is also clearly a lot more emotionally disturbed than all of his previous incarnations; as per his family's introductory song, "It's Teavee Time!", he has been placed under house arrest for a string of violent offences around his community, which include setting a cat on fire, chloroforming a nurse and stealing a German tank (okay, the cat thing's horrible, but those other two incidents really demand their own half-hour specials). Overall, I prefer Fry's aloof, brooding Mike to the overstimulated enfant terrible he is in the musical, but I still love this interpretation, particularly the dynamic he has with his mother - it always gets a laugh whenever she tells him to be nice and he flat-out ignores her. (In this version, Mrs Teavee accompanies Mike to the factory, since this Mr Teavee will scarcely acknowledge the existence of either of them. Which is probably the preferable arrangement - otherwise, as we saw in Burton's version, the last leg of the tour becomes a total sausage party.[4]) The musical also does significantly better than Burton's film in bringing the Oompa Loompas' judgement of Mike in line with his character's modernisations; his comeuppance song, "Vidiots", while still reinforcing some of the same old hyperbole about how electronic media rots the senses, cleverly updates its rhetoric, and Mike's predicament, to comment more on the dangers of compromising one's personal information in the social media age ("His secrets now are yours and mine, cos everything he's got's online"), which is a much more relevant concern for the current young generation.
Most importantly, Mike's fate in the musical differs from the book and either of the films; he still gets shrunken down via TV signal, but here Wonka never offers to reverse the process, insisting that "nobody ever goes back to normal once they've been on television". Instead, his mother accepts this outcome as a practical solution to her domestic troubles, having realised that Mike is back to being as small and helpless as he was as a baby, and she can now relive those glory days when he was entirely dependent on her to take care of him. It's a little creepy, but there is also a sweet side to it. Mrs Teavee isn't motivated by spite - she simply wants to recapture that more innocent dynamic they once had, before the world and its tech drove a wedge between them. Now Mike can look forward to a lifetime of being cosseted by his mother; as for Mr Teavee, he probably won't even notice the difference. It is, in its way, a warped answer to the problem posed by the Mr Teavee of the 2005 film, there left unsolved, about modern children not staying kids for long (also expressed in the lyrics of "Vidiots", which warn that, "The age of innocence is gone, when certain sites are clicked upon"). Wonka, in this version, may even feel some sympathy for Mrs Teavee, and helps her out by allowing her to keep her son in a state of permanent infantilisation - his trip through the Wonka broadcasting system could therefore be regarded as a rebirthing of sorts. On paper, that's no less fucked up than what happens to Mike in the default version, and yet strangely enough I am more at ease with this than I am the outcome in the book or the 2005 film. He avoids the horrors of the taffy-puller and instead gets confirmation that his mother has his back, and I'm just a sucker for that. (You know, all those bad nuts - for as harshly as Wonka judged them, they were each the fruit of someone's loins. Somebody loved them, and felt inclined to nurture them.) Besides, if we view Mrs Teavee as someone who's been screwed over by the patriarchy, ignored by her husband, beleaguered by her son and dismissed by the authorities, then there is something tremendously satisfying in seeing her triumph through the reassertion of her maternal mettle.
What can I say? If only there was some way to combine Ostrum's Charlie and Wilder's Wonka, Fry's Teavee and the ending with his mother from the musical (and also the mecha Oompa Loompas from the musical's recent UK tour, which sidestep the usual racist implications and are the coolest version anyhow). The perfect Charlie and The Chocolate Factory experience! But whatever the version, wherever Mike Teavee has the pluck to challenge Wonka, I'll be in perpetual admiration of the little techno junkie, and Fry's Teavee absolutely gets the gold star (it helps that the Wonka he's up against is in such desperate need of challenging). Seriously, why does the man make gum in his factory, if he has so much contempt for those who chew it? But then I think I already know the answer to that, and I suspect that Mike '05 did too. Four out of five consumers get nothing but disdain from Wonka - but as long as there's moolah to be had from your disgusting habit, you can bet he's going to exploit it.
[1] Dahl
might have used Veruca to send up class privilege, yet a profound irony
that does not escape me is that, of all the bad nuts, he privileges her
- I'm sure going down that garbage chute was a properly traumatic
experience for the girl, but she's the only one who doesn't end
up with any kind of physical disfigurement for her sins. There's also no indication, in the book, that her parents are going to stop spoiling her. Then again, Mike does better than the other kids in the stage musical, in that he gets closure and to go home at the end, while the fates of Augustus, Violet and Veruca/Mr Salt are just left hanging. The musical might actually be the most brutal version of the story.
[2] Charlie thinks this is delightful, apparently. Really, and Teavee's the one who has the problem???
[3] Mike's biography in the tie-in trading card set created by Artbox gives his age in the 2005 film as 13, but I'm going to dispute that. Fry was younger than that when he played him, and I'd assume he's meant to be more-or-less the same age as he is in Dahl's novel; if Mike '05 is meant to be 13 years old, then he's on the puny side for a young teen.
[4] In the book, all four of the bad nuts were actually accompanied by BOTH of their parents, but I can understand why the adaptations have all insisted on that one adult per child rule. Otherwise you end up with too cluttered a cast.
