{"id":677,"date":"2009-02-10T19:26:50","date_gmt":"2009-02-11T00:26:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/?p=677"},"modified":"2016-03-22T20:17:12","modified_gmt":"2016-03-23T03:17:12","slug":"we-are-the-music-makers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/2009\/02\/we-are-the-music-makers","title":{"rendered":"We are the music makers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the film <em>Willy Wonka &amp; the Chocolate Factory<\/em> (1971), after Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) proudly describes that in his lickable wallpaper &#8220;The snozberries taste like snozberries!&#8221;, an exasperated Veruca Salt snidely objects, &#8220;Snozberries? Who ever heard of a snozberry?&#8221; Willy Wonka grabs her mouth and explains &#8220;We are the music makers, and We are the dreamers of dreams.&#8221;<\/p>\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/R15AS5LIJWI?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<p>Wonka&#8217;s oblique answer references the first stanza of a poem by Arthur O&#8217;Shaughnessy, the &#8220;Ode&#8221; featured in his collection of poems from 1874, <a title=\"Music and Moonlight by O'Shaughnessy (Google Books)\" href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=gllN58w1SS0C&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=&quot;Music+and+Moonlight&quot;\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Music and Moonlight<\/em><\/a>. I didn&#8217;t understand Wonka&#8217;s response to Veruca Salt until I read the entire poem. The meaning provided me a key to understanding the story, who the mysterious character Wonka represents, what his motivations are in finding a child to give his factory to, and what Charlie Bucket really means for him. Read the poem below, and I think you might understand too.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>ODE.<\/p>\n<p>WE are the music makers,<br \/>\nAnd we are the dreamers of dreams,<br \/>\nWandering by lone sea-breakers,<br \/>\nAnd sitting by desolate streams;&#8211;<br \/>\nWorld-losers and world-forsakers,<br \/>\nOn whom the pale moon gleams:<br \/>\nYet we are the movers and shakers<br \/>\nOf the world for ever, it seems.<\/p>\n<p>With wonderful deathless ditties<br \/>\nWe build up the world&#8217;s great cities,<br \/>\nAnd out of a fabulous story<br \/>\nWe fashion an empire&#8217;s glory:<br \/>\nOne man with a dream, at pleasure,<br \/>\nShall go forth and conquer a crown;<br \/>\nAnd three with a new song&#8217;s measure<br \/>\nCan trample a kingdom down.<\/p>\n<p>We, in the ages lying<br \/>\nIn the buried past of the earth,<br \/>\nBuilt Nineveh with our sighing,<br \/>\nAnd Babel itself in our mirth;<br \/>\nAnd o&#8217;erthrew them with prophesying<br \/>\nTo the old of the new world&#8217;s worth;<br \/>\nFor each age is a dream that is dying,<br \/>\nOr one that is coming to birth.<\/p>\n<p>A breath of our inspiration<br \/>\nIs the life of each generation;<br \/>\nA wondrous thing of our dreaming<br \/>\nUnearthly, impossible seeming&#8211;<br \/>\nThe soldier, the king, and the peasant<br \/>\nAre working together in one,<br \/>\nTill our dream shall become their present,<br \/>\nAnd their work in the world be done.<\/p>\n<p>They had no vision amazing<br \/>\nOf the goodly house they are raising;<br \/>\nThey had no divine foreshowing<br \/>\nOf the land to which they are going:<br \/>\nBut on one man&#8217;s soul it hath broken,<br \/>\nA light that doth not depart;<br \/>\nAnd his look, or a word he hath spoken,<br \/>\nWrought flame in another man&#8217;s heart.<\/p>\n<p>And therefore to-day is thrilling<br \/>\nWith a past day&#8217;s late fulfilling;<br \/>\nAnd the multitudes are enlisted<br \/>\nIn the faith that their fathers resisted,<br \/>\nAnd, scorning the dream of to-morrow,<br \/>\nAre bringing to pass, as they may,<br \/>\nIn the world, for its joy or its sorrow,<br \/>\nThe dream that was scorned yesterday.<\/p>\n<p>But we, with our dreaming and singing,<br \/>\nCeaseless and sorrowless we !<br \/>\nThe glory about us clinging<br \/>\nOf the glorious futures we see,<br \/>\nOur souls with high music ringing:<br \/>\nO men! it must ever be<br \/>\nThat we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,<br \/>\nA little apart from ye.<\/p>\n<p>For we are afar with the dawning<br \/>\nAnd the suns that are not yet high,<br \/>\nAnd out of the infinite morning<br \/>\nIntrepid you hear us cry&#8211;<br \/>\nHow, spite of your human scorning,<br \/>\nOnce more God&#8217;s future draws nigh,<br \/>\nAnd already goes forth the warning<br \/>\nThat ye of the past must die.<\/p>\n<p>Great hail! we cry to the comers<br \/>\nFrom the dazzling unknown shore;<br \/>\nBring us hither your sun and your summers,<br \/>\nAnd renew our world as of yore;<br \/>\nYou shall teach us your song&#8217;s new numbers,<br \/>\nAnd things that we dreamed not before:<br \/>\nYea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,<br \/>\nAnd a singer who sings no more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The premise of Roald Dahl&#8217;s novel, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Charlie_and_the_Chocolate_Factory\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Charlie and the Chocolate Factory<\/em><\/a> (1964) asks: what would an industrial factory engaged in mass production look like if it was built by a fantasist, dreamer, and romantic in a world dominated by pragmatists, realists, and materialists. In this lonely island, Wonka wonders who will inherit his life&#8217;s work and hopes that in the next generation of children there might still be a romantic dreamer. His sampling of youth via the lottery tickets provides a referendum on Charlie&#8217;s generation. The selected tourists to Wonka&#8217;s candyland are a fools gallery of technocrats, capitalists, hedonists&#8230; and opportunists. The latter is what Wonka makes of Charlie Bucket.<\/p>\n<p>Poverty does not make Charlie a finer candidate than any of the others or even more sympathetic to Wonka. But the moral challenge that Charlie meets in the face of his family&#8217;s dire poverty does affect Wonka. For Charlie to give back the stolen <em>everlasting gobstopper<\/em> means returning to Wonka&#8217;s competitor Oscar Slugworth empty handed and to his family with only tales of <em>Oompa-Loompas<\/em>. Wonka is so resigned to the absence of new romantics in the world that he is willing to give up everything to Slugworth by letting Charlie walk out with the gobstopper. By returning the gobstopper Wonka is enlightened to Charlie&#8217;s enduring romantic virtue. Charlie&#8217;s elevation of an abstract moral good over an immediate material good justifies his embrace of the young lad as the rightful recipient of his vast empire of imagination.<\/p>\n<p>If these insights were intriguing, note that they don&#8217;t apply to either Roald Dahl&#8217;s book <em>Charlie and the Chocolate Factory<\/em> (1964) nor the screenplay he wrote for the film. Rather, credit is due to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/David_Seltzer\" target=\"_blank\">David Seltzer<\/a>, an uncredited Jewish screenwriter who wrote at least 30% of the final script. Seltzer was responsible for all of Wonka&#8217;s literary references throughout the film including Wonka&#8217;s quotation from O&#8217;Shaughnessy&#8217;s &#8220;Ode&#8221; and his quote of Portia from Shakespeare&#8217;s Merchant of Venice at the end of the film, &#8220;So shines a good deed in a naughty world.&#8221; (Seltzer later directed another film representing the tribulations of an alienated romantic youth, <em>Lucas<\/em> (1986).)<\/p>\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/WW2qaBJWdaA?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<p>Dahl, furious with the casting of Gene Wilder over <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Spike_Milligan\" target=\"_blank\">Spike Milligan<\/a> and Seltzer&#8217;s focus on Wonka rather than Charlie Bucket, later forbid a film adaptation of his <em>Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator<\/em> (1972). Focus on Dahl&#8217;s anti-Semitism often focuses on his 1983 outburst: &#8220;There&#8217;s a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity &#8230; I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn&#8217;t just pick on them for no reason.&#8221; It&#8217;s intriguing to speculate that a decade earlier Dahl&#8217;s animus might have been expressed in his frustration with Gene Wilder and David Seltzer&#8217;s reinvention of Wonka, the romantic industrialist, as a <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sacred-texts.com\/jud\/jms\/jms04.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Magical Jew<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy a paper I wrote for a graduate class comparing different models of pedagogy, &#8220;<a class=\"text-gray-darker\" href=\"https:\/\/www.academia.edu\/5477012\/So_Shines_a_Good_Deed_in_a_Naughty_World_The_Moral_Education_of_Charlie_Bucket\">So Shines a Good Deed in a Naughty World: The Moral Education of Charlie Bucket<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the film Willy Wonka &amp; the Chocolate Factory (1971), after Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) proudly describes that in his lickable wallpaper &#8220;The snozberries taste like snozberries!&#8221;, an exasperated Veruca Salt snidely objects, &#8220;Snozberries? Who ever heard of a snozberry?&#8221; Willy Wonka grabs her mouth and explains &#8220;We are the music makers, and We are <span style=\"color:#777\"> . . . &rarr; Continue reading: <a href=\"https:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/2009\/02\/we-are-the-music-makers\">We are the music makers<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1716,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,2,20],"tags":[60,129,130,131],"class_list":["post-677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-yiddishkeit","category-poetry","tag-romanticism","tag-philomathean-society","tag-willy-wonka","tag-roald-dahl","odd"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>We are the music makers &#8226; Aharon&#039;s Omphalos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/2009\/02\/we-are-the-music-makers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"We are the music makers &#8226; Aharon&#039;s Omphalos\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In the film Willy Wonka &amp; the Chocolate Factory (1971), after Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) proudly describes that in his lickable wallpaper &#8220;The snozberries taste like snozberries!&#8221;, an exasperated Veruca Salt snidely objects, &#8220;Snozberries? 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