Hello, friends. Welcome to this week’s close reading.
Today, I’m taking a look at a curious connection between two things:
That new devastating documentary about Nickelodeon, Quiet on Set
Gene Wilder’s wickedly smart portrayal of Willy Wonka
When I was a little girl, Disney and Nickelodeon were basically it for kid TV after you were done with Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. (Okay, I also watched Arthur well into my teen years because it was so dang cute.)
These networks were pitched to us kids as playgrounds: the adults weren’t welcome! This is kid freedom! This is our sense of humor. Our creativity. Our style.
Of course, when you’re nine or five or twelve years old, you don’t realize that the kids aren’t actually in charge, even though they’re the stars of every show and they’re the ones in all the commercials. You don’t realize that there are a bunch of grown-ups scripting every sketch and writing every episode and making the wardrobe choices.
You watch the show playing out in front of you, and you take it at face value.
You hear the laugh track and you think, “Oh, this must be funny.”
You see the wacky hairdos and bright clothes and hear the sassy taglines and quick wit and you think, “Oh, this is how to be a kid.”
You just…trust it. You think that what the network is promising is a world of pure imagination — one free from all that boring, exhausting adult-stuff. You don’t think about the profound power dynamics underneath all that content.
The child actors are not okay
This week, I watched all four episodes of the new Quiet on Set documentary, which digs into the horribly abusive culture of power and manipulation at Nickelodeon during its Golden Years of TV programming (from about 1995 to 2010).
The episodes take, as their central focus, two men who used their positions of unchecked power and access to young stars to manipulate, lie to, groom, and outright abuse the kids, and the parents, involved in various shows and programs at the network.
In the most damning episode, Drake Bell (now in his forties) comes forward as the previously unnamed child actor who was routinely and brutally sexually assaulted by his acting coach who continued to work with child actors even after he’d been convicted and spent (just) 16 months in prison for assaulting Bell.
We’ve all heard — and have perhaps grown tired — of the “few bad apples,” narrative. Yet despite Quiet on Set pointing at two particularly disgusting apples, the overall message of the documentary illuminates the sordid fact that absolute power corrupts absolutely, that a culture of abuse and power was cultivated and emboldened by a nasty cocktail of naivety, lust for fame, power, shock, intimidation, desperation, and silencing created by the interplay of immature TV writers and execs, bad boardroom politics, unsuspecting parents, and little kids who want to “live their dream” of being a TV star.
After finishing all four episodes, I sat in a dazed sadness. I physically remembered the tug in my gut I often felt, as a kid, watching some of these shows: that the jokes just weren’t actually funny but super mean; that the gimmicks of All That and The Amanda Show and iCarly seemed more about humiliating those kids than staging creative freedom or real childhood experiences. As I watched cringey jokes and sickening pranks, I remember wondering if those kids actually seemed as happy and energized as they pretended to be on screen because they often seemed manic and terrified.
And it sounds like many of them were. As the documentary shows in painful detail, many of the sketches (still available on streaming platforms and in damning clips all over the internet) overtly sexualize the children in them — from dressing young boys in unitards covered in noses that look like dicks, to fetishistic zoomed-in shots of girls sucking their own toes and getting packets of literal goo shot into their face in long, uncomfortable scenes that clearly embarrassed them.
Over and over again, the child stars, now grown up and looking back at photos and memories on a darkened documentary set, wondered why those terrible people got to call the shots and how they’d become so trusted when what they were doing was so obviously terrible. Over and over again, the parents of these child stars voiced their grief and pain, bemoaned their naivety, and wondered why they were so quick to trust all those people — especially those powerful, charming, volatile men — who wanted unchecked access to their children.
On podcasts and YouTube channels and in memoirs and documentaries like this, now-grown, once-child stars are openly sharing their stories of confusion and exploitation and exhaustion and extreme stress. They’re saying what I believe many children of famous mommy bloggers will say in a few years: None of that was what it seemed. None of that was okay then, and we’re still not okay now.
As clips from the documentary go viral, the once-child viewers of these shows seem to be asking: None of that was what it seemed? Are we okay now?
Willy Wonka’s tricky entrance
Before Gene Wilder would agree to star in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, he made the director agree to one thing: Wonka’s iconic first appearance.
In the original script, Wonka had no cane and did no somersaults.
But Gene Wilder had a character-making, story-defining entrance in mind — an introduction to the wildly mysterious candyman that makes his rendition of Wonka stand the test of time.1
Here’s what Wilder recalls:
“I was offered the part. I read the book. And Mel Stuart, the director, came to my home in New York. He said, ‘You wanna do it?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you, I will do it if I can come out, and all the crowd quiets down, and I am using a cane.’ Oh, my God. Willy Wonka is crippled. ‘And I walk slowly and you can hear a pin drop. And my cane gets stuck in a brick. And I fall forward onto my face and do a forward somersault and jump up, and they all start to applaud.'”
(Watch Wilder recall this backstory here.)
This trick was critical to the story — and to Wonka’s character — Wilder explains. Because “no one will know from that point on whether I am lying or telling the truth.”
Wilder knew that problematizing Willy Wonka’s trustworthiness from the very start was key to the dynamic of the story. And by performing this trick — in his bright purple suit with his rickety cane and his wobbling gait — he highlights the true stakes of the game afoot beneath his Golden Ticket contest.
“In the book, various characters describe Wonka’s eccentricities this way: “He’s balmy! He’s nutty! He’s screwy! He’s batty! He’s dippy! He’s dotty! He’s daffy! He’s goofy! He’s beany! He’s buggy! He’s wacky! He’s loony!” An exchange in the film is slightly more restrained, but carries the same underlying message. “He’s absolutely bonkers!” declares Veruca Salt. Charlie Bucket’s response: “That’s not bad.”
Despite the story’s darkly happy ending, and despite Wilder’s spellbinding performance, it’s not entirely clear whether Charlie is right.” (Source)
The truth is, Wonka’s not looking for a hyper child star or spoilt mini-capitalist to run his empire; he’s looking for someone trustworthy, unlike him, who will trust him implicitly. He’s looking for a child to take over his well-oiled-machine of a candy empire because a child — unlike all those rotten adults he’s considered for the job — won’t threaten his power or change the business or share his secrets with the world.
Wonka is looking for a loyal, unfailingly kind child who is not yet bent to their parents’ capitalistic and elitist whims. This is precisely why he doesn’t want the bratty heiress Veruca Salt or the deeply opinionated Violet Beauregard. He is looking for a child he can control and teach — this is perhaps why he doesn’t choose those naughty little boys who dive into pools of chocolate and leap into experimental machinery without thinking of the consequences of their actions.
He’s also looking for a child who, when screamed at, will not scream back. Who, threatened with losing the promised “lifetime of chocolate,” will still refuse to sneak a contraband Gobstopper to Wonka’s competitors on the outside. Who, when he discovers the entire plot to sneak candy out to the sniveling Mr. Slugworth was yet another test Wonka laid out to weed-out the wrong kind of child apprentice, will not feel anything but exquisite relief?
(Who can forget the shocked, pained look on Charlie Bucket’s face when Wilder’s Wonka becomes unhinged in his final performance, a cruel trick in which he rails and screams at Charlie: “You get nothing! You lose!” as a final test of Charlie’s passivity and goodness, and perhaps also of Charlie’s grandfather’s unwillingness to hit back?)2
Wilder makes Wonka’s duality clear from the start with an enchanting, unforgettable entrance that delights — and fools — everyone in the crowd (and perhaps in the audience). By doing so, he concentrates his power by performing that subtle intimidation of showing you, from the moment you meet him, that you probably can’t trust him. That he’s got his own game going. That you’re being invited to play, but on his terms. That you will not win, unless he deems you worthy, even if you follow every rule. There’s always that pesky fine print.
Wilder knew all of this. Or, at least, Wilder’s performance of Wonka suggests he did. His performance of the deeply egocentric, emotionally volatile, and calculated man at the heart of the sweetest company in town shows us that even in a world of pure fantasy and pleasure, things are never what they seem.
How do you like being famous?
”The Creator’s approval means a lot to me,” writes Jennette McCurdy of an unnamed (but it’s almost-definitely that one guy in the documentary) network executive in her memoir about growing up a child star.
“I feel like The Creator has two distinct sides. One is generous and over-the-top complimentary. He can make anyone feel like the most important person in the world….The other side is mean-spirited, controlling, and terrifying. The Creator can tear you down and humiliate you….I’ve seen The Creator make grown men and women cry with his insults and degradation….The Creator knows how to make someone feel worthless.”
The same sentiments wouldn’t necessarily surprise me if I found them in Charlie Bucket’s memoir about coming-of-age in the Wonka factory after growing up in profound poverty. His story parallels McCurdy’s that way: they’re both kids with desperate caregivers, trapped in poverty, who become “golden tickets” to financial stability for the whole family, or, at the very least, a lifetime of free chocolate.
They’re both kids The Creator finds ideal.
Who is the dreamer of dreams?
In a particularly tense moment, Wonka uses the opening couplet of Arthur O’Shaunghnessy’s “Ode” in response to a snotty little girl questioning the validity or necessity of his invention of snozzberries.
“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams” he says, with his signature blank, twinkling blue stare, his voice somehow deadpan and bitingly judgmental at the same time.
“If you want to view paradise,” he sings later, “simply look around and view it. Anything you want to do, do it. Want to change the world? There’s nothing to it.”
And yet, we all know this isn’t true. There’s so much to it. Especially in a year that feels like Groundhog’s Day, where the same two old white men are running for President, again, even though nobody really wants either one of them to be in charge anymore. It’s all well and good to close your eyes and view paradise; but what about the real world — the one behind all those polished screens?
After her success on an ensemble comedy, Jennette meets with The Creator for lunch with her mom, and he dangles another shiny golden ticket in front of her:
“We’ll have to wait a few years,” The Creator reiterates, “But if you keep doing what you’re doing and listen to me, take my advice, and let me guide you, I promise you I’ll give you your own show.”
Mom looks over at me and nods, urging me to smile with my teeth. So I do. Even though I’m concerned. The Creator was very clear that his offer had a contingent — me listening to him, taking his advice, and letting him guide me. And even though a part of me appreciates The Creator, a part of me is scared of him, and the idea that I’ll have to do everything he wants is intimidating to me.
“Why don’t you seem happier? You’re getting your own show,” Mom says on our drive home.
“I am happy,” I lie. “Very happy.”
“Good,” Mom says as she glances at me in the rearview mirror. “Because you should be. Every wants what you have.”
With his take on Wonka, Wilder stages what the Quiet on Set documentary seems heartbroken to reveal to all of us who grew up with these child stars on our TVs after school: that the so-called worlds of pure imagination offered up to children are always defined by their creators, and that those creators cannot be trusted no matter how wonderful their creations may be.
The Creators, given unchecked power, build entire empires around their secrets, exploiting and manipulating and creating little tortures — like having green slime poured over your head in the same moment you win an award or competing for a years’ worth of chocolate when your family can’t afford to buy dinner — to maintain their power and to concentrate it around a few key players, holding themselves carefully aloft at the center.
They perpetuate these empires, these seeming paradises, by luring us in with candy-sweet promises. But at the end of the day, as we keep learning over and over again, the snozzberries don’t taste like snozzberries. There’s really nothing to it.
I will be neither watching nor discussing the new Wonka with Timmy. Just: no.
In a documentary about his portrayal of Wonka, Gene Wilder reveals that he had to warn the sound guys about how loud he expected to yell at Charlie in the final scene. But, crucially, he didn’t tell the young actor playing Charlie how angry and upsetting the scene would get. The resulting, horrified expression on his face is a true reaction to Wilder going off-script, in an effort to get the genuine reaction he was looking for.
Quite brilliant observations. Thank you.
I saw the Wilder/Wonka movie when I was 10 or 11. My reaction: I found Wonka mesmerizing AND repellent. This was buried down under the spell the movie obviously cast - since I was a kid and manipulatable.
From the Wizard of OZ on, we've learned of the really abhorrent abuse child actors suffer.
It's a business, show business is - and the money needs to control all the variables they can. Children pressed into this golden servitude are hard to control. But once "they" have them where they want them, all sorts of corrupt and sordid things will occur.
Haley - I enjoyed reading this article. Unlike many kids of my generation, I never really watched Nickelodeon as we only had a couple of TV channels in the rural area where I lived. It does not surprise me regarding the systemic abuse that took place.
I do love the original Wonka movie, though. Wilder's performance is magnificent. I don't think the remakes have ever quite captured it in the same way.
I think it is quite sad that those in positions of power have abused their authority to manipulate and take advantage of children. I think that parents have some culpability as well because it seems that some parents get their kids into show business for the fame and fortune without consideration for the impact of the industry on their children.