Dahl Redux
I was contacted by email last night by someone from Radio 4's Today programme, inviting me to come on this morning and talk about Roald Dahl "origin" stories - prompted of course by the new film Wonka, released in the UK today.
I must have replied too late, because they haven't got back to me. I'll check later to see if they found someone else instead.
However, it did make me think around the question. I think that with Dahl, the options are really rather limited. It's hard to do the origin story of a child, and most of his adult characters don't offer that kind of scope. People such as the Twits, the Wormwoods, Aunts Spiker and Sponge, etc., have clearly always just been awful. The fact that the filmmakers are coming back to Wonka after the Tim Burton version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory already provided him with a back story (involving Sean Connery as a strict dentist dad) is evidence of the lack of scope.
That said, I see three possibilities:
1) Loompa
Sticking with Charlie as a source text, I'd like to see a film that faces the book's colonialism head on. My protagonist would be one of the so-called Oompa Loompas. The story would tell of his youth in Africa, living as a proud member of the M'Pau Lompau people, until the arrival of Wonka and his highly addictive cocoa beans brings them low, and in due course to indentured labour in the Wonka factory. A bit of a downer, but that's what you get when you mix colonialism and capitalism. Were you expecting a happy ending?
2) Trunchbull
Miss Trunchbull is the only Dahl villain who warrants an origin story in the tradition of Joker or Cruella, because she has a canonical past quite different from her present life as a murderous bully. We are told that she was once an Olympic hammer thrower - something that requires enormous dedication. The key line for me, here, is when she throws Amanda Thripp over the school wall and an anonymous voice calls from across the playground, "Well thrown, sir." This misgendering is something Trunchbull has suffered from all her life. She was forced from her beloved hammer event after she, like Caster Semenya, was persecuted by more feminine presenting (but less talented) competitors. It was this that made the iron enter her soul and turned her to evil, with a special animus against the pigtailed-and-ribboned Thripps of this world. I would particularly have enjoyed pitching this to Today's Justin Webb, who is notoriously credulous of every trans moral panic story.
3) Witch Finder
This is the only one that I could imagine getting serious Hollywood backing. It shows us the early life of the Norwegian, cigar-smoking Grandmother from The Witches, who even as an older woman is pretty badass. I see her sweeping through the fjords, wiping out witches as she goes. Think of a cross between Van Helsing and Troll Hunter. Hell, even I would watch it.
[Edited to add: in the end they went with Charlie Higson and Katya Balen. Fair enough.]
I must have replied too late, because they haven't got back to me. I'll check later to see if they found someone else instead.
However, it did make me think around the question. I think that with Dahl, the options are really rather limited. It's hard to do the origin story of a child, and most of his adult characters don't offer that kind of scope. People such as the Twits, the Wormwoods, Aunts Spiker and Sponge, etc., have clearly always just been awful. The fact that the filmmakers are coming back to Wonka after the Tim Burton version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory already provided him with a back story (involving Sean Connery as a strict dentist dad) is evidence of the lack of scope.
That said, I see three possibilities:
1) Loompa
Sticking with Charlie as a source text, I'd like to see a film that faces the book's colonialism head on. My protagonist would be one of the so-called Oompa Loompas. The story would tell of his youth in Africa, living as a proud member of the M'Pau Lompau people, until the arrival of Wonka and his highly addictive cocoa beans brings them low, and in due course to indentured labour in the Wonka factory. A bit of a downer, but that's what you get when you mix colonialism and capitalism. Were you expecting a happy ending?
2) Trunchbull
Miss Trunchbull is the only Dahl villain who warrants an origin story in the tradition of Joker or Cruella, because she has a canonical past quite different from her present life as a murderous bully. We are told that she was once an Olympic hammer thrower - something that requires enormous dedication. The key line for me, here, is when she throws Amanda Thripp over the school wall and an anonymous voice calls from across the playground, "Well thrown, sir." This misgendering is something Trunchbull has suffered from all her life. She was forced from her beloved hammer event after she, like Caster Semenya, was persecuted by more feminine presenting (but less talented) competitors. It was this that made the iron enter her soul and turned her to evil, with a special animus against the pigtailed-and-ribboned Thripps of this world. I would particularly have enjoyed pitching this to Today's Justin Webb, who is notoriously credulous of every trans moral panic story.
3) Witch Finder
This is the only one that I could imagine getting serious Hollywood backing. It shows us the early life of the Norwegian, cigar-smoking Grandmother from The Witches, who even as an older woman is pretty badass. I see her sweeping through the fjords, wiping out witches as she goes. Think of a cross between Van Helsing and Troll Hunter. Hell, even I would watch it.
[Edited to add: in the end they went with Charlie Higson and Katya Balen. Fair enough.]