Deep Roy, the actor who played all the Oompa Loompas, has a long history of playing under heavy make-up or inside boxes. While I don’t mean to distract from the analyses of the sameness and otherness of the Oompa Loompas, my wife and I were delighted that Roy got so much “face time” (even if his voice was dubbed).

For those intersted in a racial reading of Oompa Loompas, I suggest this student paper, posted on RoaldDahlFans.com, which describes Dahl’s revision of the book (based on pressure from the NAACP.

http://www.roalddahlfans.com/articles/char.php

The paper describes Dahl as changing the description of the Oompa Loompas from variations of African Pygmies to rosy-cheeked dwarfs (who look like white flower children).

I would like to add that I thought that that Violet and her mother and their parental-child unit, sans a father, absence of whom was unexplained and apparently unnecessary, was indicative of western society’s obsessive overachieving woman who in efforts at independence has championed single motherhood to a point where it is selfish. Of course, this is nothing new. Disney does this all the time. Most Disney films have one parent missing and often, it is the father.

But good conversation, all. And, Mike, I like that point about the poor/working class becoming affective surrogates. In the movie and in our field. Totally, yes.

I like what you said, too, Dorothea, about the rules of the zero-sum game and who plays and who doesn’t, although the notion that the losers not only lose but must be humiliated or destroyed is much more Dahl than Burton.

And yeah, I’ll admit I was distracted by The Pretty, as well. I’m not surprised A. O. Scott missed the class stuff — I mean, look at the NYT’s pathetic past treatment of class and inequality — but aside from that, I don’t have much an answer for your question about political art, Donna. It seems like a two-stage question, though: first, how explicit should one be with one’s political intent; how much do you display or show your audience about the workings of your rhetoric? Shadi Bartsch, in her fantastic study of Neronian literature in Actors in the Audience, talks about works of art that carry multiple and sometimes diametrically opposed meanings depending upon who’s interpreting them, essentially turning Leo Strauss’s esoteric / exoteric binary to the liberatory left rather than to Strauss’s elitist and Machiavellian right. (As it happens, she’s at Chicago, too.) Then the second stage of the question is: how does this political message or rhetoric or art, encoded within artifacts of culture, become political action?

Like I said, I don’t really have an answer. But I think it’s a good question, and I’d be curious to hear what you think.

I’m just boggled by all these reviewers who proudly proclaim that they looked for a point and didn’t find one, though. Dudes. Stop looking under the lamppost and c’mon over here…

So that leaves open the question, though, of the effect, doesn’t it? What does the skewering of labor abuse and class stratification do if only the three of us see it? (I realize this is a bigger question for any political art–but why not raise it?) And might the visual pleasures of the film *affectively* subvert the politically subversive intent?

And Donna, I agree with Dorothea that the glaring quality — that very over-the-topness — was likely in service of subversive critique. I mean, Burton skewered suburbia in Edward Scissorhands, fears of miscegenation in Planet of the Apes, yuppie homemakers in Beetlejuice: the guy ain’t exactly subtle. In his own way, I think he’s doing a little bit of what Freire called “problem-posing,” and — let’s be honest — if you’re not doing art-house stuff, you can’t really afford subtlety in American cinema. (And I suddenly feel like I should offer a general apology: that sentence itself constitutes a bit of Matthew Arnoldian classist snobbery.) And, again, Dorothea’s right: people still aren’t talking about it, despite the over-the-topness of the way in which Burton poses the problem.

I wonder if there’s some sort of tendency where movie critics consider themselves to be high-art cultural critics, far above commenting on crudely material and crass concerns of labor and class. As usual, the Chicago Reader is a welcome exception with J. R. Jones’s careful review — but I wish they’d given the assignment to Jonathan Rosenbaum, who’s had fine things to say in the past about representations of class in American cinema.

The sad thing is, the subversion doesn’t seem to have worked. I haven’t seen a single review pick up on this, and I’ve read many. Or maybe people are too uncomfortable with it to comment?