Wonka humanizes autistic people and, no, I’m not talking about Willy
Hear me out…
I just watched Wonka (2023), because I wanted something charming and light for a Sunday afternoon and most definitely didn’t also want an excuse to see Timothée Chalamet simply existing onscreen for two hours.
I wasn’t sure what to expect; some critics were saying things to the effect of, It doesn’t have the dark and weird undertones that it’s supposed to or Chalamet doesn’t do Wonka with the dark and weird soul that Gene Wilder did, but whatever; it’s fine. No matter, I thought. I’m here for magical feel-good shit; I can use Johnny Depp’s version or Coraline for my weird fix.
For better or worse (honestly for better; this film made me smile just the way it was), the critics were right and Wonka wasn’t at all unsettling. Nor was its protagonist. In fact, Willy had some serious rizz. As in, the seriously neurotypical kind. And I was there for it (and am here for it).
Call me crazy or just uncreative, but I absolutely relished in the fact (or my opinion, at least) that the genius — the guileless character, the weird and almost inhumanly-wonderful one— was NOT the token autistic this time around. He was a people-loving (and mostly people-competent) goddamn charmer.
But you know who did strike me as one of my kind (on the spectrum, that is)? Prodnose.
I dunno; maybe I need to watch it again, and maybe the sample size of his onscreen appearances is woefully small (it is). But I remember catching this guy in particular ‘saying it like it is,’ often out of turn, much to the discomfort of his more elegantly slimy co-conspirators. He’s got a few awkward hand movements and mannerisms in there, too that stood out to me as confused little contortions I’d totally also do with my body on the non-rare occasion that I suddenly perceive 2.5 of my limbs in polite conversation and have absolutely no idea what to do with them for the proper effect or lack unintended thereof.
Anyhow.
Mr. Prodnose is a villain, yes, but he’s not anything (remotely) resembling the unknowable, ‘beautiful tragedy’ that we in the autistic community are frankly tired of being portrayed as.
(cough cough Cloud Cuckoo Land, though, to be fair, I’m 89% through it and it’s otherwise breathtaking. And/or Phantom Thread, whose ending made me utterly sick with horror. Essays for another day.)
Anyhow, Prodnose is as bumbling and unremarkable as the other bad guys, and this, in my view, is something that makes Wonka great. I’m reading way too far into it, but the idea that someone like me can just be a boring jerk and not an enigmatic jerk is a breath of fresh air. It’s humanizing.
It’s like the film was saying, ‘hey, we don’t feel a need to artfully twist our annoyance and discomfort with your existence into something palatably dark and gorgeous!
We don’t need to pretend to celebrate you as beyond human when we really just mean below human.
You get to sin in a fun and low-stakes and understandable way like the rest of us now, instead of somehow being an archetypal embodiment of both purity and sin itself!’
(okay, maybe I’m on some kind of high horse now. And I seriously need some chocolate.)
Anyway, good job, Wonka.
