I watched Willy Wonka more times than I can count as a kid. I knew every song. I wanted a golden ticket so badly that unwrapping a chocolate bar felt like a lottery I was sure to win one day.
So when Wonka’s The Golden Ticket showed up in our Netflix recommendations, the eight-year-old in me got there before the 48-year-old could object. We’ve been watching it this week, and I am conflicted.
The part I love
The factory is pristine. Everything is edible, everything is lit like a dream, and it looks better than it ever did in 1971. Rusty Goffe, one of the original Oompa Loompas, is back in the factory more than fifty years later. In the first episode’s montage of ticket winners, Peter Ostrum, the original Charlie Bucket, shows up for a moment and does not get a ticket. And over all of it is Gene Wilder’s voice, recreated by AI with his estate’s blessing.
The nostalgia works on me, and I’m not ashamed of it.
The part I don’t
I have never liked reality competition shows. They take ordinary people, put a pile of money at the end of a hallway, and film what happens when values meet a price tag. Too often what happens is the worst of us: the two-faced alliance, the tribal vote, the knife in the back dressed up as strategy.
But here is what I missed until this week. The 1971 movie was already a reality competition. Five kids walk into a factory with a prize at the end. Four of them lose, and not one loses on skill. Augustus loses to appetite. Violet loses to impatience. Veruca loses to entitlement. Mike loses to his own cleverness. Every elimination is a character failure.
And Charlie wins by handing back the Everlasting Gobstopper after Wonka has already thrown him out. He thinks he has lost. He gives it back anyway. That was the whole test. It isn’t even in Dahl’s book. The 1971 film added it, and Netflix is now running it on adults.
What the pressure does
Watching the show, you see two kinds of people. Some keep their footing. Others crack, and you can watch it happen: their reasoning starts bending toward whatever keeps them in the game, and the logic falls apart because the foundation under it is gone.
I used to explain that away. The competition is a pressure cooker. Fight-or-flight never switches off. Nobody can relax, so nobody is thinking clearly. All of that is true, and it is also an excuse.
Both kinds of people got the same pressure. The difference isn’t what the pressure did to them. It’s what was already there. If a value cracks the first time it costs you something, it was never a value. It was a preference wearing a value’s clothes. The crack is the reveal.
One caveat, in fairness. I’m judging real people through a producer’s cut, and that cut is built to make me judge them. Editing ramps up every pain point. But character still leaks through the edit, in both directions. You can’t fake someone keeping their word for nine episodes.
Where the line is
I don’t think the problem is competition. Competition is honest. We all signed up, we all know the rules, and may the best man or woman win. If I beat you in a challenge, I haven’t harmed you. That’s the game, and you’d do the same to me.
The problem is what people do that the game never required. Lying to your face. Feeding you bad information. Smiling at you in the kitchen and voting against you an hour later. Nobody loses a challenge that way. They lose themselves that way, and then call it strategy.
So the line is simple to say and hard to walk: I will try to outdo you, and I will not deceive you. The contestants who fail aren’t failing at competing. They’re letting the competition rewrite who they are, and most of them don’t notice it happening.
The factory at work
None of us are getting a golden ticket. But most of us have worked on a project where the goal, if you were honest about it, was not for the team to win. It was for you to win. The incentives rewarded the individual, and the politics you had to navigate to set up your own win leaned, one way or another, toward being a jerk.
The Gobstopper shows up there too, just smaller. Credit you could quietly take for work that wasn’t yours. A mistake you could let someone else own. A decision you could delay until the blame lands elsewhere. A number you could shade in a status report because nobody will check.
Nobody is filming. There is no Wonka waiting to see if you hand it back. That’s the test: what you do with the Gobstopper when you’re sure you’ve already lost and nobody is watching.
One man
I’ve said it on this blog more than once: I want to be the same man at work, at home, at church, and anywhere else I’m standing. Now I have a name for it. I want to be the same man in the factory.
Trustworthy. Dependable. Honest and forthright. Yes means yes and no means no. And in the same hand, competing as hard as I can, because that’s what I agreed to when I walked in.
I know which contestants I’m rooting for, and it isn’t the ones winning the challenges. It’s the ones who would still hand the Gobstopper back.
