A Ride on the Great Glass Elevator
Stephanie Tam
“This isn’t just an ordinary up-and-down elevator!” announced Mr. Wonka proudly. “This elevator can go sideways and longways and slantways and any other way you can think of!” (Dahl 119)
Willy Wonka’s Great Glass Elevator in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory may belong to a world of decided impossibility, but it points out some extraordinary and ambiguous aspects of an elevator ride. As the chime sounds and the doors open, you step into a world where the exercise of power is followed by complete loss of control, where natural laws are challenged, where transportation seems magical, and where private and public spaces blend.
“Make this awful thing stop!” ordered Mr. Teavee.
“Can’t do that,” said Mr. Wonka. “It won’t stop till we get there. I only hope no one’s using the other elevator at this moment” (123)
Television junkie Mike Teavee determines where Wonka and his guests are headed, but no longer has any control once a button is pushed. The exertion of power is followed by utter helplessness: short of pushing the emergency stop button or the button for every floor, you no longer have any control over the elevator’s movements. Individual movement comes to a standstill once you enter an elevator, and everyone is moved along at the same speed.
The number of stops made before reaching your floor is unpredictable. Elevators have multiple masters as they democratically respond to the index fingers of those waiting on any floor, at any time. The only stop you can be certain of is the one you requested at the beginning of the ride. The itinerary you set is subservient to a larger itinerary determined collectively by all of the elevator’s users; your ride is a fragment of the elevator’s never-ending journey.
And Mrs. Teavee cried out, “The rope has broken! We’re going to crash!” (122)
Accompanying the loss of power is a sense of fear. The nightmare of snapped cables and plunging elevators resurfaces when an elevator makes an unscheduled stop between floors or jerks unexpectedly. Charlie’s crazy ride in the Great Glass Elevator flirts with this subliminal fear, as Mr. Wonka reveals that there is another elevator that goes the opposite way on the same track. Suspended by a cable several storeys high, elevators are a precarious space even without the possibility of collision.
Charlie emphasizes the unnaturalness of an elevator ride:
It was an eerie and frightening feeling to be standing on clear glass high up in the sky. It made you feel that you weren’t standing on anything at all. (147)
Willy Wonka claims that the elevator is supported by “[o]ne million candy power” (147), but Charlie’s fear is justified: elevators are uncertain spaces. Unstable and nomadic, they defy gravity and fixity. The elevator experience is a temporary departure from natural law, a magical suspension that can at any moment cease.
And through the glass walls of the elevator, as it rushed along, they caught sudden glimpses of strange and wonderful things going on in some of the other rooms:
An enormous spout with brown sticky stuff oozing out of it onto the floor....
A great, craggy mountain made entirely of fudge, with Oompa-Loompas (all roped together for safety) hacking huge hunks of fudge out of its sides.... (122)
As the elevator accelerates downward, Charlie, Grandpa Joe and the Teavees catch glimpses of the weird and wonderful worlds contained in each room of Willy Wonka’s factory. Continuous, linear experience is shattered into episodic moments that provide no coherent narrative. Although ordinary elevators don’t open onto chocolate valleys and hot caramel lakes, you similarly undergo a fragmented journey where the elevator is the only constant element and the external world is perceived in discrete flashes.
A trace of the wonder that is encapsulated in Roald Dahl’s description remains present in an everyday elevator ride. The elevator and the elevator’s occupants belong to different reference frames, and thereby perceive movement differently. Although you know that the elevator is dynamic because experience and physics tells you so, the elevator ride remains static from the point of view of an occupant: bereft of external visual references to gauge the elevator’s movement, each time the doors open, you are mysteriously facing a new place without having moved. Even glass elevators have opaque doors – there is rarely a chance that you can see the elevator approach a new floor. The doors are like magic portals: each time they open, you discover that you have been transported to some new place.
“But now,” he added, “it is time we left these four silly children. I have something very important to talk to you about, my dear Charlie.” Mr. Wonka pressed another button, and the elevator swung upwards into the sky (150)
The moment of revelation in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory occurs inside the Great Glass Elevator. Willy Wonka unveils the purpose of the Golden Ticket contest to Charlie and Grandpa Joe while they hang mid-air. The elevator becomes more than just a transition space facilitating between destinations – it is itself a destination for the remaining three characters. It is a haven hovering above the flawed world with its badly behaved children and narrow-minded parents, leaving behind the little town and all its cares. It is a space where truth can emerge, and the imagination can roam freely; physical elevation is accompanied by moral and creative elevation.
The Great Glass Elevator becomes a shelter for private discourse, but an ordinary elevator straddles both public and private spheres. After all, elevators are for public circulation, and no one is expected to linger about once they have reached their floor. At the same time, the sense of privacy shared by Willy Wonka, Charlie and Grandpa Joe remains present, leading to an uncomfortable feeling of intrusion when elevator conversations occur.
All verbal exchanges become public exchanges when they happen during an elevator ride. The closeness of the walls, the reverberating hard surfaces, the bare space, and the relative quiet ensure that a private conversation becomes a public affair, turning the rest of the elevator’s occupants into unintentional eavesdroppers. Conversely, in overhearing the conversation, the occupants share a private moment with each other: they become passive, silent participants in the conversation and share a degree of intimacy with the active conversers. Not only is the privacy of the conversation compromised, the aloof formality that is customary in public situations breaks down.
Reduced to a mundane and even frustrating everyday experience, elevator rides with their mixture of fantasy and uneasiness can still feed the imagination, as long as you defy the cries of empiric knowledge and are willing to embark on the magical journey.
So Mr. Wonka and Grandpa Joe and Charlie, taking no notice of their screams, simply pushed the bed into the elevator. They pushed Mr. and Mrs. Bucket in after it. Then they got in themselves. Mr. Wonka pressed a button. The doors closed. Grandma Georgina screamed. And the elevator rose up off the floor and shot through the hole in the roof, out into the open sky (155)
Works Cited: Dahl, Roald. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. New York: Puffin Books, 1998.
