Paradise Is a Whole Lot of Chocolate

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"Images of heaven in the media often have a gustatorial component to them," says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. "For the modern heaven, we see heaven as the ultimate pleasure, and for most people food is one of the greatest pleasures they have."

A quick survey of pop culture proves the point. Jimmy Buffet sings of a cheeseburger being paradise, while Homer Simpson is constantly envisioning heaven as a place full of beer and doughnuts or as a fantastic Land of Chocolate where everything is edible, including the dogs.

Food, of course, is not the only earthly pleasure we may wish to see magnified in a vision of heaven. Sex would certainly be up there on most people's lists, and that's a part of pop-culture paradise, too: Think of Meat Loaf's 1977 hit "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." That also has medieval precedent in Cockaigne, where sexual pleasure was an important component.

But in American media, which tends to the more puritanical side of things, sex as paradise doesn't really sell in the way food does. "The American tradition has identified sexual pleasure with sin, so eating is a safe way to describe ultimate pleasure. Gluttony is certainly a sin, but not one Americans put a lot of credence in," notes Thompson.

Indeed, gluttony is embraced in Albert Brooks' "Defending Your Life," which takes the concept of food in paradise, or the afterlife, to its logical 20th-century conclusion: the no-calorie paradise. Newly departed souls sent to Judgment City enjoy the best food they've ever tasted, in the grandest amounts they've ever seen, and never gain a pound. A sort of Angelic Atkins diet.

Similarly, "Groundhog Day" offers its own vision of paradise, a place where Bill Murray's character can keep trying until he gets things perfect--and he, too, can eat whatever he wants without consequence.

So with scarcity of food no longer an issue for most people in America, empty-calorie edibles--foods eaten purely for enjoyment--have taken the place of the ripe fruit and protein-rich meats of paradises-past. Willy Wonka's factory would not have the same appeal for us, of course, if it made, say, brussel sprouts. But still, candy represents something even more primordial than latter-day gluttony. "Sweets are the memorials of our innocence," writes Tim Richards in "Sweets: A History of Candy."

"The history of sweets goes back a long, long way, right back to the earliest human civilizations [sic], and (until the late 20th century) mankind always associated this sweetness with goodness and pleasure."

And what is "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" all about if not a return to innocence, a return to paradise?

After the other children's greed gets them expelled from the tour of the Wonka factory, Charlie Bucket and his Grandpa Joe are the only pair left standing. But Willy Wonka knows that Charlie and his Grandpa have been up to no good as well, and refuses them the rest of the prize, a life-time supply of chocolate. Charlie ends up repenting, by returning a super-secret candy he planned to make off with, and is given the keys to the factory--to paradise--by Wonka.

And there you have it--sin and repentance, reward and punishment, with lemondrops as the backdrop. Which makes Roald Dahl's confectionary conception of paradise just perfect.