Note I originally wrote a longer version of this, but in making a minor edit I accidentally erased a huge chunk of the middle and couldn't restore it properly, so I pulled it off to rewrite it, but I think I'll just post what remains, as it is probably better this way anyway. It included a link to this cool video about why the song is so beautiful, in terms of music theory, which I barely understand.
I had been thinking of the late Gene Wilder, a great actor, and I found myself singing this song the other morning as I drove into work, fumbling over the lyrics I remembered. For some reason it punches me in the gut like no other song. and takes me to some special place from my early childhood that makes me want to break down and even sob with a collage of dredged up emotions, as if everything lost and mourned can be remembered and regained in some magical way. I can imagine myself croaking out this song with my last breath on my deathbed.
As I sat behind the wheel of my car in my usual spot the ASU parking lot, I tried to think why it was so emotional impactful. I realized that the entire depth of the song comes from the first line: "Come with me.." The song is not just an appeal to the power of imagination. It's an invitation to a shared world of imagination. If you grasp this, you will get the whole idea of the movie itself---a lonely, broken, wounded man with a vision of a world from his imagination, who made that vision of that into reality, and who yearns to share it ("Traveling in the world of my creation"). But he can share it only with those worthy enough to accept this gift. So he issues invitations, seemingly random, but somehow we learn that maybe they aren't so random after all. One by one his invitees prove themselves unworthy and are expelled from his imaginative vision. At the end, there is only one left, to whom he will put the biggest test of all. When the last surviving candidate succeeds, only then do we see the Wonka character, the inviter, instantly reveal himself and his true intentions all along.
I think this all reveals something profound---that the most satisfying aspect of imagination is that it can be shared with others. As children we learn this, and attempt this, but we are often beaten down by rejections of our creative imaginations from others. We learn to be cynical, to keep them to ourselves, protecting ourselves from the pain we experience trying to invite others. At some stage we may stop inviting even our own selves to these worlds.
If I could criticize contemporary children's books and movies, my impression is that they focus too much on empowering of children to use their imagination for themselves, something that can ultimately be only marginally satisfying in my estimation. You can do anything. Stand on your own and roar. Conquer the world. Blah blah blah. Seriously, it's about conquest? Somehow I always hated those messages as a kid. They felt manipulative to me. I sensed they were what adults wanted us kids to think about, so adults could pat themselves on the back and feel good about themselves for molding kids the right way. All the while it felt like a form of power and control to me. OK, it is I who am cynical, but there is something almost demonic in the frequent adult obsession about molding the way kids play.
The sharing of this imaginative vision with others is a nuance that is not as easily packaged into political and religious ideologies of any kind. It is potentially deeply painful step in which one might risk one's entire self image.
On an archetypal level, it the basis of all courtship and romance. The young man falls in love with a young woman and imagines a future with her. He invites her to take his hand step into that vision with him, for the rest of their lives potentially. This is a process that seems to have broken down in our culture.
Likewise, that risk is the basis of all art, one could argue, whether paintings, novels, movies, etc.---an invitation to share a vision. It is how one becomes a creator.
From that risk it comes potentially the ultimate form of un-aloneness, and perhaps the most deeply satisfying thing on earth we can experience. If you want to see paradise, simply look around a view it, sings Wonka, as he himself looks around, seemingly alone in this thoughts as the others ignore him. Yet we see he is viewing them enjoying his imaginative creation. Paradise.
Would you like to hear my tale? I will tell you, the whole thing if you want. But my invitation is conditional. With each word I tell you I will be watching your eyes, to see if you are with me. If not, I will not bother to continue, and you will never notice as my voice trails off and we switch subjects. But if you pass my test, and you laugh and cry at the places that I thought only I could laugh and cry, and at other places that you yourself discover in my tale, places of pain and joy that I had not even noticed, then you will earn a kind of trust from me, one that I yearn to give to someone. Then I may let you imagine it along with me, and if you have a story, and you invite me into it, I might help you imagine it too, if you want, and maybe our imaginations will even mingle together.
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