In the movie “Chocolat,” chocolate pralines awakened people’s secret longings – and ultimately reconciled society. Ideologically, the cultural product chocolate should have exactly that function.
Photo: dpa
In civil society one always has to deal with a bad conscience. Have you done enough sport, eaten healthily enough, learned throughout your life and also gained enough exciting experiences and fulfilling moments? Have you landed in your dream job (although to be honest, no one would dream of wage work) or have you become unemployed? Our everyday lives are full of contradictory ideal imperatives regarding the right way of life, self-realization and decency, as well as, of course, performance and work. We should lead a successful life, full of intensity, but with moderation, never boring or stuffy, but always stable and functional.
Accordingly, this society has a lot of cultural goods to offer that negotiate such contradictions between conformism and rebellion, Puritanism and excess, prudery and sensuality, self-control and sin. You don’t even have to look at the adventurous spirit of event vouchers and extreme experiential tourism or the planned excesses in club culture, including the petty-bourgeois flirtation with forbidden desire and the “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Every average household actually has a little bit of social contradiction in their drawer, usually in a clearly structured and easily portioned ideal form: chocolate.
The concept of the fall of man
Chocolate is not just a treat, it is rather an almost universal luxury product that reflects the ambivalence of pleasure and guilt and therefore carries the aura of sin. “The tenderest temptation,” as it is said, is often “sinfully delicious” and the epitome of sensual enjoyment. The advertisement for a famous chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream on a stick uses flames, leopards and sweaty dances to project animal sensuality for the average social business person. Just in time for every summer, the manufacturer of an almond-filled coconut and cream ball advertises the “enjoyment without chocolate” as if this were actually an impossibility. The sin of chocolate is contrasted here with the beach paradise and the white vest or summer dress.
But what exactly is the sinfulness of chocolate? In concrete terms, the mixture of fat, sugar and cocoa is the most likely way to sin against the recommended balanced diet, against your diet and fitness and thus against your commitment to the standard body and performance ideal. In a figurative sense, however, enjoyment in itself is already a sin, namely against the Protestant ethic of abstinence, willpower and work ethic – and thus against nothing less than the ideal foundations of capitalism, which sociologist Max Weber once defined as its “spirit”.
Placing a moral taboo on pleasure and sensuality also has a religious tradition. But that doesn’t mean that the sin-charge of pleasure is simply a relic from the old days of religious order. It’s more the other way around: the obsession with sin and repentance in Christianity, for example, is an expression of a social context of guilt that, with the Enlightenment, lost its collective projection in religion and shifted onto the shoulders of individuals and their actions. Where previously the Son of God had to atone for common sins, today, as is well known, there is personal responsibility – and one’s own guilt.
In our time, such guilt does not only mean the neoliberal privatization of social contradictions; rather, it is part of a contradictory society that produces guilt. The sign of bourgeois modernity is precisely its ambivalence: supposedly freed from authoritarian dogmas, people make their own history, albeit under existing conditions. However, their ideal freedom constantly comes up against real social constraints. In short, the fundamental guilt in modern civil society is that people have the potential for freedom and equality, but it is systematically blocked from them. This is apparently so difficult to bear that it regularly drives people to long for a leader and fatherland as well as to hate freedom – because it makes them guilty. A classic modern conflict of ambivalence that can be traced down to the most innocent details.
A small bite is enough
Accordingly, chocolate is not just a vice, but its sinful consumption also has a healing, reconciling effect: a bit of contained contradiction can be consumed, without any side effects such as the demand for social liberation. In 2000, the film “Chocolat” showed the miraculous power of chocolate to a mass audience. It tells the touching story of the nonconformist chocolate maker Vianne (Juliette Binoche), who shakes up the French provinces with her warm nature and her cocoa spirituality. Through an affair with the “vagrant” Roux (Johnny Depp), she ultimately becomes a projection surface for racist exclusion. In the pogrom mood that has been instigated, the mayor himself breaks into Vianne’s shop and begins to wreak havoc on it, accidentally tasting a shard of her chocolate and promptly being overwhelmed by his repressed passions and desires.
Enjoyment is a healing trip that turns him into an apologist for the joy of life. As the film’s German subtitle suggests, “a small bite was enough” to shake the hardening of the prudish post-war society. At the same time, it is also a reminder that a small bite has to be enough. In this case: a little tolerance and humanity and all conflicts will be forgotten. It is no coincidence that portionable sin chocolate has this cathartic function. It is the little bit of seduction and sin that can be integrated compliantly into the managed world.
Chocolate also has magical powers in the Tim Burton film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. Here the mysterious industrialist Willy Wonka (again: Johnny Depp) lets five children, chosen with a golden ticket, visit his chocolate factory. A mystery surrounds the factory because you never see workers entering or leaving. Wonka, who is looking for an heir to his dynasty among the chosen ones, causes the children to suffer accidents one by one during the tour, as they succumb to temptations based on their personal weaknesses. In the end, only the dirt-poor and morally upright Charlie (Freddie Highmore) remains.
Willy Wonka’s test involuntarily expresses the truth in the “spirit of capitalism”: resisting the temptation of chocolate is the condition of successful entrepreneurship, which in turn underlies the production of that temptation. The economic dimension becomes even clearer in the lead-up to the chocolate factory, which was released in cinemas at the end of 2023 as “Wonka”. The film tells the story of the industrialist Wonka’s (Timothée Chalamet) rise from rags to riches, “who prevails against a market-dominating monopoly with innovative craftsmanship, humanity and imagination,” as Philipp Bühler says in a review. The hero’s journey of the chosen entrepreneur, with all its fantastic kitsch, cannot hide the fact that the real “secret” of successful chocolate production lies in the exploitation of enslaved labor: Wonka ultimately has his factory run by a short tropical people, the so-called Oompa-Loumpas, who live in his Factory live.
Really bad conscience
The fact that the production (not only) of chocolate is based on quasi-colonial exploitation to this day is probably the very real other dimension of the “sin” that is conveyed to us culturally through enjoyment. And this mediation binds us to that social context of guilt: the symbolic breaking of a taboo of a small forbidden pleasure and its healing power are little more than mechanisms for the reproduction of the existing.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that anyone is guilty of the world’s badness by eating chocolate. Chocolate is just a commodity whose meaning for us must be reproduced by the cultural industry, in exactly such a way that we buy it, but at the same time the conditions under which it was created remain unchanged: exploitation, production and distribution. So if you reach for chocolate soon because everyday life is so stressful, because you need a break from self-control and want to reward yourself against the frustration when the chocolate bunny brings back warm childhood memories – then please remember that you are actually getting one wish for a liberated society.
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