Why the imaginary places we remember were often partly built inside our own minds

I recently watched Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory again.

The original 1971 movie was one I loved as a child, and I remembered Willy Wonka's factory exactly as I suspect many people do: enormous, mysterious and magical. It was a place where the normal rules had been suspended. Rivers could be made of chocolate. Candy could grow on trees. Impossible machines filled rooms, and every door seemed capable of opening onto something even stranger.

Then I watched it as an adult.

And I noticed the sets.

I noticed the props.

I noticed how theatrical some of it looked. Some of the effects were remarkably simple. Some of the situations were downright improbable. Rooms I remembered as enormous suddenly had very obvious boundaries.

I found myself wondering how something that looked like this now had once seemed so completely magical.

Then I realized something.

I wasn't remembering only what had been on the screen.

As a child, I had supplied part of it myself.

And once I began thinking about that, another place immediately came to mind.

Oz.

The Oz We Remember Wasn't Entirely on Film

Think about The Wizard of Oz.

For generations of children, Dorothy doesn't simply step onto a movie set when she opens the farmhouse door.

She enters Oz.

Munchkinland isn't a collection of scenery surrounded by studio walls. It's a village somewhere in an entire country.

The Yellow Brick Road doesn't stop when it disappears from the camera. It continues over the horizon.

The forest extends beyond the trees we can see.

And the Emerald City isn't a clever combination of constructed scenery and visual effects.

It's a city.

At least, that's how it can exist in a child's imagination.

The reality of the 1939 production was considerably more practical. Like most films of its era, The Wizard of Oz was filmed on sets constructed at MGM. Behind-the-scenes photographs show the lights, cameras and physical boundaries surrounding places that became limitless on screen. Matte paintings and forced perspective helped turn finite studio space into distant landscapes and enormous places.

None of that diminishes the extraordinary artistry involved in making the movie.

It makes what happened afterward even more remarkable.

The filmmakers constructed enough of Oz for our minds to construct the rest.

They gave us a road disappearing around a bend.

We supplied where it went.

They gave us a distant Emerald City.

We imagined everything inside it.

They gave us the edge of a forest.

We supplied the forest.

And perhaps nowhere is the invitation more perfect than Dorothy opening that farmhouse door.

On one side is the familiar, muted world of Kansas.

Then the door opens.

Color.

Flowers.

Impossible architecture.

Strange people.

A road leading somewhere we have never been.

For a child, it isn't simply an impressive cinematic transition.

A door has opened into another world.

All we have to do is follow Dorothy through it.

Wonka Worked the Same Way

That's what I finally understood while watching Willy Wonka's factory again.

The Chocolate Room didn't have to be infinite.

It only had to suggest a factory that was.

There were doors we never opened.

Corridors we didn't explore.

Machines whose purposes were never explained.

Rooms Wonka mentioned but we never saw.

If this room contained a chocolate river and edible plants, what could possibly be behind the next door?

The movie couldn't show us an infinite factory.

It didn't need to.

We built one anyway.

And the places we supplied ourselves may have been every bit as important as the ones constructed on the soundstage.

Mary Poppins Didn't Need an Infinite Carpetbag Either

The same thing happens in Mary Poppins.

Her carpetbag is an ordinary-sized object from which she removes impossibly large things.

Bert's chalk drawing becomes a place people can enter.

People float to the ceiling when they laugh.

Mary travels upward with an umbrella.

By modern standards, we can understand exactly what we're looking at: animation combined with live action, wires, compositing, carefully constructed sets and other practical filmmaking techniques.

Disney's effects team was doing remarkable technical work for 1964.

But a child doesn't need to understand any of it.

The important question about Mary Poppins's carpetbag isn't:

How did the filmmakers accomplish that effect?

It's:

What else is in there?

That's imagination taking over exactly where the filmmaker stops.

Memory Then Does Something Extraordinary

There's another reason these worlds can become larger with time.

Memory isn't a recording.

We don't store an untouched movie of our childhood somewhere in the brain and retrieve exactly the same footage forty years later.

Remembering is reconstructive.

Our brains preserve pieces of experiences—the important details, emotions, associations and meanings—and reconstruct memories from them.

And remembering and imagining aren't entirely unrelated activities. Neuroscience research has found overlapping brain systems involved in recalling past experiences and constructing imagined ones.

That creates an interesting possibility when we remember fictional worlds from childhood.

What exactly are we remembering?

The physical dimensions of Wonka's Chocolate Room?

Or the feeling that the factory went on forever?

The exact number of trees Dorothy walked past?

Or the sense that an enormous enchanted forest surrounded her?

The actual Emerald City set?

Or an entire green metropolis that existed somewhere beyond its gates?

Memory may preserve the experience of the imaginary world more powerfully than its physical construction.

Years later, we watch the movie again and compare a finite studio set with a place that has spent decades living inside memory.

No wonder the set sometimes seems smaller.

The factory didn't shrink.

Neither did Oz.

We grew up.

Do Modern Movies Leave Us Less to Imagine?

It's tempting to look at today's extraordinary visual effects and conclude that older movies were somehow better for imagination because they couldn't show us everything.

The science doesn't justify going that far.

And modern visual effects can create astonishing imaginary worlds of their own.

But the comparison raises a worthwhile question:

How much does imagination need to be shown?

A novel may give us nothing more than words.

Yet readers construct rooms, landscapes, faces and entire civilizations from them.

An old movie might offer a painted backdrop and three artificial trees.

A child sees a forest.

Perhaps imagination doesn't always benefit from receiving more information.

Perhaps sometimes it benefits from having something left to finish.

The blank spaces aren't necessarily failures of the illusion.

They may be where we enter it.

Maybe That's What We Really Miss

When adults talk about childhood magic, we often describe it as though the world itself used to be different.

Christmas was more magical.

The woods were bigger.

Movies were more wonderful.

Summers lasted forever.

Perhaps some of what we're mourning isn't the world we lost.

It's the way we once participated in it.

We didn't require everything to be supplied.

Someone gave us Oz, and we expanded it beyond the soundstage.

Someone gave us Wonka's factory, and we put rooms behind doors that were never opened.

Someone handed us a cardboard box, and we supplied a universe.

The adults who made those childhood worlds deserve enormous credit.

They built the road.

They painted the scenery.

They constructed the chocolate river.

They opened the door.

But they didn't build everything we remember.

They couldn't have.

They built enough.

And then a child's mind stepped inside and finished the world.

Maybe that is why some imaginary places remain enormous long after we've learned how small the sets really were.

And maybe growing older doesn't mean we have to stop going through those doors.

We simply have to remember that sometimes, when a door opens onto something impossible, we don't need to ask how the trick was done.

Sometimes we can just go in.