dibididibidi SIBLING PIRACY
Random takes on our recent pirate loot.

Hey Mag,

The first thing that struck me about Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are” is the hurried pacing of the first scene: the quick jump cuts, the jerky camera movements, Max’s guttural screams as he violently wrestles with his dog. This isn’t a children’s film. It’s a film made for grownups who long for their lost childhood. You know what that means, right? This is such a “Chris” kind of movie.

That first scene sets up the entire tone of the movie: one that we are not meant to enjoy as entertainment, nor to be preached to, but to relate with. Show me someone born before 1985 who does not remember being 10 years old, enjoying sun-kissed summers, grazed knees, dirty fingernails and winning imaginary battles against imaginary foes, and I will show you someone who never had a real childhood. You know that I refer to everyone we know who has grown up on a steady diet of Playstation 1-3, discovered the internet before they discovered what it feels like to climb a tree, and has never played a game of “patintero.”

“Where the Wild Things Are” is dark and brooding, and full of gut wrenching emotional scenes that affected me profoundly, despite the fact that 90% of the film relied on the emotions of CGI enhanced people in monster suits. Playing with this material, Spike Jonze reigned in any distracting urges to overstylize Maurice Sendak’s story, and simply told a tale that is essentially a celebration of childhood. It made me long for mine, that’s for sure. I’d give anything to recapture what it feels like being ten years old again.

Chris

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Yo Chris,

A parenthetical remark, first: True. I was born before 1985, and you’re right, there were a lot of skinned knees (swabbed with radioactive colored merthiolate) back then. And dirt. And climbing up trees, then falling on our little behinds. And a HELL of a lot of running—but mostly (see annoying sibling archetype) because I was trying to catch up to you.

So yes, with practically every shot being marinated in hazy golds and warm taupes (how many times can one say “holy lens flare, Batman?’), visually speaking, WTWTA successfully conveys the nostalgia for a remembered childhood. With that being said, though, I think this story resonates more with your idea of childhood than with mine.

The comfort of the film’s nostalgia notwithstanding, one cannot deny that there is something fundamentally unsettling about its premise: a mischievous little boy leaves home and becomes king of a magical land inhabited by Wild Things—who, by the way, may or may not eat him up. If your child sleeps with a night-light to ward off the monsters under his bed, then this probably isn’t the movie for him. In defense, though, it is precisely this lack of cutesy preciousness that I believe to be one of the primary strengths of the film—a refreshing counter to what Sendak believes to be the “American problem” of churning formulaic and insipid stories for/about children:

Sendak: Europeans have done films about children, like The 400 Blows or My Life as a Dog, which is one of the most wonderful movies ever. It’s tough to watch his suffering when his mother is dying and he scoots under the bed. That’s the kind of way they have of dealing with children and they always have. We are squeamish. We are Disneyfied. We don’t want children to suffer. But what do we do about the fact that they do? The trick is to turn that into art. Not scare children, that’s never our intention.

Do you think Disney is bad for children?
Sendak: I think it’s terrible.

While I am a hardcore Disneyphile, I can see Sendak’s point. Although I’m a sucka for the singing mermaids and cricket-consciences, stories about children alone in a world of strange and potentially dangerous creatures have simultaneously petrified and fascinated me, as well.

EXHIBIT A

(I have a sinking feeling this did not age well, however.)

EXHIBIT B

(An exception to the Disney-Movies-are-Sissified-Versions-

of-the-Original-Source-Material rule)

EXHIBIT C

This tops my Favorite Creepy Childhood Movies List.

Much to my delight, in WTWTA things do not only get curiouser and curiouser, but they get kind of ugly as well. King Max’s monster-friends/vassals are not of the Sesame St/Monster’s Inc/ Batibot. variety; there are no long-eyelashed elephants or blue, yeti-like creatures with hearts of gold or gravelly voiced monkeys. And while they do have sharp incisors, there are no instances of sparkling in the sunlight. Granted, they do bring in the fun times, but it is clear that they are all too capable of inflicting harm:  they fling each other into the air, tear each other’s limbs, and step on each other’s faces. And—an interesting (read: NOT MY FAVORITE) addition to their characters—they can also get annoyingly emo at times.

This brings me to another point: Sendak’s WTWTA has long been regarded as a fictional study on the anger of a child (Francis Spufford in The Child that Books Built {which, admittedly, I have not read} characterizes it as “one of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger”), and yet the Eggers-Jonze take on the tale seems adamant on characterizing Max as a child who is wrestling with other emotions as well. Anger does play a huge part in the story: Max’s rage is the kind that does not know how express itself, but instead bubbles over and manifests itself in stomping feet, uncontrollable tears, bites, or just the yearning to go out into the wild and be, well, wild (i.e. Max is one of the Wild Things himself). In Max’s case, however, these bouts of petulance are mostly in retaliation to what he perceives as mammoth injustices in his own world: a distracted mother, a broken igloo, a sister who fails to come to his defense.  This kind of anger (or, at the very least, the attraction to a ‘wild rumpus’) is not alienating, though—at least not to me. God knows that there are days when I pass by the glassware section at the department store and I am overcome with this strange compulsion to break a dish. Or ten. This inexplicable desire to bash things is certainly not alienating to the Wild Things, themselves. Hey, weird little thing, one of them says. I like the way you destroy stuff.

In the script, my ex-boyf, the now very married D. Eggers gives us a Max who is as hyperactive and temperamental as Sendak’s original creation. However, the film’s Max is also lonely (one of his first promises as King is to protect them from loneliness with a “sadness shield” that is big enough for all of them) and terrified of things that are bound to expire (the sun. his mother. perhaps even childhood itself.). Even the strongest Wild Thing of them all, Caroll, (voiced by James Gandolfini, who has mastered the Stoic, Macho Archetype)  shares Max’s fear of mortality — at one point he turns to Max, bewildered, and says, I don’t even know what comes after dust.

Intense stuff? Um, yes. While I appreciate the attempt to flesh out Sendak’s characters, (expanding the 10 sentence long children’s story into a feature length film is no small feat indeed), I sometimes found these emotional meanderings a tad bit heavy-handed for my personal taste. However, these are very minor quibbles.  I liked WTWTA. A lot. Primarily because it was able to evoke a very visceral (and yet, at the moment, undefinable) reaction from me. Did my Disney-softened self react squeamishly because it showed a child’s suffering?  Did it make me mourn the loss of my imagination or was i inspired to rediscover the magic in simple things, like balls of string, or jumping up and down or whooping like an Indian, or carving my name on the surface of a tree trunk? I don’t know, I can’t tell, not yet.