Where the Wild Things Are
Directed by Spike Jonze
The film version of Maurice
Sendak's picture book Where the Wild Things Are is wildly original and imaginative, arrestingly beautiful, and entirely heartfelt. It is also excruciatingly boring, an airless exploration of the consciousness of a little boy that compelled me to explore the inside of my eyelids on several occasions.
I never fall asleep during movies, not even when I had a baby who woke up four times every night; but for me, Where the Wild Things Are was cinematic Sominex.
Which just goes to show that originality, imagination, beauty, and purity of intent are no substitute for a good story. In fact, they may make the lack of a narrative seem all the more glaring. The problem with Where the Wild Things Are is that its ambition isn't to tell a tale but to map out the psychosexual terrain of boyhood.
Yes, you read that right. In this sense it differs from Maurice Sendak's beloved book, which has a simpler goal--one that was all the rage among progressive-minded and pretentious children's authors like Sendak, William Steig, and Dr. Seuss in the late 1950s and early '60s. They sought to demonstrate their own intellectual sophistication by incorporating the wisdom they had gleaned from psychoanalysis about the structure of the human personality into their books for kids.
Thus, the "wild things" of Sendak's title, as well as Thing One and Thing Two from The Cat in the Hat, are metaphorical representations of the chaotic force
Freud called the Id. (The fish in The Cat in the Hat is the superego, as is the unseen mother in Where the Wild Things Are.) It was because of flourishes like these that people in New York, where the wild middlebrows are, were inclined to take Sendak
seriously as a semi-thinker upon the release of his celebrated tome.
In Sendak's rendering, a four-year-old named Max behaves badly, is called a wild thing, and when he's sent to bed without supper, dreams of becoming the king of a group of monsters who worship him. Eventually he decides to go home, which means he awakens to find his dinner waiting for him, "and it was still hot." Sendak's monochromatic illustrations are beautiful, and so is the rhythm of his language. But it is the simplicity of its message--even Ids eventually need and crave the comforts of home--that explains the fact that this odd book has sold 19 million copies since its publication in 1963.
The movie version is far more psychologically ambitious, and as a result, is far less satisfying. For one thing, Max is eight or nine, a child of divorce with an older sister who was once his playmate but has since discovered boys. When he sees his mother kissing her new boyfriend, he explodes in a rage and bites her. She chases him; he runs out of the house into the night and down into a ravine, whence his fantasy of journeying in a boat to the land of the wild things commences.
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