October 18, 2009

Wild Things

Where The Wild Things Are captures perhaps better than any other movie I’ve seen in a long time the danger and mystery and confusion and secret life of a certain age in childhood. It’s always been my favorite children's books – get me drunk and I’ll quote the whole thing – but the movie and the filling in of Max’s backstory offers something else, and though it slides close to sentimentality at moments and the Wild Things are a bit too talky, it also strikes in those opening scenes in particular to something near to the heart of how it is to live in a world that feels random and uncertain and where adult decisions, all decisions, feel both arbitrary and personal.

Max’s misunderstood fear of a dying sun, for example, is beautifully shot with Max sitting in the classroom and then the voice, the words of the teacher, following him as he rode the bus home. It reminded me of being a kid and listening to the radio and hearing for the first time about Russian ICBMs aimed in my direction. The thought of a missile capable of wiping out Washington DC, and our home 90 miles away, felt real and possible. I looked on maps of first strike cities and traced the outer edges of circles of immediate death and possible death by radiation poisoning. I imagined nuclear winters. The reports on the radio were another sign in a world of signs that said, not yours. No control.

The game of finding parallels between one’s life and any work of art is both an act of authentication but also a dangerous limiting of both the complexity of the life and the work. But as I watched the movie I couldn’t help but remember what it was like to see a parent begin to date again, seeing a sister's more popular world, strange and wonderful dreaming and play, or the rage and fear of emotions that can't be accounted for in adult terms. A couple of years ago my mother and I were going through a box of old letters, report cards, etc. and found a report written about my behavior in kindergarten. It said something to the effect that
Josh can become easily frustrated if unsuccessful on his first try and sometimes has trouble controlling his temper. We both laughed, in part of how I’ve changed, but mostly because the personality described then could have been recycled and reprinted on every progress report, evaluation throughout my childhood. And while I think I’ve matured slightly since age 6, there was something surreal about seeing a younger version of myself, and a shadow of that description in my current self, written with such accuracy.

Eggers and Jonze, in giving Max a single mother just beginning to date again and worried about money, an older sister, an absent father, have set up clear domestic causes for his wildness. But even while they’ve set up possibilities they’ve also left it uncertain. The scene of the all the kids playing in the school yard, the science teacher describing the sun as a star that will one day die, and the quiet moments of Max playing alone, building of a room of forts, the igloo, etc. – all of these build to shape not the cause of Max’s behavior but the world in which he inhabits. If Max’s acting out were the result of a single cause then I think it’d feel manipulated, and I understand that compliant about the movie, but in my movie watching experience I could believe that Max’s confusion, anger, and uncertainty respond to the fact that the world, his world, is changing. Arbitrary and personal. At the end of a Mark Strand poem in Dark Harbor the speaker writes “Tell me I have not lived in vain, that the stars / Will not die, that things will stay as they are, / That what I have seen will last, that I was not born / Into change, that what I have said has not been said for me.” As we get older we find ways to deal with these contingencies – our own islands of imagination, wild rumpuses –it doesn’t change the truth that we’re born into a world of change.

The movie also conjures with intimate, often handheld shots, the strange and private wonder of play that too is part of childhood. Individual imagination, quiet revealing, games of one and wild stories: these become Max's way not just to entertain himself but understand his place with the world. Being a kid is a lonely business. I think one of the reasons that when adults describe this as ‘not a kid’s movie’ they are calling attention to the themes that make them uncomfortable. It’s what most ‘kid’s movies’ avoid, and for some good reasons -- loneliness is a hard thing to show in an interesting way and it makes people in our age of good feeling uncomfortable. There’s a moment where one of the Wild Things, “Carol” says something to the effect that Max as the new King of the Wild Things will keep the loneliness out. It’s a moment I think Eggers and Jonze perhaps show their cards a little too much. If it is a movie in part about loneliness, it's also about the counter to that: story.

“I could use a story,” Max’s mother says, and for me it’s also a movie about the kinds of stories we tell each other. And the stories we tell ourselves. The story Max creates of the Wild Things, the need to travel to that world in order to understand the one he left behind, gives him meaning and definition. By pretending to be King, he’s able to see who he is as both an individual, but also his part of his family’s community. There’s a letter Don Dellio wrote to Jonathan Franzen and quoted in Franzen’s book of essays How to Be Alone, I’ve been thinking about recently and seems connected to this idea of the stories we tell. Dellio says, “Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.” Max is like and unlike Dellio’s vision of the novelist as engaged in an act of survival; as a boy he wants, though can’t articulate, his desire to be both an individual and part of a community. It's what I admire about the end of the movie -- I don't think I'm ruining anything here -- is that even when Max returns, we know that life is in some ways unchanged. There's no false statements by either his mother or him about never hurting the other again. It's a happy ending to be sure but one that doesn't refuse the truths. Living in a community and staying an individual is hard. Being part of family isn't always easy. Life will continue. There’s no end to loneliness, just small islands of safety and danger, and some rooms where dinner is waiting for us, still warm.










October 5, 2009

Damn

One of the best poems I've read in a while.


In a Beautiful Country

A good way to fall in love
is to turn off the headlights
and drive very fast down dark roads.

Another way to fall in love
is to say they are only mints
and swallow them with a strong drink.

Then it is autumn in the body.
Your hands are cold.
Then it is winter and we are still at war.

The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear
about how we live in a beautiful country.
Snow sifts from the clouds

into your drink. It doesn't matter about the war.
A good way to fall in love
is to close up the garage and turn the engine on,

then down you'll fall through lovely mists
as a body might fall early one morning
from a high window into love. Love,

the broken glass. Love, the scissors
and the water basin. A good way to fall
is with a rope to catch you.

A good way is with something to drink
to help you march forward.
The gold-haired girl says, Don't worry

about the armies, says, We live in a time
full of love. You're thinking about this too much.
Slow down. Nothing bad will happen.


KEVIN PRUFER
Poetry
October 2009

September 20, 2009

Last Words



I haven't written much in a while, but this made me want to write or at least post this article. These statements, last words, said by Texas death row inmates before they were executed are compelling, surprising, a few are darkly humorous, but taken together they are devastatingly sad. On one side of these words is an act of terrible and shattering violence they most likely committed. And on the other side of the words is silence. Many of them apologize or ask for forgiveness, and in doing so we see the incompleteness of apology and the finality of their deaths. Most likely -- and as was described in a recent New Yorker article, it seems that at least one innocent person was executed -- being important here, and shadowing all of these words with doubt. And while I know they've been gathered and arraigned by the author to create an effect, this is an editorial after all, it doesn't diminish their power for me. Its not an overtly polemical statement against the death penalty, though it certainly serves that purpose, but rather a reminder that a person is speaking, was speaking.

September 7, 2009

Nocturne, Phnom Penh

A short prose piece from being in Cambodia this summer, part of a very cool site of collaborative writing projects called The Owls:

http://owlsmag.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/stamps-rivkin/


August 28, 2009

Why so quiet Josh

When writing poems, the blog feels like an escape, or at least a counterweight to a certain kind of intensity or focus or obsession with precision, but when i'm working on prose, in this case an essay, or right now pieces of an essay, writing here feels like a distraction or taking away somehow from the prose. I'm also really busy getting ready to teach. So instead of reflections on the state of the soul or the purpose of poetry (Milosz: "The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person/ for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors), here are a couple of things I'm looking forward to in the next couple months.

Poetry! New books from a couple of writer's i really like...

Robin Ekiss' The Mansion of Happiness

http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780820334080-0

Gabrielle Calvocoressi's Apocalyptic Swing

http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780892553532-0

Max! The night max wore his wolf suit he made mischief of one kind and another...

Where the Wild Things Are Movie

http://wherethewildthingsare.warnerbros.com/

Wisconsin Music! The state that brought you fried cheese curd brings the noise...

Volcano Choir (with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver)

http://www.jagjaguwar.com/onesheet.php?cat=JAG156