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.