InsaneJournal

Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is one of those books that I’ve loved as both a little girl and a grown woman. Visually it appeals to me enormously, the illustrations are gorgeous, but beyond that I’ve always been fascinated by the story (simple and epic all at once), by Sendak’s sly sense of humor, by the sense of joy and the edge of darkness the book contains. In a lot of ways Where the Wild Things Are has always struck me as a story that works on a primeval, Jungian level charting the child’s process of identity building in a mythic fable. Growing up is like Max’s journey. You over step boundaries, you reject authority, you play with other roles and unacceptable behavior, you run amok but then hopefully you return your parents, your home, to love and safety and order.

I felt like Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are film did a really good job with the difficult task of adapting Sendak’s book. The movie is visually striking in its own right and doesn’t slight either the playfulness or the sometimes menacing edginess of the original.

Screenwriters Jonze and David Eggers stay true to the narrative outlines sketched by Sendak while fleshing out the story. We see a bit more of Max’s home life than the book shows. Nine year old Max (Max Records) is an extremely creative little boy with a rambunctious streak. His older sister can’t be bothered with him and his divorced, working mother loves and encourages him, but sometimes she kind of wants a life of her own. At school his science teacher talks about the sun dying. Wanting attention, confused, angry, sad and frightened all at once Max lashes out. First he trashes his sister’s room after her friends wreck the igloo he’s built. Then he behaves badly indeed when his mother has a (male) friend over for dinner, eventually biting her before he flees.

Max arrives in the world of the Wild Things to find one of them, Carol, in the process of breaking things. Max immediately identifies, as well he should. The Wild Things, especially Carol, are like giant, motherless children. Theirs is an id level world of joyful rough and tumble anarchy on one hand and frightening destructive violence on the other. Initially they consider eating Max but when he assures them he can do away with sadness and loneliness and make it so they’re happy all the time they make him their king. They all have wonderful, raucous fun together and Max sets them to work building the ultimate fort but the family of the Wild Things is no without it’s conflict and Max isn’t able to make them go away. Carol ultimately becomes as frustrated with Max as Max became with his mother and like Max lashes out.

The themes of the fallibility of authority figures and the currents of destructiveness that exist even in loving families are new to the film version of Where the Wild Things Are. There was a certain gleeful amorality to Sendak’s version but in the film it’s spelled out more clearly the ways Max grows through his experiences among the Wild Things—he returns because his time as king has taught him empathy for his mother.