A Late-Viewer’s Review of Where the Wild Things Are
In this review I will not attempt to rate this film. I don’t mean to grade Where the Wild Things Are by any cinematic/aesthetic/critical scale, so I’ll leave that to the slew of critics who will watch all movies on their superficial level. Underneath the furry hides lies a semblance of childhood that isn’t quite fondly recalled.
The last thing to fade from our memory is light. A wrestling match amongst the bed sheets when we were seven is fused with the light coming through the window and through the sheets in our older minds, but there is a moment, probably forgotten, when one child has overpowered the other and there is an intensive fear of not being able to breathe. Max is thrust is similar situations three times in the movie: play gone too far, all air passages blocked and a tell-all panicked expression on his face while his arms move in frenzy to escape the deadly embraces. The moments in this movie force audience members to review their sun-spotted memories with that unsettling addition. He was playing too rough and I could not breathe.
The funny thing about Max is his ambivalence towards being eaten, perhaps an unconscious confidence in his immortality, or even, his ignorance about mortality and all that it entails. He is however very scared of being abandoned, a feeling he knows very well and abhors. He feels a need to impress the wild things so they will not leave him. The all-encompassing concern is not necessarily to rule, that being a more adult-like concern, but to simply be accepted. In the social circle of Wild Things, Max picks out a mother figure, another creature very similar to himself and a rivalrous, sibling-like character. The father-figure is markedly absent where the Wild Things are since, as it is a sort of parallel universe, Max hasn’t a father in real-life. His mind has constructed something vastly different from reality, yet is inspired by reality. His fantasy proves to be much more susceptible to reality the longer it plays out: families fight, friends lose trust in you and forts get destroyed, most frequently, by someone who helped you build it.
The end of fantasy is inevitable, so Max returns home to a mother anxiously waiting for him. The audience is then thrust into the mother’s shoes as we get a sense of the heartbreak she must have waited with and how terribly sad and wonderful it is that Max is totally oblivious to it.
I see this movie as an attempt to paint the true divisions between adulthood and childhood. Adults tend to view children as beings living out a sort of psuedo-life where only good things happen and any expression of pain is due to the child’s over-active imagination.
(To tie in with a point I was making earlier, this perception is probably thanks in part to our shoddy memories.)
Children are completely ignorant to things adults have a better mental grasp of: primarily mortality. They simply cannot know what shoving against the parent’s embrace does to the parent’s heart. It is the parent that can abandon them, the child, not the other way around.
In attempts to explain these dynamics, Spike Jonze takes a rather surrealist approach. There are hints of Oedipal complexity and World-of-the-Mother, but the most telling surrealist property is the dream-like execution of the plot. That is to say, there isn’t really a plot. Things do not happen for any real, coherent reason. Events are meant to mirror the anxieties Max feels in reality. Seeking “organic unity” within Where the Wild Things Are is a moot point, unless you happen to be Sigmund Freud.
That said, I’m afraid this review may reveal certain aspects of myself to strange readers, but I mean, I can’t claim any empirical objectivity when I review something. So go ahead: psychoanalyze me bitch.
Jonze… what do you mean to say? For I heard, “Ignorance isn’t bliss, and we are all children in the face of death.”
