Wild Things

Taking a break from such heavy cosmological topics as the Universe ending in heat death sooner than anticipated and a new translation of the Bible that shows God did not create heaven and earth but merely separate what was already there, Sophie and I went out last night to check out the opening night of Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Despite reviews claiming the movie is too depressing or frightening we both found it highly charming, particularly the stellar acting of child-star Max Records, the intricate costumes from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and upbeat soundtrack from the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Karen O [Found link, for preview purposes only, buy here]. It was interesting to note that the audience was primarily comprised of young adults, who probably were raised on Sendak's masterpiece and are perhaps the intended target demographic of Dave Egger's script (the whole movie really capturing the indie spirit of the times).


[Potential Spoilers Below]

The thing that really stuck out for me though was what this movie says about the human imagination. Despite our cultural love of monsters and fantasy, the imagination here is presented in its rawest or most primal. Shaggy monsters dance and tear up the woods and throw clods of dirt at each other. Everyone howls and growls. Certainly the monsters possess some amount of adult-like self-reflection (enough to come off as rather depressed), but no more than Max himself. In fact, one could take a psychological perspective that the monsters and their land are all projections of Max's own fears and desires, for friendship, against alienation and being young and misunderstood if not ignored.

But what is interesting was the choice of not stating whether the events of Max's journey really took place or not. The final return scene has no dialogue, so we aren't asked to chose with Max over what really happened, even if with all the day to night transitions he must have been gone for several weeks. This draws on elements of the Fantastic in art, that supernatural events are left ambiguous as to their reality. This is a necessary move because the audience, instead of being asked to decide what is real here, can instead suspend their disbelief and let the monsters be real. They are reflections of ourselves. Of course, this in turn adds more weight to what both Sophie and I decided was one of the pivotal scenes of the movie, when the monster Carrol rips the bird monster's arm off, and the camera focuses on a stream of sand spilling out. Up till this point, Max has taken the monsters as real, but they are shown to be not real, and he starts feeling the need of returning home to his flesh and blood family.

What this says for me is that despite how primal and raw we sometimes need to express our imaginations as children, this rawness sometimes tears holes in the stories we make up and tell ourselves, and shows us what is more importantly real in our lives. For another example, in a school scene at the beginning of the movie, Max is told that one day the sun is going to die, which when he tells the monsters makes them even more depressed and desperate (to tie this in with the links at the beginning of this entry). I think we are encouraged to equate those kinds of predictions of science with the imagination as well, as something that must ultimately give way to the reality of the present and the more immediate significance of our families and loves.