Watched Where the Wild Things Are last weekend. Not really a movie for kids. Afterwards everyone went to bed melancholy. It is a brown movie which we watched in a brown house during a brown season. The movie leads you to believe that Max’s wild rumpuses are caused by his need for attention after his father either died or left permanently (I missed the beginning of the movie so I didn’t catch all the backstory,if it even matters). The Wild Things are like troubled children masquerading as adults. Like with Max, in our temporarily fatherless household, my children have become increasingly disorderly. My ineffective discipline does little to deter their animal nature from emerging and reigning and feeding the same spirit in their siblings, either through needlings and provocations or scuffles and physical abuse of each other. The dirt clod war near the end of the movie elicited the only laughs of delight from my crowd during the whole movie, although they seemed to enjoy Max’s violent play with the wild things after they got over the initial shock of hearing the glum human voices coming out of the big destructive wild things.
Naturally.
Eventually Max realizes all this hurtful play makes the other wild things unhappy, although like siblings they quickly forgive and forget. After a minor rebellion against his kingship, he forms a connection between his mom and himself, as king, in a position of authority. They both want to make everyone happy, but they just don’t know how. In the movie his empathy for his mother sends him home, whereas in the book it seems more like he goes home because he wants to be loved for who he is, rather than whom he is pretending to be, that deep underneath the wolfsuit Max is really a good, loving boy who wants his mother to recognize him.
Perhaps the movie has captured something of the book for some readers, but the movie has a feeling of desperation absent in the book. Even though Max sits and eats cake and smiles at his mother at the end of the movie, she is still tired and lonely, and she does nothing to discipline him for running away. Even giving him chocolate cake instead of a warm supper seems to say “I’m too tired to fix you a proper supper after you’ve been so wild.” Maybe the movie left us melancholy because it hits too close to home, because it is truer to reality than to the dreaminess of the book, where the wild things are fun and controllable by Max, instead of difficult to understand in their childlike irrationality.
