Among the things I have never really been able to shake are the few pages in the middle of Where the Wild Things Are that don’t even have words. There are just big, fat and feathery beasts cavorting, swinging from branches, and tumbling about in a stylized forest – and then the book gets back to words briefly before it closes. I learned a lot from this book as a child. It showed me that the world is a carnivorous place. It is one of the things that taught me what words like “wanton” and “abandon” mean. To twist a great Lewis phrase, it was one of the first times I was truly surprised by proper hedonism.
And along with Harold and the Purple Crayon, this book was an introduction to what would become a lifelong obsession with scale, space, and dimension. I got lost in Harold’s bold lines, awestruck by the geometric implications of his otherwise blank pages. Likewise, my mind boggled at the length of Max’s sea voyage: “…night and a day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year.” I would look at those pages and wonder what Max ate, what he did to stay entertained, whether or not he missed his mom. Meditating on these massive spaces and passages of time was a breathtaking exercise, a prelude to more robust concepts of wonder I was later introduced to in grad school and beyond.
I also learned from these books that when I grew up I would probably have to take long voyages – existential, imaginary, or otherwise – to make sense of the world. And I did, and it was true. Books like these are probably the reason I am now so attracted to Tarkovsky’s and Hou’s balloons, to Tarr’s quiet passages of time, or to Malick’s monotone frames.
Where the Wild Things Are chronicles the moment when a child first discovers vast, looming emotions like loneliness, anger, and despair that are unfortunately the pillars of the bridge to adulthood – and I think Jonze gets all that spot on in the film. As it is an adaptation of a book that is ten sentences long, he felt compelled to shoehorn in other bits of narrative and context that would enable the audience to pick up on the massive possible subtext to Sendak’s book. Because of all this extra material, the unformed id at the center of the book is simply conjured up with less abstract finesse. But the spirit of the book, maybe best expressed in the way Carol comes to embody the sorrow and anger we often feel for no other reason than that we are human and that we live in a wild place, is beautifully expressed. The smile he shares with his mother at the end is hard won.
But then, this was my daughter’s first cinema experience. I have been waiting for something intensely expressive, hieratic, and exploding with joy and light, and it looked like this was it. We talked to her beforehand and she developed a very structured series of contingency plans in the eventuality that it would be too loud or scary (Hello Kitty factored into all of them). So we packed up Hello Kitty, some juice, and a bag of clandestine M&Ms. When we got to the theater it turned out that she is still so young that they don’t even charge her for a ticket. We bought our popcorn and saturated it with butter, deciding that the machine that allows you to somehow dust the popcorn with a cloud of white chedder or hot jalepeno was both too confusing and terrifying. She was rapt through the previews, asking me if this was the movie yet, and if not, can she see that movie when it comes out. I was very proud of her. I was thrilled to hold her little hand when the intro credits rolled over to the very first frames of her planned obsession with the Great Conversation. The flicker of color on her face was beautiful. I briefly imagined a life in which I would have to buy two of every festival ticket because my daughter couldn’t bear to miss the Costa retrospective.
She sat in my lap and we watched this together and I was disappointed that she understood almost everything about it immediately. I really wanted her to be puzzled, to marvel at images that she couldn’t quite wrap her head around in the same way I struggled through Harold and the Purple Crayon and Dandelion Wine a few years later. I wanted more long passages of wordless wild rumpus. If Jonze had trusted his images more, stayed faithful to the fantastical pace of Sendak’s vision, this would have been it.