I went with my 7 year old niece to see the much anticipated film adaptation to the 1963 children’s novel Where The Wild Things Are.  I had bought her the book by Maurice Sendak when she was four or five and we’ve been looking forward to this film since we heard it was coming out a year ago.  During the film I am trying to view it from two perspectives: my own, which is jaded by critical analysis and your general cinema snobbery, and hers, a perspective chock full of innocence and wonder.  I actually loved the movie.  Sure it was a little heavy-handed with it’s spelling out of literary symbolism, but that’s fine, because it helped spark insightful conversation with my niece afterwards, since she too struggles with the similar themes in her own psyche.  She still didn’t get, at first, that Max only went to the island in his imagination, but for kids, this is an irrelevant point.  Especially since the main character himself doesn’t even recognize that the wild things are actually projections of himself.

OK Spoiler Alert!  If you haven’t seen the movie (and you intend to) stop reading this post!

One of the main themes in Max’s drama is his loneliness and isolation.  His sister is a teenager and pre-occupied with friends.  She doesn’t defend him when her friends accidentally hurt him and crush the igloo he built after providing him with a fleeting rush of attention with a snowball fight that Max initiates.  His single, overworked, and financially strapped mother, who loves him dearly, but makes paltry attempts to engage with him, is stretched to her limits and is also trying to get something going with a new boyfriend, which takes even more time away from Max.  Dad is not in the picture.  Max is desperate for attention and interaction so he resorts to chasing the family dog, who appears downright terrified, around the house for a wrestle.  Finally, attention-starved and calling for his mother to come look at his new fort in his bedroom, he goes downstairs to find mom entertaining a male guest.  He attempts to create conflict over the frozen corn she is about to prepare and stands up on the counter to announce “I am going to eat you!”  When she grabs him down off the counter top, Max bites his mother on the shoulder and scampers away and out the front door and into the woods.  And this is where his imaginary adventure begins.

After crossing a tumultuous ocean in a tiny sail boat he embarks on an island where he meets a “family” of monsters, all projections of his own psyche.  There’s Carol, who Max is immediately identified with because when he encounters him he is in a destructive state and smashing up all their huts.  Carol is angry that KW has left again and he doesn’t know when she’ll be back.  As he is asking for the other monsters to help him smash things, Alexander, the significantly smaller of the wild things goat-boy, is ever submissive and allows Carol to hurl him onto the huts.  Alexander laments that nobody ever listens to him or acknowledges his existence so he is eager to help out even if it means he is getting abused or taken advantage of.  He desperately wants to be noticed.  Sound familiar?  KW is the maternal figure that keeps leaving and has made strange friends, Terry and Bob, who turn out to be owls--and they don’t speak English so neither Max or Carol understand what they are saying.  Their unintelligible squawking is symbolic of reason and adult rationale (KW keeps remarking about how smart they are), by which Max seems both intimidated and ostracized in his emotional world of strife and restlessness.  One of the main conflicts Max has with Carol, ie. himself, is whether to allow these strange outsiders into their new home, where things are suppose to be happy and good.  Carol does not like this idea and throws an epic tantrum resulting in ripping the arm off another wild thing (which is artfully replaced by a twig--I love it.)  KW reflects Max’s fears of abandonment and longing for a stable and reliable maternal figure, who protects Max when Carol is in a rage by having him hide in her mouth--a classic return to the womb theme, complete with a gooey rebirthing when he begins to feel smothered and in need of more independence, typical at his stage of development.  Another character that is worth mentioning is Judith, the one with the horn on her nose.  She is the self-proclaimed “downer.”  Judith is Max’s budding inner-skeptic.  She doubts his reign as king of the wild things from the very beginning and challenges his rule when he is clearly picking favorites with Carol. 

Max’s chosen role in this psychic struggle is to be a king and make everyone o.k.  He kicks off his reign with a celebratory rumpus, an initial cathartic release which ends in a precarious dog pile of snuggling.  Boys need hugs and physical affection and he dreams of sleeping “in a pile,” which is sadly only realized in his imagination.  He identifies with Carol who shows him a model he has created of a land where only good things happen to them.  So Max decides that they should create a “real” fort that only people they want there can enter or else a mechanism in the fort will automatically destroy them via brain-ectomy.  Brilliant!  So they get started building this perfect structure of limbs, twigs and underground tunnels.  According to Erik Erikson’s theory of ego development, Max is well into the Industry vs. Inferiority stage.  This fort building is his process of traversing rocky relational waters to make it all work out in the end.  But this task is full of unexpected challenges that cause Max to doubt his efficacy in relationship maintenance.  His inner struggle is too complicated for an imaginary king to fix it all just by willing it so.  So he eventually drops the king fantasy and is left with his own regular boy abilities, which, if he can still accomplish his relational goals, will result in the positive outcome of the ego crisis: competence!  The final conflict between Max and Carol, ie. himself, is to resign to not having a king to make things better.  Children have to figure it out for themselves.  If they can’t then they get stuck in that ego development stage and will continue to struggle with inferiority of all shapes and sizes throughout life.  He is able to resolve it in the end and return home, where mom welcomes him with a warm embrace and an enormous slice of chocolate cake!  Max is at peace as he sees his real KW across the table nodding off after staying up worried about him for however long he was actually gone. 

Take away lessons:

1. ★  Boys need room to romp.  Make sure they have a designated space to let loose and be physical.
   

2. ★  Pay attention to the themes in a child’s play, be it aggression, isolation, fear, abandonment, rejection, etc.  The natural language of a child is through play.
   

3. ★  Encourage a child’s imagination.  It isn’t foolishness.  This is how they grow.
   

4. ★  Allow children to work things out on their own.  If they do not have opportunities to develop this skill, they will be ill-prepared for relationships of all kinds in the future.  And finally . . .
   

5. ★  Sometimes it’s nice to sleep in a pile.