- Bruno Bettelheim
A wolf-suited blur of unfocussed aggression, Max hurtles down the staircase – a fork clenched in his fist – in pursuit of the terrified family dog. The camera, handheld, careens with him like an accomplice. Wildness, yes. But not the exhilaration, the temporary unbounded freedom of acting out – of trapping one’s hurt like lightning in a bottle to release it later in a burst of electric, savage creativity. Here, there is only the white-hot immediateness of anger, the confusion and helplessness that turns on and snarls at smaller things. Almost immediately, however, the frame freezes, and Max’s furious pursuit is cruelly halted – not as an authoritative preventive measure, but as an authorial intercession that denies the boy any liberation from the bewilderment of his young life.
For Maurice Sendak, a private jungle emerges from a boy’s bedroom in order to offer up a dark haven where he might disgorge all his fears and anger in a secret rumpus. This is not to be taken as the condescending reduction of a child’s tantrum; it is a measure of respect for their attempts at fashioning dimensions of solitude where they cannot be dominated or frightened or disappointed – where we cannot touch them. It is also Sendak’s achievement to insist that the inevitable decision to return from this solitude belongs to the young adventurer in question. A hot supper will await him, yes, but the journey back to familial concord will be on his terms, and that private jungle will recede at his behest.
For Spike Jonze, by contrast, family becomes yet another incomprehensible structure from which his young protagonist cannot escape, as befuddling and pathetic a universe as those found in Being John Malkovich or Adaptation (or even some of his more downbeat music videos). Max is driven from his house into the night – away from the perceived betrayals and tyrannies of his sister and mother – towards the little boat that bears him away. Already Jonze has forsaken the crucial autonomy that the book accords the boy. Subsequently, the world into which Max burrows is not an expansive kingdom within the confines of a bedroom, but a hermetic dimension beyond the constrictive boundaries of the familiar. His voyage is an exilic retreat rather than a restorative adventure.
Just as Max is paralysed by the opening freeze-frame, so too is he pitilessly condemned to a realm that is a warped and cryptically refracted image of his home. These wild things are haunted by an unnamed sadness, riven by jealousies and petty resentments, and given to inexplicable bouts of rage and reactionary hostility. Even the initially exquisite natural lighting becomes oppressive in its unvarying twilit tones – as if the sun really were dying, as Max and Carol (his monstrous analogue) fear.
On the one hand, Jonze and Eggers’ screenplay is admirable for its attempt to adopt an amorphous child-like logic: Max attempts to work out these all-too-familiar mystifying conflicts and half-understood problems through improvisational stories and games with ever-evolving rules. On the other, the film pessimistically thwarts every effort to resolve these troubles. Max’s time with the wild things is profoundly melancholic, and characterised by confusion, loss, and ultimately defeat. Although he is declared “King” of this realm, his fraudulence is eventually exposed and he is driven away once again. Unlike the intentional abdication of the throne in Sendak’s story, Max is overwhelmed by his circumstances and surrenders.
Jonze subsequently ends the film ambiguously with Max watching his mother succumb to an exhausted sleep at the kitchen table, but nothing we have seen so far warrants an interpretation of his gaze as an epiphanic reversal of parent-child relationships. The mother remains an inscrutable mystery – yielding up none of her secrets in sleep – and the son can only look upon her with a yearning that is never to be appeased. Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are offers no respite from the fundamental incapacities that it perceives at the heart of childhood, and no opportunity for an emergent self-sovereignty to establish the beginnings of a dominion.
