Boy Gone Wild

I never fall asleep during movies, not even when I had a baby who woke up four times every night; but for me, Where the Wild Things Are was cinematic Sominex.

Which just goes to show that originality, imagination, beauty, and purity of intent are no substitute for a good story. In fact, they may make the lack of a narrative seem all the more glaring. The problem with Where the Wild Things Are is that its ambition isn’t to tell a tale but to map out the psychosexual terrain of boyhood.

Yes, you read that right. In this sense it differs from Maurice Sendak’s beloved book, which has a simpler goal–one that was all the rage among progressive-minded and pretentious children’s authors like Sendak, William Steig, and Dr. Seuss in the late 1950s and early ’60s. They sought to demonstrate their own intellectual sophistication by incorporating the wisdom they had gleaned from psychoanalysis about the structure of the human personality into their books for kids.

Thus, the “wild things” of Sendak’s title, as well as Thing One and Thing Two from The Cat in the Hat, are metaphorical representations of the chaotic force Freud called the Id. (The fish in The Cat in the Hat is the superego, as is the unseen mother in Where the Wild Things Are.) It was because of flourishes like these that people in New York, where the wild middlebrows are, were inclined to take Sendak seriously as a semi-thinker upon the release of his celebrated tome.

In Sendak’s rendering, a four-year-old named Max behaves badly, is called a wild thing, and when he’s sent to bed without supper, dreams of becoming the king of a group of monsters who worship him. Eventually he decides to go home, which means he awakens to find his dinner waiting for him, “and it was still hot.” Sendak’s monochromatic illustrations are beautiful, and so is the rhythm of his language. But it is the simplicity of its message–even Ids eventually need and crave the comforts of home–that explains the fact that this odd book has sold 19 million copies since its publication in 1963.

The movie version is far more psychologically ambitious, and as a result, is far less satisfying. For one thing, Max is eight or nine, a child of divorce with an older sister who was once his playmate but has since discovered boys. When he sees his mother kissing her new boyfriend, he explodes in a rage and bites her. She chases him; he runs out of the house into the night and down into a ravine, whence his fantasy of journeying in a boat to the land of the wild things commences.

The early scenes of the movie are exciting. Max is a formidable little boy (played by a formidable little actor named Max Records), and the gravity with which he responds to the frustrations and disappointments in his life is just right. Its director, Spike Jonze, creates an intimate feeling with extensive use of a hand-held camera and a low-to-the-ground perspective.

But the movie also goes sodden. Max is not a wild thing, but an angry, depressed, and self-pitying thing who lies in his bed in the middle of the day (while nauseating minor-key indie rock music plays on the soundtrack). In any case, it makes little sense for the Max of the Sendak tale to be an older kid. The dream of becoming a king in a monster fantasyland is only something a very little boy would indulge in.

And what kind of fantasy world is this, anyway? The five Wild Things argue amongst themselves, carp and kvetch and mope and stomp around. Why on earth would any little boy seeking an escape dream of hanging around with them?

It seems that Jonze and his co-writer, Dave Eggers, aged Max because they have a different kind of wildness they want to explore here. Their interest isn’t in Max as a child but Max as an emerging sexual being. Forgive me for being this blunt, but this is a movie obsessed with vaginas and birth canals. Max begins the movie in a tunnel, which is destroyed by his sisters’ friends. He and the wild things build a palace out of wood sticks that is round with a round entryway; and when he needs to hide at one point, he does so by jumping into a female Wild Thing’s mouth and spending a few minutes inside her. When he emerges from her mouth, he is covered in placental goo.

The Wild Things are riven with unresolved and somewhat inexplicable sexual tension. And a rivalry develops between Max and his best Wild Thing friend over the female Wild Thing who swallows and then gives birth to Max.

There are a great many ideas at play here. But none of them is all that interesting, really. Neither were Sendak’s, but it takes only three minutes to read his book. Jonze and Eggers want you to sit through a hundred minutes of their take. That’s 97 minutes too many.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.