Is Where the Wild Things Are too scary for kids?
Maybe. But that’s exactly why they should see it. Over at Newsweek.com, I wrap up Wild Things week with an essay about how Spike Jonze and directors like him are defying our culture of coddling and restoring some much needed danger and disobedience to children’s stories. An excerpt:
The standard line now is that by letting Jonze make Wild Things largely his way—as a movie “about childhood” rather than “for children”—the studio has abandoned (or frightened off) the audience that Sendak’s story was originally supposed to reach: actual kids. In the film, Max is in near-constant danger. Older boys collapse his handmade igloo with him inside; a monster almost knocks him off a cliff in the midst of a rumpus; claws, dirt clods, and falling trees barely miss his head; and the neurotic, melancholy Wild Things—which are very real-looking nine-foot-tall puppets—go from wanting to hug him to wanting eat him without much warning. What’s more, there’s little plot to hook distractable young minds—just a moody, inchoate ramble across an alien landscape. It’s not, in other words, what “happens at the end” that’s causing controversy. It’s the idea that kids won’t (or shouldn’t) watch such an intense, free-form movie long enough to find out.
But what if that intensity, that asymmetry, is exactly why kids should see Wild Things? What if the very thing that makes the movie “controversial” is also what makes it necessary, now more than ever?
The greatest children’s stories are about what happens when we become untethered from authority, whether by disobedience, disaster, or disregard, and the twinned feelings of freedom and fear we experience as we grapple with an autonomy we’re not quite ready for. They are, in that sense, rehearsals for adulthood. Much like Wild Things’ Max, Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by their parents in the forest and forced to fend for themselves. The children of The Cat in the Hat are left in the care of a massive anthropomorphic feline. Mary Lennox of The Secret Garden, James of James and the Giant Peach, and Harry Potter are all orphans; Astrid Lindgren’s unruly Pippi Longstocking might as well be. “That always seemed to be the most critical test that a child was confronted with—loss of parents, loss of direction, loss of love,” Sendak told NEWSWEEK. “Can you live without a mother and a father?” Fiction and fantasy let children indulge their primal desire to grow up—to be rid of rules and face a dangerous and exhilarating world alone—from the safety of their own bedrooms.
In an Age of Obedience (like ours), these escape hatches become especially important… The less room we leave in real life for rebellion and abandon, the more kids need stories to make space for those very things.
Read the whole thing here.
