Where The Wild Things Are

 Spike Jonze

I’ll tell you where the wild things are.

Inside of us, yes, somewhere in our bowels, a wild thing lies nestled, and Spike Jonze wants us to poke at that furry, atrophied part of ourselves, to confer life onto the comatose and tragically compartmentalized element of our constitution that we call, what? Imagination? Indignation? Creativity? Passion? Maybe there isn’t a word for it. Maybe it’s better stated as: that which makes you growl both in empathy and anger, or some liminal space of ecstatic fury where you can’t calm down, won’t calm down, and fully resent being told to calm down.

The film, though, isn’t a celebration of this fragile Id—it’s a tombstone, a melancholy testament to the sad, sad fact that the moment this wild thing manifests itself in our yawning, stretching, newly blinking consciousness, the world begins to castrate and police the poor thing. It doesn’t stand a chance.

Max Records, a rookie actor, plays Max without a flaw, fomenting an uncanny verisimilitude despite, or maybe because of, the fantastical nature of the story. Max fights that gradual, creeping numbness, resisting the broad attacks on his burgeoning creature by carving out spaces, imaginary and real, into which he retreats. Constantly buttressing and creating, Max builds igloos, and forts, and fictional worlds.

In one of the most awe-inspiring visual moments of the film (and there are so, so many), the inevitable invasion of our imaginative space and the slaughter of our unnameable thing is rendered concretely. The film can be broken up into two distinct parts—a series of carefully-paced domestic vignettes that build up a palpable tension and despair in young Max and his subsequent fleeing into wildness reified and ultimately calcified—and this scene of encroachment belongs to the former while the same encroachment constitutes the latter.

Max builds an igloo out of an oblong mound of snow left from a passing snowplow, or, rather, he simultaneously bucks societal forces to tame and govern the natural while establishing a safe space and barrier against said pressures. We follow Max inside his structure and share with him a few quiet moments of deep, foggy-breathed respite. Max then attempts to engage outsiders in his fun, initiating a snowball fight with his aloof sister and her disaffected friends. A libidinal and joyful handheld-camera sequence follows, one of several in the film, but soon the wide grins end and things turn sinister. Max retreats into his igloo, and one of the older boys jumps on top, crushing him, the igloo, and its inherent metaphor.

What follows is heartbreak: Max emerges from the snow and looks at his sister, now piling into a car with her friends. What starts as a gaze pleading for justice and comfort turns into a glare of betrayal and wrath. In between the two are a few beats of recognition and horror, an artful statement of the painful loneliness of childhood accompanying a traumatic realization of endemic injustice and hostility to play.

The overworked and wildly sympathetic single mother played by Catherine Keener attempts to nurture the wild thing inside of Max. In one scene—arguably the film’s best—Max lies under his mother’s desk, a taupe panty-hose-encased foot protruding into the southwest corner of the frame, as he recounts a story involving vampires or zombies that ultimately turns sour for the meta-protagonist. There is something so magnificently familiar about this scene: curling up under things! That foot! The loose, breathless way you tell stories when you’re a kid (“and then, and then, and then…”)! Quiet and electrifying, the scene serves as a distillation of the second half of the film: The characters that Max creates—and the inventive worlds they inhabit—are poisoned by the quotidian traumas of his life, and ultimately shrivel up and disappear into an isolated and isolating blackness.

The eponymous creatures, voiced by an emphatically talented group of actors (Gandolfini, Dano, Whitaker—so iconic you don’t need their first names), are less storybook characters than emblems of social anxiety, severe depression, and bipolar disorder. A morbid cast for a film based on a children’s book, the creatures fight and maim one another while bemoaning their impending death and ongoing bodily deterioration. (Note: Where the Wild Things Are is tummy-achingly rich in allegory, and this “violent superego” reading is but one of many possible approaches: The film also ruminates profoundly in its second part regarding issues like statecraft, aging, and minority identity.)

But for such a dark, dark film, there’s a hint of light in the end. Not in content—no, that’s all loss, sadness, and alienation, what we can expect from something co-written by Dave Eggers, that forebear of the divisive and weepy New American Sentimentalism (Tao Lin, Miranda July, the McSweeney’s empire), a genre I think I just made up—but rather in its form. Where the Wild Things Are, and I say this without qualification, is one of the most remarkably impactful and creative visual experiences in film history, and therein lies our salvation. The film, after all, was created by adults, so that wild thing I’m talking about—that thing that dies in us everyday—stands a chance at revival, at least long enough to create something beautiful.

The film is a perfectly realized and inclusive aesthetic experience: The Palette—dusty blues, burnt orange, butterscotch, and beige—is unerringly consistent and considered; those eight-foot-tall furry suits from the Jim Henson Company strike a chord between lumbering weight and buoyant levity. (Look for the scene where Max sleeps inside a dog pile of all the creatures—unreal.) The towering structures that house the creatures are swirling, soaring masses of branches and logs. Like in a Wes Anderson film—for better, not for worse—everything is considered and nothing is out of place.

The result of all this desaturated melancholy is this, if you let it be, if you insist on it, if you’re into that sort of thing: Go wild, be wild, do things wildly, and resist the nagging pressure to invert that W.