Martyn Pedler

I ended my short jmag review of Spike Jonze’s long-awaited Where The Wild Things Are with the following: “Even if you’re sick of handmade, golden-glowed nostalgia, you need to see Where The Wild Things Are. It’s not more pointless whimsy. It’s something else entirely.”

I thought I’d explain what the hell I meant.

Over at The Millions, Jeff Martin admitted that the film itself left him cold, but the trailer “remains to be a revelation”. He’s right: the first trailer for Wild Things is a thing of pure awe. Its combination of imagery and music has a voodoo-like power to make grown men burst into tears.

(Other men, I mean. Other men less manly than me.)

“I’ve come to think of the full-length film the way I think of those indulgent overlong director’s cuts that always seem to show up on DVD,” says Martin. “[Spike Jonze] has created one of the best (and certainly most expensive) short films in the history of cinema. And I, for one, am thankful.”

The first third of the movie was pretty much what I was expecting from that trailer. Maybe not packing quite as much emotive power, but still gorgeous, sad, and capable of generating near-nuclear levels of nostalgia. Max flees from the conflict of his home life, finds a boat, and travels to the island of monsters where he’s declared to be their king.

It’s what happened after the Wild Rumpus that surprised me. I’m certainly not the first to say it, but this isn’t a movie for children. It’s a movie about childhood, just like Scorsese’s King Of Comedy is about humour without being funny. That’s why adults should be less concerned about the movie scaring their kids – though, yeah, it probably will – and more concerned that it’ll bore them stupid.

As the film continues, Max finds that the same fears he faced at home have infected this new world, too. His escape into a fantasy world of giant monsters becomes more complicated; our attempt to retreat into some kind of warm, wild, uncritical nostalgia with him also fails. The movie seems to stall, overwhelmed with doubts. The promised fun and freedom evaporates, and Max is left desperately struggling to understand his place in this world, just like he was in the last.

In the words of Buckaroo Banzai: no matter where you go, there you are.

The first note I scribbled after coming out of the movie was this: “SADNESS IS UNAVOIDABLE”. (Sigh.) A little later, though, I began to think about superhero stories – the ‘grim and gritty’, sex-and-violence kind, usually seen as starting with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. In his book How To Read Superhero Comics and Why, Geoff Klock points out that “comic books were now expected to tell stories for adults using the building blocks of children’s literature”.

Just like some think it’s wrong to, say, turn a goofy superpowered criminal called Doctor Light into a full-blown rapist for some ‘adult’ thrills, I see how turning a classic of childrens’ literature into a slow, difficult film about unavoidable sadness might be missing the point.

Did we need to see Maurice Sendak’s untamed monsters bursting into a flood of self-loathing tears? I don’t know. I just know I won’t ever forget it, and that’s enough for me.