Note: If you haven’t seen Where The Wild Things Are or Pan's Labyrinth but intend to see them, be warned of spoilers.
[img]7|left|||no_popup[/img]Commenting on an article about a 5-year-old girl who bit her mother after watching Where The Wild Things Are, Sci Fi Wire reader Mandy asked, “Some five-year-old isn't clever enough to tell the difference between fiction and reality, so now parents are going to think this is bad for kids?” Answer: Of course the film is bad for kids, at least the ones not old enough to distinguish between reality and fiction. More significantly, everything about the film — from director/co-writer Spike Jonze’s cinematic vision to the film’s marketing by Warner Brothers — demonstrates the persistence of an adult perspective. And from this comes a rather odd conundrum: The film adaptation of a children’s book is all about a child’s experience but is not, in itself, suitable for children.
On the surface, physical violence makes the film problematic. The MPAA, in all its rich and infinite wisdom, assigned the film a PG rating despite scenes of aggressive wrestling, environmental destruction and, crucially, dismemberment. This raises a question as to why it’s okay for kids to see violence but a four-letter word or display of womanly anatomy brings down a PG-13 rating, if not an R. The deeper issue rests in how adults interpret a child’s experience of the world. Again, it’s worth pointing out that the book and the movie play with different stakes. A boy who rampages throughout the house and is sent to his room is quite different from a boy who acts out violently, both in reality and in his imagination, from feelings of neglect. Is it possible that we are so culturally accustomed to violence that we are not shocked by its manifestation in children? Judging from the comments at SyFy Wire or other forums, violent temper tantrums could very well be a common occurrence. I’m not a parent, but from the many children I’ve seen, tantrums certainly happen in the more volatile personalities but many children are relatively even-tempered. Those who resort to the aggression of Spike Jonze and Dave Egger’s Max are the stuff psychological interventions are made of. The first point of contention, then, is that it’s hard to see Where The Wild Things Are (the film) as a credible portrait of childhood, except for certain special cases.
Where Are the Adult Questions?
Presented to adults like an unveiling of the secret inner life of children, Where the Wild Things Are also suffers from the lack of adult contemplation. In fact, it is astonishing that the film, drawn-out and somewhat dull, is so focused on Max that it pays no attention to his mother. As much as I can understand her relief at Max’s safe return, shouldn’t there be something more for Max than a big fat piece of chocolate cake? Discipline, perhaps? But what punishment is suitable? How should Mom handle Max given his feelings of isolation? What could Max’s sister do? All valid questions, all adult questions. But none of these inform the film in the slightest. Hence, a corollary conundrum: The film is intended for adults but doesn’t ask adult questions.
Of course, the film doesn’t even offer answers. Max merely abandons the Wild Things without any sort of resolution to their situation. Nor is it clear that mother and son understand one another at the end. If neither explores the problem of childhood alienation and anger with adult insight in mind nor presents the problem in a way children can benefit from, the only conclusion is that Where the Wild Things Are has an identity crisis. In striving to be something it can’t be, it ends up being pretentious.
But what of other films with child protagonists? Setting aside horror movies that cast children as victims or murderous monsters, many films that feature stories from a child’s point of view are arguably not for children. Tideland, for example, based on the book by Mitch Cullen, features a young girl – innocent to the point of being disconnected from reality — who helps her parents with their drug habit and later dresses up her father’s corpse without quite registering that he is dead. In The Reflecting Skin, a boy comes of age amidst suspicions that a neighbour is a vampire responsible for a series of grisly murders in his town. The overrated Pan’s Labyrinth put forth a girl in Fascist Spain who comes under the care of a monster who threatens her brother; she is murdered before she can save her brother, although the film’s fantasy elements trivializes the brutality and offers instead a magical salvation for the girl.
Perhaps it is helpful to distinguish between stories that have children as protagonists, in which case telling stories of experiences children shouldn’t have can excuse films intended for adults at the risk of being exploitative, and films that aim to excavate the child psyche. Where the Wild Things Are is too personal and introspective to be the former, and commentary from both the filmmakers and the film’s supporters clearly foster the interpretation that it works as the latter. In all of this, the biggest question comes from our relationship to violence and how it is both manifested and depicted. I’m not suggesting that films are to blame for our reflexive, cultural acceptance of violence, but that they are merely a mirror of that acceptant. The problem with mirrors, however, is that they only reflect what is put in front of them. They don’t question, they don’t dissent, they don’t examine. Forget what Jonze and Eggers may or may not be saying with Where the Wild Things Are. What does it say about us that we would see Max’s bad behaviour, nod our heads in agreement and say, yes, that is how it is? Maybe the real pretension is believing that we can get inside someone’s head and prop up what we interpret as a universal truth.
Frédérik invites you to discuss this week's column at his blog, www.inkandashes.net.
