Adam's Movie Reviews

My wife and I went to check out Where the Wild Things Are this weekend. I was able to see a couple of weeks ago too.

The New Yorker had this to say about it:

The movie seems to be less about liberation than about futility.

I just have to disagree that the movie was about futility. For me, the movie had two main themes:

1) Unconditional Love

At the beginning of the movie, Max sees the world in child like black or white. Either he is good or he is bad (he can’t decide). Either his mother loves him or she loves her new boyfriend. Either his sister defends him or she abandons him.

Through the Wild Things on the island he sees reflections of himself and his family members. I’m not going to point out all the parallels here, you can watch it and look for them yourself. However, I did want to draw attention to two moments.

Carol is the monster most like Max. He is the most creative artist in his tribe but he also has a hot temper and tends to destroy things when he feels slighted. At the end after he goes on a bit of a rampage, Max leaves him a heart with a C in it.

My interpretation is that Max learns to love Carol despite his destructive side. In turn, Max also learns how to accept and love himself despite his wild side. It no longer matters as much whether he is “good” or “bad”, but rather he accepts that he is both and decides to love anyway.

The second parallel I wanted to mention is that between Max when he is the king and his mother. On the island, Max assumes the role of an all powerful king with unlimited powers including a Sadness Shield. As the story progresses he is forced to admit that he is just ordinary, he can not fix all the problems, and can not deliver eternal happiness. In a telling moment, he wishes out loud that the monsters could have a mother (instead of the powerful king he was attempting to be) and then he decides to go home to his mother.

His journey as a king parallels Max’s own image of his mother. In the beginning he is very angry that his Mother can not solve his loneliness and can not fix his relationship to his sister. Through his time on the island he realizes that his mother is “just ordinary” and not all powerful but that she loves him and that is enough.

Max can love his mother more completely when he returns because he has seen the family and himself from her perspective. This is classic coming-of-age material, just told in a unique way in this film. I’m surprised that the New Yorker review saw only melancholy and futility…

2) The Urge to Create vs. The Urge to Destroy

Another theme that was interesting to me was the tendency to create vs destroy. This seems to me another common boyhood coming-of-age theme but I think it is also interesting to think about more universally.

For every one creative person in the world who is successful (musician, artist, architect, designer, movie director, software developer, writer, actor, etc…) there seems to be 1,000 people who have something bad to say about their work. Often this conflict between creative and destructive urges resides in the same soul. I know it does in mine.

In the movie Max and Carol war with these opposing sides most visibility. I think Spike Jonze is avoiding a clear moral to the story here. The movie simply observes that there is a fragile balance between the nature to build and tear down. For me, it reminds me that destruction is easy and creation is hard but deserves our efforts.

That is my perspective. What did you think the movie was about?