Simply put, childhood does not exist. Its existence is contingent on its status as memory, not as experience or reality. Childhood has value only once it has actually disappeared, only has reality in the mind of the adult who conceives of his past, its purity and its frustrations--which are so "moving" because they remain our frustrations as we grow older. This means that childhood--no matter how liberating its primal scream, is really a call for conservatism, for a construction of the past as we imagine it. It has no forward motion and denies memory: it seeks to be without place or time, yet remains only in the place of our mind and the time that has past. Childhood is not real.
Part of what I found frustrating, then, about Where the Wild Things Are was its very conception of childhood. The film is precious, but not in the way that, say, Mary Kate and Ashley on Full House is precious. Its affectations are those of memory: Max seems to exist in a time before bulky Nikes and wears canvas sneakers, he doesn't like frozen corn, he wants to build an igloo. The film would fall apart if Max's youth wasn't recognized as pure.
Yet his world, quite visibly, is not pure. There's violence not only in the land of the Wild Things, but at home too: his idea of engaging with his sister's friends is by snowballing them, and he gets angry when the violence is returned. He tries to destroy his sister's room but doesn't really know how to go about it. Later, he bites his mother. (As J. Hoberman said, "Women!") In the land of the Wild Things, Max manages to make this violence into a game played with heavy, realistic looking creatures with great jumping powers. Violence, though, is in some sense morally unclassifiable: there's no good violence or bad violence, just the pure force of violence. Everything else--like childhood--comes from the outside. I was unsure about the place of this violence in the film, but I assume it took part in the Eggers/Jonze conception of childhood's irretrievable innocence, since nothing in film indicates even an exploration of the apparently nascent masculine violence that underlies society's fantasies.
When Max comes home, he doesn't take off his wolf suit or eat frozen corn: the film isn't about his acceptance of "adulthood," but rather it portrays an adult's acceptance of their own concept of "childhood," where kids are really out of control--and either you like the out of control, or you don't. Though this appears to be an honest look at the world of a child, I can't help but feel that the more honest approach would be to recognize that, for a child, there is no out of control: there is no control. When the Eggers/Jonze conception of childhood creates a division between child/adult, it privileges the child--but at the expense of what? The mistake of this nostalgia relationship is thinking that there is something to go back to: it exists here, it always has--there's nothing to retrieve.
I though a lot about why I didn't like this film, even getting into some uncomfortable arguments outside the theater based on my inability to articulate what I was thinking. But I think it boils down to what I said above: nostalgia is dishonest because it denies the reality of the moment. Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze don't know what it's like to be a child any more than Truffaut ever did, or Spielberg, or anyone. They imagine its purity, they pray to the liberation of the scream, the rumpus (Where the Wild Things Are was written in 1963 and does present a serious belief in liberation hipppiedom that would characterize the flower children of the 60s)--when such an act is an intrinsically hollow construction.
In the words of Don Draper: "Move forward."
Yet his world, quite visibly, is not pure. There's violence not only in the land of the Wild Things, but at home too: his idea of engaging with his sister's friends is by snowballing them, and he gets angry when the violence is returned. He tries to destroy his sister's room but doesn't really know how to go about it. Later, he bites his mother. (As J. Hoberman said, "Women!") In the land of the Wild Things, Max manages to make this violence into a game played with heavy, realistic looking creatures with great jumping powers. Violence, though, is in some sense morally unclassifiable: there's no good violence or bad violence, just the pure force of violence. Everything else--like childhood--comes from the outside. I was unsure about the place of this violence in the film, but I assume it took part in the Eggers/Jonze conception of childhood's irretrievable innocence, since nothing in film indicates even an exploration of the apparently nascent masculine violence that underlies society's fantasies.
When Max comes home, he doesn't take off his wolf suit or eat frozen corn: the film isn't about his acceptance of "adulthood," but rather it portrays an adult's acceptance of their own concept of "childhood," where kids are really out of control--and either you like the out of control, or you don't. Though this appears to be an honest look at the world of a child, I can't help but feel that the more honest approach would be to recognize that, for a child, there is no out of control: there is no control. When the Eggers/Jonze conception of childhood creates a division between child/adult, it privileges the child--but at the expense of what? The mistake of this nostalgia relationship is thinking that there is something to go back to: it exists here, it always has--there's nothing to retrieve.
I though a lot about why I didn't like this film, even getting into some uncomfortable arguments outside the theater based on my inability to articulate what I was thinking. But I think it boils down to what I said above: nostalgia is dishonest because it denies the reality of the moment. Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze don't know what it's like to be a child any more than Truffaut ever did, or Spielberg, or anyone. They imagine its purity, they pray to the liberation of the scream, the rumpus (Where the Wild Things Are was written in 1963 and does present a serious belief in liberation hipppiedom that would characterize the flower children of the 60s)--when such an act is an intrinsically hollow construction.
In the words of Don Draper: "Move forward."
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