It's a parallel process. Layers of it, actually. Maurice Sendak died last year, so we are left to mourn the loss and deal with change. In Sendak's beloved book turned film, Where the Wild Things Are, 9-year-old Max's parents divorce, leaving him lost and developmentally struggling with unwanted changes around him and within him. This theme is also an echo of Sendak's early life where sickness left him helpless in a family haunted by memories of the Holocaust. Sendak and Max have rescue fantasies. Sendak and Max fear impermanence. Sendak and Max deal with these issues by turning passive to active. Sendak, through his “wild” characters, Max through his. Like looking in a mirror, looking in a mirror…and so on.
In the film, we are introduced to Max, the rascally, sensitive, imaginative, and lonely boy who is living with his recently divorced mother and older sister. While the marital dissolution and the brokenness of the family are not directly discussed, there is hardly a scene in the movie where some structure or relationship is not caving in, being destroyed, or broken, often at the hands of Max.
The movie starts as Max, armored in his wolf costume, chases and tackles the “beast” in his home—the little family dog. For a moment, he gets to be bigger, dominant. Feeling his power, Max ventures outside in the snow and transforms a snow pile into a separate igloo home (perhaps like his father's) with an opening just big enough for him.
Noreen Honeycutt, Ph.D., is a training, teaching, and supervising analyst with the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. An Edith Sabshin Teaching Award winner, she runs the Baltimore psychoanalytic film series and heads Psychology for Woofound, Inc., where psychology meets technology.
Lauren Honeycutt earned a degree in English education in children's literature from Florida State University and a master of education from the University of Maryland. She taught English, drama, and creative writing. She is an educational specialist for Woofound, Inc.
When an older boy throws himself playfully on top of the igloo, collapsing it, Max dissolves into tears. He's small again, and his rebuilt home, broken. He looks to his sister to help him, but she chooses the teenage boy. Turning passive to active, Max runs to her bedroom, jumps on her bed the way the boy jumped on his igloo and then breaks the popsicle stick heart that he had made for her at a more tender time. He puts himself in charge of the breaking and the betrayal.
Maurice Sendak was stricken with multiple illnesses as a child. Like Max, he was surrounded by women, particularly his mother and sister, Natalie, who watched over him (much the way we see Max longing for his sister and mother to help him feel better). Sick children often feel helpless in the face of illnesses and procedures, and Sendak was lonely and too often separated from friends.
He dared not complain because nothing compared to the suffering children of the Holocaust, whom his parents would remind him of on a regular basis. His family was there, but they could not make him better. With the worry of the constantly-ill Maurice at the front of her mind, his grandmother would dress him all in white in hope, as Sendak explains, “the angel of death would pass over [him].” Sendak learned that it would take magic to survive.
Max, like Sendak, retreats to his bed, holding a small sailboat that he manipulates through the sea of blankets. His gaze lands on a globe next to his bed with an engraved plaque that reads, “To Max—Owner of This World—Love, Dad.” His isolation is interrupted by his mother who is attuned to his sadness as he tells her about the broken igloo and peripherally about his broken heart and the one he broke in his sister's room. We see him regress as he lies on the floor as his mother works, looking up at her as he likely did as a smaller child. She tells him that she could use a story and proceeds to type the story he invents, which is a fantasy replete with vampires, the biting off of buildings, and teeth that fall out. His father dubs him “Owner of This World,” and he gets his mother but then regresses and exposes his castration fears through his story.
Storytelling was always a part of Sendak's life. As a child, when he was not telling his own stories to his neighbors, he listened to his father's tales, which were often a mix of fiction and nonfiction. The true parts of stories involved the suffering of Sendak's extended family left behind in Poland and their tortured existence during the Holocaust. Much like Max, he feels burdened by the dramas of the adults around him. Sendak's father entrusted his son with a level of maturity beyond his years, relaying stories that included themes that were too dangerous and guilt inducing for his young age. These stories, like most traumatic material, led Sendak to write in a more truthful manner, as he believed that no one should lie to children. Here again, he turned passive to active.
The frightening stories of Sendak's past and sense of impermanence are reflected in the film as Max's teacher lectures about the sun (son?) being both the center of the universe and destined to die. Here again, something Max has counted on as a given is threatened. Moreover, his oedipal fears are stimulated, for just as he becomes the “man of the house,” the “Owner of This World,” and the “center of the universe,” he unconsciously feels threatened with death.
He quickly returns home and turns passive to active by building a fort and putting himself in charge of the sun, turning the light on and off and back on again. He calls for his mother to join him in the fort, to rescue her from the impending doom. She chooses to stay downstairs with the new man in her life. Cloaked in his wolf outfit, Max is emotionally overwhelmed with rage, fear, and competitive feelings, causing him to scream, climb on the kitchen island, and bite his mother, threatening to “eat her up.” Feeling helpless in the wake of his father's leaving, Max turns passive to active by leaving himself—running away from home, away from his scary impulses, and sails to the land of the Wild Things.
The Wild Things in Sendak's books are caricatures of his Polish relatives, gruesome in demeanor and reminding him of the family members who perished in the Holocaust. They would hug Sendak and his siblings fiercely and profess their love by exclaiming, “I could eat you up!” This disconcerting, cannibalistic threat was internalized, emerging later as the most memorable phrase of his fictional Wild Things: “We'll eat you up! We love you so!”
The film audience follows Max and the “day residue” into what appears to be a dream—a dream every analyst would love. Max's internal state is depicted in the stormy seas that he sails through to arrive at an island where he watches a large, male monster named Carol throw a temper tantrum to his Wild Thing family, much like the one Max just had himself. Carol yells, “Nobody cares. I'm the only one that cares that we don't stay together.”
Max imbues each Wild Thing with aspects of himself, giving the viewer a peek into his conflicted internal world. There is Alexander that no one listens to; KW, the mother figure that does not know whether to stay with Carol or to separate; Ira, who desperately wants to please the one he loves; and Judy, who is certain that everyone is against her. In spite of their threats to eat him, Max declares himself king of their Wild Thing kingdom. Rescue fantasy mobilized, Max sets out to make it all okay through action and doing and undoing.
In this “wild” dream, he is most identified with Carol who, like Max, wants to believe that the Wild Things can be one big happy family, that they can always sleep in a pile, that he can create a world where all the things you want can happen. Like Max, he is threatened by change, rejects KW's new “friends,” and spends a lot of time breaking and rebuilding homes. Like Max, he is deeply wounded and disillusioned when he realizes that he cannot fight the tide of growing up and cannot be bigger or more powerful than he is. Through his reign as king, we gain insight into Max's fantasies: that he caused his father to leave through his “badness,” that if he tries, they can be one big happy family again, that if he can build a strong enough kingdom, he can insure foreverness, and that, most importantly, big people in charge can make it right again.
In the end we see Carol clinging to hope and Max sailing off, knowing that sometimes separation is the right thing. They howl together, harmonizing in mourning and resolution. Max leaves the island after realizing that the Wild Things need a mother.
Through the stories of Max and his Wild Things, Sendak works through his own early helplessness and survivor guilt. He could not reverse his family's tragic history, but strived to keep his immediate family unburdened and intact, and then extended that to a world of families through his writing.
Max's ego is challenged beyond its capacity when his family life crumbles, leaving him in the too weak and too powerful position. Through turning passive to active and the transformative relationships with the conflicted Wild Things, Max is able to make room for his wishes, losses, and the limits of his power. He is able to return to his home where his dinner is waiting. Max reunites with his mother, eating with her, rather than eating her up.