(Notice: Any film that creates a real dialogue about it has really done its job. Matt’s review of Where the Wild Things Are is here. Giampaolo’s review of it is here. Also, I discuss some plot points of the film but try not to spoil anything; however, if you want to see the film fresh, you might want to read this after watching it.)

When Bonnie & Clyde opened in 1967, it was heralded as the quintessential baby-boomer film. Even though the subject matter was over thirty years old, and the script was written by a hollywood outsider, and the direction was old school (almost archaic) formalism, everything about it seemed to bear some reflection on the current social and political atmosphere.

Where the Wild Things Are, forty years later, is the new generation’s Bonnie & Clyde.

I should begin by saying that I saw Where the Wild Things Are in a significantly different setting than either Giampaolo or (especially) Matt. Both of my fellow posters saw them in a cinematic atmosphere, a quiet place in which to appreciate the value that the film can bring.

I saw it on a Saturday night in a crowded theater packed full of kids.

Most of the kids were Max’s age or younger. Now for the past four years I’ve been seeing films in the effete settings — somber and serious — and, hell, the last kids movie I went to, Up, I saw on a Wednesday morning (so no kids there). And, yes, I have been to the AMC on 42nd Street in New York, and am well-acquainted to the noise and “shout-back” interactivity that many filmgoers nowadays participate in (It really is interesting to know that there is the small, fierce clan of people who feel compelled to warn the screen that the woman should not, in fact, go up into the attic where she will meet certain death). This is not some rant, though, on noisy children in theaters. Rather, what was so remarkable about seeing Where the Wild Things Are alongside children was that I was able to hear what hit home most about the film: the terror of newness.

It was fascinating. Five minutes in, after some of his sister’s friends destroy Max’s igloo, he stomps into her room, getting his snowy boots all over the bed and destroys a small, precious craft he had made for her that sat on her desk. He tears it up, sniffling and holding back sobs, throwing it to the ground in his rage.

“Why’s he doing that?” the seven-year-old sitting in the row in front of me whispers to his mother.

“Because he’s mad his igloo got knocked down,” his mother whispers back.

For me, this question represents what hits home about the film. The kids who are experiencing the seemingly unknown emotions that Max goes through cannot yet label them in such a way as adults can.

It’s not that childhood does not exist, or we’re all somehow just children of another kind, but rather that the binding element of the human spirit is this ferocious concept of change. As adults, we’ve come up with solutions for dealing with it, but children have that peculiar panic of direct experience. Kids don’t analyze the same way adults, or even teenagers do. We can “cope,” whatever that means, in a myriad of ways. Instead, they are forced into newness, the unnamable, and damn if it isn’t shit-scary.

All the Wild Things (with Max at the helm) are the strangest damned gang you ever heard of. And that’s entirely the point — there’s a comfort in odd bonds. Every major character in the film (Max, Carol, the Mom, KW) faces some change that they are helpless to fight alone. It’s emotional pugilism. But the friendships that form between Max and the Wild Things are not logical in any sort. It’s about being cared for — and that’s what Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze and Maurice Sendak all claim as their thesis. Without falling into sentimentality, they claim love as the opposite of terror; it’s not about the frozen corn, it’s about the chocolate cake.

One of the great things about the screenplay is that the childhood portrayed does not vilify the parents or create unnecessarily abusive scenarios to create empathy (“It’s not your fault, Will….”). In a refreshing and difficult manner, they show a few days-in-the-life of most nine-year-olds. Max’s father is not present. Yes, that has had a massive impact on his life. But, again, the film should not be psychoanalyzed. That’s one label too many for it. Where the Wild Things Are is about going back to explore that early terror of life and remember what those emotions are all about in the first place.

In some handful of years, someone’s going to write their film theory dissertation on Political Philosophy in Cinema and use Wild Things as one of their strongest pieces of evidence. There’s a lot going on on that island, much of it buried deep below the surface in tunnels a lot like the fortress Max and the Wild Things build. It’s a film that couldn’t have been made in any time other than the past two-and-a-half years because Where the Wild Things Are successfully eliminates the technological and sociological obstacles that we (the adults) have used to “cope” with that terror of newness. Jonze, Eggers, and Sendak all whisper in our ear how wonderful it would be to run away somehow.

This difference between what children take from the film and what adults do solidifies Where the Wild Things Are’s position beside Bonnie & Clyde: both are chock full of rage and rebellion. It is not the same revolution of the late 1960s, though, but one placed to reclaim the acts of pure nonconformity and act as a harbinger for the possibilities of the future. Both Bonnie & Clyde and Where the Wild Things Are meditate on this conception of the terror of newness. When people discuss Bonnie & Clyde, more often than not, they talk about the violent ending.

Why— because the ending of the film manifests that terror in a sudden symphony of bullets and death. It is the newness of federal law; of “the Man”. The outlaw, nonconformist heroes do not succeed. Yet, the brilliance of the film rests in Arthur Penn’s decision not to make it graceful or heroic. Death comes to Bonnie and Clyde in an ugly arrangement. Penn shows the bullet holes.

Back to the kids in the theater. When Max first lands on the island and meets all the Wild Things, who in turn surround him and threaten to eat him, about half a dozen children began sobbing. And I mean howling.

“I don’t want him to eat me!” one screamed.

Yes, the kids who cried were much younger than Max. But it still proves a point. They don’t know it’s not real; adults have the luxury of creating disbelief. Throughout Where the Wild Things Are, we’re not subjected to filmmakers attempting to make us actually believe something but rather attempting to make us remember something. Instead of bullet holes, Jonze shows us a demolished igloo, an impulsive bite, and a fortress nearly torn down by uncertainty. This is what’s so revolutionary about Wild Things, it accepts the ugly parts of childhood terror in the face of championing the innocent calm of feeling loved.

A person is the strangest damned gang: we’re disconnected throughout our lives … a child becomes a teenager who becomes an adult. All of us feel those very same fears as we did once upon a time. We’re there with Max in the face of the vast ocean of the unknown, in the middle of the endless night. Wild Things is able to let us know that, although the night feels terrifying and long, the sun will always rise again.