I Am So Popular: Where The Wild Things Need Psychotherapy

Hell, I didn’t even wait until I grew up. (Wait, have I grown up? God, I hope not.) I began toiling away at the joys and chores of authoring from the time I was at least eight. Literature enthralled me. I grew up in a town of fewer than 3,000, all of us blue collar, few of us aspiring to the academy. The local library was about the size of a pimple on a gnat’s ass, housed in the little building that also held the Police Station. Oh, how I sorted through the limited shelves, devoured like a Wild Thing any tome that would transport me—to another place, another time, another universe (thank you A Wrinkle in Time).

Last year, when I learned that Warren had not had the same love affair with WTWTA when he was little, I went to great lengths to find him a perfect copy, by which I mean one translated into Hebrew, his first language. After much back and forth email haggling, I struck out with the delightfully named Mile C’hai bookstore in Denver, but eventually managed to have a copy delivered from Tel Aviv. There they are, the same Wild Things, being told in another language! So excellent.

So when the movie finally arrived, I had those goddamned expectations—the ones that more often than not lead to disappointment. Okay, to say I was disappointed isn’t accurate. I liked the movie—visually stunning, fantastic soundtrack, brilliant monster costumes, a perfectly portrayed Max. But, well, fuck, I didn’t know, going in, that I would feel more inclined to go back to therapy after the screening than, say, have a rumpus in the street.

I do not want to go getting all spoiler-y on y’all so let me tread lightly here. While I think it was a curious experiment to assign a back story to Max, and to thrust him in a situation that would encourage empathy and foster compassion well… you know, I was really sort of just hoping for more of the same of what I felt the first time I read the book. Which was pure enchantment and escapism. Over the course of nearly forty years of reading it with some regularity, and despite the fact I hold a degree in English which sort of requires that I - as Warren puts it— analyze things “until they suck…” well this is maybe the one work of literature that I always and forever took purely at face value.

A boy.
A tantrum.
A trip to the bedroom.
A self-conjured trip to a faraway and wondrous land.
A return home.
Some cake.
Fin.

Did I need Max’s mom brought to life in the movie, even if she is played by uber-awesome-super-hot Catherine Keener? Did I need to have triggered so many regrets over past parenting errors heaped on me? Was it really necessary to push my abandonment issue buttons so hard? Was it truly crucial that the monsters be given names and voices and grouchy attitudes? No, Nyet, Unh-uh, Ix-nay, Nein.

Now, how else they possibly could’ve stretched it out to a full-length feature without these devices I cannot tell you. And, to be sure, there were some pretty light moments, some added silliness that wasn’t in the book but certainly matched the tone.

I guess what I mean is, if you asked me: Spike, if you didn’t like it, how would you fix it? Hell, I can’t answer that question. I have no idea. I think I’ll just have to travel forth in life holding the book and the movie as entirely separate entities, the former inspiring the latter the way, say, some artificial flavoring is vaguely and allegedly based on the purer source of that flavor.

Here is a picture of me in the theater watching WTWTA: I am in, like, the fourth row, because everybody and their mother got there ahead of me. I am craning my neck. Max is leaving the Wild Things. And they begin to howl, all of them, Max included, in unison. This touched something so deep, so primitive in me, that I just lost it. Tears are streaming down my cheeks. Warren reaches in his pocket and extracts what appears to be a Kleenex and he hands it to me. I’m usually a wipe-snotty-nose-on-sleeve type, but his kindness moves me so I take this offering, grateful for it.

Only after dabbing at my eyes for a few minutes do I realize that this very instrument of dabbing is causing me more pain. Having run out of soft, true, brand name Kleenex, my young hot lover has handed me a scratchy, sandpaperesque napkin. But because I love and trust him, even though I can feel from the first wipe the coarseness of the “tissue,” I’m not making the connection right away that this thing is hurting me. Because Warren would not purposefully do that.

Which, pardon my English Major self, is a pretty good metaphor for what it was like watching that film. Yes, it rather emulated the thing it was supposed to represent. On the surface it looked so much like the thing I wanted it to be. And I don’t think the point was to trick the audience into feeling deeply depressed by the time the credits rolled. But in the end it hurt me more than it soothed me.

I do hope, eventually, I can get back to that Wild Thing place of old that has occupied my heart for so many years. A place where symbolism is banned, monsters are monsters, nobody talks too much, parents stay in the shadows, and there’s a nice piece of cake at the end that does not trigger, say, miserable memories of some birthday ruined. Instead it is just short, sweet, delicious and good, easy to eat in one sitting, leaving nothing but a happy memory in its wake.

Spike Gillespie blogs at www.spikeg.com and KnitBuzz. She's got a couple of slots left in her writing workshop the last weekend of October. Email spikegillespie@gmail.com for details.