AA-Ooooooooooooooooooo! (Or, whatever.)

My quick and dirty thoughts after seeing Where the Wild Things Are:

Really, who hasn't, in some fit of rage or other such tantrum, ripped the arm off his or her favorite stuffed animal and later tried to repair it with a stick, or a sock, or something else stupid like that. But it's never the same, and no matter what we do it's like that forever, and it just goes into the bin with all the other things that, one day when we're sifting through old trash, reminds us of some moment in life we can't have back.

For everything that Where the Wild Things Are does well--visually, tonally, the constant apt manifestation of everything that goes on inside a kid's psyche, and the incoherent hodgepodge of what they've managed to internalize from a world they don't understand--what works best for me is this looming motif of the sun burning out. Because, really, childhood is always a world in some sort of constant state of dying; after all there's not one state of 'childhood' but endless iterations that are constantly fading away and developing into something new. And that's good, I guess, but it also necessitates constant loss. No fort ever quite lives up to the grand visions we had for it, so we have no choice but to tear it down, because what the hell is the point of reality if it can't mirror our imaginations. But then, our imaginations can't live up to our imaginations, and our fantastical escapes wither along with everything else.

It's telling that the only time we see a wild thing apart from Max is Carol rooting through the cave before running to see Max off at the beach, since obviously he IS Max (well, they all are, but Carol is clearly who Max identifies himself with), and embodies what Max's return home is supposed to be. At the end Max, smiling at his mother, isn't some touched child who has learned a valuable lesson by a literal experience with wise, mystical creatures, he's just a regular kid who got upset and had to spend some time inside his own mind until he got over it. Like any kid, he depends on fantasy to get him through his childhood, but it's still just fantasy, and clearly the viewer experiences this film as something far more depressing than Max himself does. Years later he may think back in some nostalgic reverie about the imaginary worlds of his childhood he can't get back, but for the time being it's just something that played its part, and now he gets to eat cake.