If that title isn’t enough of a warning for those looking forward to a live-action cartoon that will remind them of their childhood, let me warn you that it’s not a Michael Bay rendition. If you go expecting that–if you go expecting something like Transformers or Fraggle Rock, you’re not going to be happy. If you go expecting Dave Eggers–if you go expecting Spike Jonze, you’ll see a powerful and settling movie.
I talk a lot about there being two types of art (music/books/performances/paintings): those things that make you excited in the moment (think Batman), and those that you chew on and have to digest (think The Darjeeling Limited)–those that stay with you for days, weeks, years. I think a lot of people I know went to Where the Wild Things Are thinking they’d be getting the first kind of experience. When they were confronted with the second, they felt a little bit like they were watching Adam Sandler going punch drunk during a song about Hanukah.
I was trying to put words to why I liked it so much on the drive home. The only thing for now–remember, I’m still digesting–is that Jonze and Eggers presented something real. You can’t really call it magic realism; there’s still an overlying mist of fantasy in Marquez’s stuff. But it does seem ironic that we get to see real relationships and sadness unfold with giant horns and beaks and claws. They manage to give us something that feels honest.
This is Eggers’ strength in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It’s too easy to turn relationships into either a complete mess or a complete success. We want relationships in our lives and in our stories to have clean boundaries and be easy to describe. Good or bad. Doomed or ordained.
Take Robin Hood for example. We never see his moments of doubt or indifference. You’ll never see him cry or wonder if Marian is worth it. When the lovers are together, we don’t see him confused about what to do with his sword, or trip and fall after he kisses her goodnight. It’s not real-life. Most of us don’t really want it to be, but this is where the poetry comes in. That’s what poetry is: beauty and meaning still existing in our honest, mundane, messy, sticky, confusing, angry, double-standard lives.
So, you should go see Where the Wild Things Are if you’re ready to digest something meaningful and you’re ready to be self-obsessed for a little bit after watching huge wild creatures pelt each other with dirt clods. If you’re looking for something a little more cartoony, stick with Sponge Bob.
I wasn’t eager to see this film until this post.
One of my favorite passages from Eggers A.H.W.O.S.G. is “We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. But it’s just the opposite, more is more is more – more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. He leaves it where he molts. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.”