Rethink Mission: Inspiring gospel-centered missional churches

By Justin McLaury

When I was five and in kindergarten, I brought home the Scholastic book order form and began to pester my mom to let me get something, anything, from the so-thin-it-was-translucent, brilliantly-colored double sheet of literary delight. What we settled on, after some persistent persuasion on my part (some would say “hounding”) was a paperback of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, with an accompanying vinyl record that could read it to me even when my parents were exhausted from having already read it countless times any given day.

I loved the book, not only because (despite my lack of a wolf-suit) I could still make “mischief of one kind and another,” but also because, like many children, I dreamed of a place where I was in charge, where the things I was scared of were scared of me and where what I said would go – a place like the one that grows in Max’s room in Sendak’s book. I wanted a place like the one Carol, one of the Wild Things in the movie, described as being, “where only the things you want to happen would happen.”

Looking back on the book and my experience with it as a child, I am struck by how powerful a ten-sentence story can be to show the interplay between anger, fear and power and how these three things affect both self-awareness and relationships. Sendak was able to achieve such a complex task with so few words by carefully crafting his language and by showing much of the story through surreal, narrative pictures; the images in the book are so good that a reader could understand the story without any narration at all.

Which is why, when I heard that Spike Jonze was creating a movie adaptation of my favorite childhood picture book, I was both excited and nervous. The visual nature of the original story makes it a great candidate to be transformed into a great movie, but the excellence of the source material combined with the paucity thereof would make crafting a compelling film remarkably difficult; one misstep, one misinterpretation, one hastily constructed moralizing soliloquy could torpedo the film and put it up in the massive failure category with Mike Myers’ The Cat in the Hat.

While the film has gotten good but not great reviews (scoring a 69% on Rotten Tomatoes), it is an incredibly successful adaptation of the book. Not because it is line-for-line identical to it (in order to make a feature-length movie, a lot of story, and an indie-rock soundtrack, had to be created to supplement the original ten sentences) but because Jonze and Eggers (Jonze’s co-writer) managed to invite us into the story without patronizing us, to allow us to identify with the points-of-view of the characters and with their flaws.

Like the book, the movie does more showing than telling, more questioning than moralizing. The characters and settings are surreal, yet they remind us again and again of ourselves and of our lives as they float back and forth between caricatures of childhood and stark pictures of brokenness. As I sat and watched the movie, I saw that the things I struggled with as a boy — powerlessness, fear, anger, unrealistic expectations, resentment, disillusionment — are still the things that haunt me today. And the thrilling experience of having my fears exposed, which brought me back again and again to my worn-out paperback of Where the Wild Things Are (the line in the book, “We’ll eat you up we love you so,” which was treated much more softly in the movie, still scares me today when I think about the picture that went with it), will no doubt bring me back to this film, time and again.

At the end of the day, each of us is “just a boy (or girl)
pretending to be a wolf pretending to be king.”

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The thing that I appreciated most about Jonze and Egger’s treatment of Where the Wild Things Are is that, while the film doesn’t answer any of the questions it raises about family and power and the existence of a true and reliable source of good in the world, it does provide a cathartic acknowledgement that things are not as they should be – that there is no place where only the things you want to have happen will happen. Our families and relationships are broken (even if they’re good), we are subject to authority that doesn’t always have our best interest at heart, and, despite our best intentions, when we exercise authority, we don’t do so great either. At the end of the day, each of us is “just a boy (or girl) pretending to be a wolf pretending to be king” (Douglass, the Bird Wild Thing). And that’s not very much, is it?

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Justin is a marauding barbarian in the spiritual lineage of Genghis Khan, a conceptual natural disaster, a lover of casseroles and British tea. He is usually clean-cut and clean-shaven yet is quite snobby about having been a mac user since the PowerPC days.

These are his thoughts, what are yours?

Rethink Mission is about the intersection of the gospel, the church and culture. Weekly we feature reviews and other interactions with artistic expressions of the culture around us.

Tags: books, film

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 12:02 am and is filed under cultural engagement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.