Rachel Starr Thomson

The story has been familiar since I was a child: Max, a small boy in a wolf suit, rampages through his house until his parents call him “Wild Thing!” and send him to his room without any supper.

There, his imagination sails him away to a faraway island populated by enormous wild things, who declare Max their king. “We’ll eat you up — we love you so!” they pronounce, and Max, wearing a golden crown and carrying a scepter, leads the wild things in a rumpus all over the island until he gets lonely for someone who “loves him best” — who presumably won’t eat him up — and sails home again.

His parents have left a hot bowl of soup in his room in what is either an example of grace or of too-permissive modern parenting. Or both.

Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are has been a wildly popular children’s book since its initial publication in 1963. It fascinated me as a child, though I was never the rumpusing sort; the monsters were at once frightening and sympathetic. (Sendak himself said they were based on his Polish relatives, who were somewhat overwhelming to a small boy.) And the language is beautiful.

Spike Jonze’s 2009 film version explored the story on a much deeper level. In the movie, Max’s rampaging isn’t just the behavior of a small boy who’s feeling cooped up; it’s the latent anger, fear, and insecurity of a child who’s trying to deal with life that isn’t going the way it should. His father is gone, his mother is stressed, his sister doesn’t seem to care about him. Dysfunction is all around, not least of all in himself. Max is scared and overflowing with emotion, so he bites his mother — and horrified at his own reaction, he runs away.

When he reaches his imaginary island, Jonze’s Max meets wild things that mirror different aspects of his own heart. There’s the part of him nobody listens to, the part of him that wants to run away, the part of him that covers up rejection with bitterness; and especially there’s Karol, the angry, violent, scared-to-death-of-losing-what-he-loves-most part of him.

The irony is that Karol does what Max does: In his fear, he tries to control or lashes out. And the result, for both of them, is that everything gets worse. They drive away those they love instead of drawing them closer.

I doubt that Maurice Sendak saw deep spiritual truths in his frightening Polish relatives, but I see them in his story. In both book and movie, Max styles himself King of the Wild Things — but he isn’t really, and by the end he knows that. He’s lonely and just wants someone to love him, so he sails home to his parents and soup, narrowly avoiding being eaten. But I doubt he ever entirely escapes the wild things on the inside, any more than I can escape — or rule — the wild things in me.

Read the whole article here, on Boundless.org.

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