![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
We went to see Where the Wild Things Are and found it utterly divine.* And maybe Divine is a useful way to look at this violent and painful fantasy that is so bound in love that it bursts.
There's a point where Max is staring up at the sky at the circling Bob and Terry, when KW throws rocks up at them to knock them out of the sky. Max's face shows a unbelieving shock at this violence, but then KW carries Bob and Terry with their incomprehensible croaking voice. There's a mystery in the violence, a mystery whether it was as awful as it seemed, a mystery in KW's respect and fondness for Bob and Terry, a mystery in her comprehension. For me, i can only take this violence and understand it loosely as i understand the necessary and creative destruction of hurricanes and wildfire and earthquakes and tornados and floods.
I wonder at a child looking at the relationships of adults: are the relationships as mysterious?
Then there's something to the violent and destructive nature of the Wild Things: my heart cracks in pain a little as i watch the Wild Things drag their claws around the trunk of the tree, girdling it. I connect suddenly with that age where innocence fall apart, and one finds that the creative exuberance or curiosity or simple wild behavior turns to damage, wounds, death. Do the wild things intend to kill the tree? Of course not. Do they really want to hurt each other with the dirt clods? No. But then there's the slow awareness dawning of how that mad exuberance hurts others.
I suppose in developmental psychology, this is just the point where the egocentric child becomes aware of the experience of others. It's when it's possible to discover that simple dynamic that is clearly a root of so much global pain. How hard it is to balance the discovery that one didn't mean harm and yet harm clearly results with the sense that when one has been hurt that hurt might not have been the intent.
Perhaps the most succinct way of describing this film is to say it sits on the tipping point of the discovery of compassion.
* OK, except for "All is Love" from Karen O and the Kids. That, not so much divine. On the other hand, i was mumbling-singing "Hideaway" on the way home, and have since bought the track.
There's a point where Max is staring up at the sky at the circling Bob and Terry, when KW throws rocks up at them to knock them out of the sky. Max's face shows a unbelieving shock at this violence, but then KW carries Bob and Terry with their incomprehensible croaking voice. There's a mystery in the violence, a mystery whether it was as awful as it seemed, a mystery in KW's respect and fondness for Bob and Terry, a mystery in her comprehension. For me, i can only take this violence and understand it loosely as i understand the necessary and creative destruction of hurricanes and wildfire and earthquakes and tornados and floods.
I wonder at a child looking at the relationships of adults: are the relationships as mysterious?
Then there's something to the violent and destructive nature of the Wild Things: my heart cracks in pain a little as i watch the Wild Things drag their claws around the trunk of the tree, girdling it. I connect suddenly with that age where innocence fall apart, and one finds that the creative exuberance or curiosity or simple wild behavior turns to damage, wounds, death. Do the wild things intend to kill the tree? Of course not. Do they really want to hurt each other with the dirt clods? No. But then there's the slow awareness dawning of how that mad exuberance hurts others.
I suppose in developmental psychology, this is just the point where the egocentric child becomes aware of the experience of others. It's when it's possible to discover that simple dynamic that is clearly a root of so much global pain. How hard it is to balance the discovery that one didn't mean harm and yet harm clearly results with the sense that when one has been hurt that hurt might not have been the intent.
Perhaps the most succinct way of describing this film is to say it sits on the tipping point of the discovery of compassion.
* OK, except for "All is Love" from Karen O and the Kids. That, not so much divine. On the other hand, i was mumbling-singing "Hideaway" on the way home, and have since bought the track.
Tags: