Where the wild things are swinging

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If I had to choose only one book to save from our children's shelves when they grew up, it would be Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. (No doubt a whole lot of other people feel the same.) Sendak wrote and illustrated the 48 page, ten sentence book in 1963, and I discovered it the next decade during bookstore "squats" in the children's section when I was in college. Maybe I wished I had written it and drawn those illustrations. A few years ago I did copy one of his pictures onto the new seat Don sawed for our 60-year-old swingset my siblings and I grew up with, which now sits on the hill behind our family cottage. This was the first time that old swing seat had been replaced. I used to fly so high on it that I wondered what would happen if I looped all the way up and over the top of the A frame. What I imagined didn't happen, thank goodness, but Sendak's vision did, as I copied and painted his swinging characters right onto the new wooden seat. I even bought a copy of the book to leave in the cottage's red reading room so kids would be sure to have the book handy for a read after swinging.




So you'd think I would have been ecstatic at the movie theater recently when I saw a trailer for Spike Jonze's upcoming feature movie version of Sendak's book. But my immediate reaction was horror. NO! You can't make this book into a movie! I closed my eyes to shut out the images and saw only those from the book in my memory.

In the book you have ten glorious run-on sentences (for example: "Almost over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of my own room where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot."). You have a boy's dream after he has been sent to bed without his supper, illustrated in some of the most evocative images ever. You have a nightmare transformed into a love story, the mysterious dilemmas of parenting with mercy and grace, and conversely of being a child who has to grow up into a responsible person, but not quite yet. You have delicious and cuddly monsters painted in warm earthy tones. You have cute small Max in a white wolf suit and crown. The way he dishevels that crown when he's sleepy is so charming! As a lover of children's illustrations, I got lost in them. I wanted little text. Making it into a movie would fill in the gaps of imagination in unwanted ways, changing it forever.

It is the dilemma of all books-to-film. How do you take Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and make it into the film "The English Patient"? In that case, the book is spare and wonderful, and the movie is lush and wonderful. Both succeeded. But often the film is a disappointment after a rich book. Of course the opposite can often be said too.

In a fantastic article Loring sent me by Wendell Berry (he whose beloved poem resides on my sidebar) about our country's warped economics, in which he criticizes the entertainment addiction we're in (The Progressive, Sept. 2009, p. 24), Berry wrote:

If you can read
and have more imagination than a doorknob,
what need do you have
for a "movie version" of a novel?

To agree with Berry, you could argue that a novel is different from an illustrated children's book. Without illustrations, a novel relies on the reader's vision of each scene and interpretations of characters. If you're a good reader, this terrain can be fertile indeed. If a movie gets made, and if you had any attachment to the book, you wish they would consult with you about the cast, set, direction and costumes! It's your story now after all, for the scenes and characters have evolved into your inventions too. Especially vile is when a film is made of a classic tale, such as "The Scarlet Letter" or "Last of the Mohicans," and the story is changed unrecognizably and unforgivably into a more palatable (sell-able) Hollywood adaptation. Why not just write a new story-script in the period and context?

To argue against my original mortification, a children's illustrated book is different, no matter how sacred, especially if the author was also the illustrator. Apparently Maurice Sendak has been working on a movie version of Where the Wild Things Are since the 1990s, and he pursued Spike Jonze as the one to make it. How do you argue with a book's author, if he had a vision for it as a film? It makes perfect sense that a visual artist would cross over into film. And from the enticing film sets and costumes I've seen so far, I myself can feel the pull. Can he help it that so many of us own this entity called Where the Wild Things Are and might object to his decision? Such controversy in my head over his imagination's expression!

In the video below you can hear Sendak and Jonze describe their collaboration in the movie. As Sendak says, Jonze took the peculiarness of the book and made it into his own Where the Wild Things Are with Jonze peculiarness. The glimpses of the monsters in the misty forest and silhouetted by the crashing sea, and of the fabulous Max, who happens also to be a "Max" in real life, have seduced me. Guess where I'll be October 16? In the presence of a newly inspired and evolved expression of what Maurice Sendak made possible: a wild seat to ride up and up as high as the next visionary could take it.

But please, no movie version of Goodnight Moon. I can live with the sweet animation narrated by Susan Sarandon, but I will not allow my future grandchildren to watch it on TV when I'm around. They must look at the pictures from my lap and hear "Good night comb and good night brush" from my voice box, feeling my heartbeat against their temples. And then I will close the finger-softened pages of the book and tell them for the 100th time how their mother said "Dat Doh" for "Goodnight Moon." Then I will eat them up, I love them so.




Here are my siblings' grandchildren helping me put the new swing on that old swingset.