When Jess Hyde picked a copy of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are from the bedroom shelf last week, her seven-year-old son, Arthur, pointed to it and said: “That gives me nightmares.”
“He had never mentioned it before,” says the mother of three from Somerset in the west of England. “But it is a tricky one because the monsters are quite scary. They are not friendly pictures. It is something about the color — they are brown and gray and not very endearing.” Arthur’s mother, who was given the book by friends, asked her son if he wanted her to read it. “He still said yes,” she laughs.
The spooky palm tree fronds and twisting vines that invade the bedroom of naughty Max in this nursery classic will soon be invading the imaginations of young children anew, as a film version of Sendak’s book heads for the cinema. A modern morality tale, Sendak’s story sees little Max reject his parental home for a world where he can become “king of all wild things.” It has been brought to the screen this autumn by the director Spike Jonze and the writer Dave Eggers, who adapted the screenplay. Their film has won plaudits from many critics, but some parents have been troubled by the ferocity of the story, and by the power of Jonze’s new interpretation. As a result, they are advising other families to stay away.
The protest, or “wild rumpus” to borrow a phrase from the book, which has greeted the release of the film echoes disquiet about the bleak message embedded in Disney/Pixar’s latest animated release. Entitled Up, it has been viewed by many parents as anything but.
A handful of American educationalists, including Holly Willett, of Rowan University in New Jersey, have rushed to defend Sendak’s 1963 book, but the new film stands accused of presenting unsettling images that, although popular, are likely to breed nightmares. A public debate about whether or not a child’s appetite for being frightened should be indulged is now in full swing.
“This is a classic hero’s story in which the protagonist undertakes a journey and returns a wiser person,” Willett, an expert on children’s literature, has argued in the American press. And Sendak’s original tale has certainly stood the test of time. Not only is it a reliable classic on the shelves of middle-class toddlers on both sides of the Atlantic, in 1983 the composer Oliver Knussen turned it into a one-act opera that has joined the modern repertoire.
“I remember reading the Sendak book to my children and it frightened the pajamas off them,” Roger McGough, the British poet, said this weekend. “But they went back to it. It is a scariness that you can control and that ends happily.”
McGough has had similar problems with his own children’s poem, The Lesson, in which a teacher inflicts cartoon-style violence on his pupils. “I was a teacher myself when I wrote it and it was a joke, but some parents now consider it inappropriate and I can see that contexts change,” said McGough. But he points out that children’s stories, from Snow White onwards, have always contained danger and death. “It is just part of the landscape. Although I don’t think a writer should set out to scare children.”
The traditional fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm are packed with disturbing twists, while the appeal of Roald Dahl’s work is inseparable from the dark side of his imagination. Dahl’s story, The Fantastic Mr Fox, is the subject of another film adaptation by a cult American director this autumn. Wes Anderson’s film opened the London Film Festival on Wednesday and is full of nature “red in tooth and claw.” Like Dahl’s book, it tells of a family of foxes besieged by the evil farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean, who are armed with guns, industrial diggers and explosives. Anderson has defended the “adult content” in his film by saying that children in his audience should be able to ask their parents about their worries as part of their learning process.
Willet argues that a good storyteller “knows that kids have many difficult feelings, as well as feelings that adults have forgotten about,” and so does not shy away from dark material.
Jonze and Eggers have fought hard for five years to retain the more troubling content in Where The Wild Things Are. Eggers received repeated notes from concerned producers about the screenplay. “There is a whitewashed, idealized version of childhood that is popular in movies. It has the kids sitting neatly in their chairs, talking with some adult, in a sarcastic, overly sophisticated but polite way — a concoction that bears no resemblance to an actual kid,” he explains.
In defense of the new film, Michael Phillips, critic for the Chicago Tribune, has argued that it is grown-ups who are more disturbed by its darkness.
“I suspect kids will go for it more than their parents; in my experience, it’s parents who tend to get fussed up about material they perceive, often wrongly, as ‘too dark’ or difficult. There’s a certain amount of pain in Where the Wild Things Are, but it’s completely earned. The movie fills you with all sorts of feelings, and I suspect children will recognize those feelings as their own,” he writes. In an article in this month’s edition of the journal The Psychologist, psychoanalyst Richard Gottlieb argues that this book and other works by Sendak are “fascinating studies of intense emotions — disappointment, fury, even cannibalistic rage — and their transformation through creative activity.”
The book of Where the Wild Things Are, which Sendak also illustrated, sees Max sent to bed without dinner after misbehaving. He then sails across an ocean encountering the hairy monsters of the title. When Max returns home, his dinner is waiting and is still warm. According to Gottlieb, the story tackles many common childhood fears. “In straightforward, undisguised fashion, Sendak’s work has addressed problems as monumental for children as being in a rage at mother, relating to a depressed or emotionally unavailable mother, or coming to terms with a mother who cannot or will not recognize her child’s concerns or state of mind,” he writes. “He manages nonetheless to maintain the optimistic view that all these troubles can be tamed, even if not fully overcome, through imagination. The ultimate magic of his work resides in his presentations of imagination, dream, fantasy and — ultimately — art itself as sources of resilience, of the strength to soldier on.”
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