| Culture Watch DVD Review - Where the Wild things Are |
 CultureWatch DVD Review Where the Wild Things are Certificate 12 Do you ever wish adults wouldn’t behave like children? Film-maker Spike Jonze believes this is one of our biggest problems: we allow our emotions to rule us, so we’ve become selfish, self-indulgent and demanding. His adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s enchanting children’s book Where the Wild Things Are shows how childish this behaviour is. The original is a very short picture book, so the film inevitably makes changes and adds in lots of new material. In the book, Max is sent to his room and imagines himself having great adventures in the land of the Wild Things, before returning home for supper. In the film, Max is disgruntled about his mother’s new boyfriend, and cross at not being fed. So he runs away, jumps into a boat and sails across a sea to an island where he encounters enormous furry monsters. They want to eat him, but Max claims that he is a powerful king. They want to know if he’s strong enough to ‘keep out all the sadness’. He assures them that ‘I have a sadness shield that keeps out all the sadness!’ But of course he hasn’t, and before long his attempts at creating peace and happiness fail. Max doesn’t succeed at being a good king because of his subjects’ jealousy, resentment and vanity. The monsters behave like children. The child, Max, however, discovers that the result of everyone doing what they want is, eventually, disaster. We live in a world where all of us, at least some of the time, behave in the same self-centred way as the monsters, though usually not to such an exaggerated extent. We tend to disguise it under a mask of politeness, but we are wild things. Jonze’s diagnosis of the big problem we face is almost right. We give in to our emotions not because they rule us, but because our self-glorifying human nature rules us. It’s what the Bible calls sin. It’s our number one problem. We won’t find any solution within ourselves, though. We too need a king – a perfect king who can bring peace to our world. We have one in Jesus. God became a man and died to take the punishment for all our self- absorption. In doing so he offers us the possibility of discovering ultimate peace through knowing God. We simply need to trust him – just like a child. This article was first published on Damaris’ Culturewatch website (www.culturewatch.org) – used with permission. © Copyright Tony Watkins |
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