Oliver Stone and the persistence of false memories, part 4.

4. From Ron Kovic to Jim Morrison.

Stone made Born on the 4^th of July next, and it is a brutish, challenging, frustrating, and well, sort of boring film. It follows real life Ron Kovic, a Vietnam vet paralyzed from the waste down. The Vietnam segment is strong, but the bulk of the movie is tedious, shoving the viewer’s face into the systemic degradation of Kovic (played with some skill but no subtlety by Tom Cruise). It’s a brave movie in a way—it refuses to offer up any kind of easy redemption, or allow Kovic any real happiness. But it’s a tough watch, too long and meandering; near the end of the film, Cruise and fellow paraplegic John Savage fight, in the desert, and topple their wheelchairs into the sand.

Stone at this point was still a filmmaker worth watching, although like many other directors, the long biopic defeated him. (It’s a problem of scale, trying to fit a whole life into two hours. The key is to find a short period that captures the essence of a person’s life.) The film is a pungent anti-war movie, but it’s preachy and inelegant. I couldn’t watch it again.

Stone learned nothing from his errors, however, for his next film was the biggest dog of them all.

Stone’s most pungent anti-war film is also preachy, affected, and too damn long.

The Doors is a real snooze of a movie, worth watching only to see Val Kilmer’s vanity peeking through what is, admittedly, quite a fine rendition of Jim Morrison. The movie suffers from the same thing almost all biopics suffer from: the subjects are treated with such hagiographic adoration, it’s hard to see and know the Doors’ true value. Meg Ryan isn’t believable at all as the drugged up groupie. And the music scenes with the band are just corny. The movie looks cheap.

The straight characters—the suits and businessmen and conservative peoples—are handled with total disdain. Most rock n roll movies handle these types in the same exact fashion. (Never mind that when he heard the Beatles for the first time, Frank Sinatra kicked his radio to pieces with the heel of his Italian shoe.) The Doors sets up a familiar, false dichotomy. On one side you have freedom-loving, drug-using, intellectuals who love freedom and sexual expression. On the other you have closed off, unhappy, bitter and sexually repressed assholes who want to thwart your freedom at every turn. It’s bad writing, and too easy. (Mad Men  has, in a sense, spent its entire series trying to combat this stereotype.)

Val Kilmer channeling his inner Morrison in a movie that is neither controversial nor interesting.

Stone refuses to allow that there might be some legitimate concern over controversial subject matter on television, or that these boring squares could have inner lives at all. He bullies the characters, which I know is an odd thing to say about a writer-director. But these are based on composites of real people; good writers provide context and insight into their villains’ hearts and minds. Stone instead punches up little bean counters and television executives as small-minded plebes. It’s simple, unsophisticated writing.

He’s better than this, anyone with half a brain is.

In the final tally, the film has no real focus with which we can view Morrison or the Doors, no anchor, no method of measurement. It’s an indulgent picture, and a profound misfire. But there was still hope. Rumors swirled about his next movie, an unwinding of the assassination of President Kennedy, a movie that promised answers to the plaguing doubts of the official story.

Oliver Stone and the persistence of false memories, part 3.

3. From Vietnam to Wallstreet.

Stone hit his stride in the mid-1980s with two very fine films and one interesting movie. He seemed perched on the ledge of greatness.

The unreliability of our own memories puts our view of life, and everything in it, at risk. Stone’s best film, Platoon, plays with this very notion of the subjectivity of war. It follows Charlie Sheen, a stand-in for Stone who did indeed fight in Vietnam, as a grunt who grows to hate his superior officer—and fear him—more than the Viet Cong. It’s superb, personal, taut, a touch overcooked but excellent, and entertaining as hell. Sheen is very fine as a demoralized soldier who only wants to survive. He isn’t a hero, nor is he courageous or brave. People who haven’t seen it will hardly recognize him. It’s excellent, arguably the best of the Vietnam war movies. (Apocalypse Now isn’t really a movie about Vietnam, or not just about Vietnam; The Deer Hunter is hobbled by a variety of problems, and you should read Studs Terkel’s review of it, which I would link to but I couldn’t find a copy of it online; and Full Metal Jacket falls apart in the second half. M.A.S.H. is superb in places but hasn’t dated well. The Green Berets was never very good, the only Hollywood movie fully endorsing the war. Casualties of War is pretty silly; Once Were Soldiers is sentimental and treacly. And Forrest Gump isn’t a Vietnam war movie at all.)

Charlie Sheen gives his best performance in Oliver Stone’s best movie.

Wallstreet is also superb, despite some nagging plot points and little pieces that haven’t dated well. It’s superbly entertaining. Douglass is excellent as Gordon Gecko, and Stone makes the manipulation of numbers and insider trading sexy, dangerous and thrilling, no easy task. Great movie? I don’t know, but it’s a very good movie, fun to watch over and over again.

The hungry youngster learns the ropes from the unscrupulous master.

Talk Radio, Stone’s fourth film, is pretty good, too, starring Eric Bogasian as a shock jock type radio host named Barry who begins to receive disturbing phone calls on the air. Barry is angry, full of bile and self-loathing, a bully, self-righteous and a real jerk. It’s a pretty tight little movie, lean, funny, energetic and robust. (With a dreadfully inadequate ending that makes you hate yourself for sitting through it.)

I liked it as a teenager. The issues of the movie are still the same ones we’re going over today. And the entire film takes place in the studio, a sort of one-act play.

Only, it doesn’t.

The false memories hit again. I re-watched. The movie has large segments in the studio, but the bulk of the movie takes place outside. There are even flashbacks—unnecessary and not very good—that move backwards to the day when Barry gets into radio. The earlier Barry is happier, nicer, less embittered (which Bogasian doesn’t pull of at all). Stone handles the cynicism of burned out professionals well, but the peppy enthusiasm of youth he doesn’t get at all.

Bogasian as a young shock jock lost in America’s hinterlands.

Stone identifies with Barry. He sees his audience as ignorant, superstitious, inferior. The movie plays like a self-righteous screed. Stone was already too far into the Hollywood machine to remember the joy of his art. A marquis director with four movies to his name shouldn’t blast his audience with self-involved pity. (Woody Allen didn’t do this until Stardust Memories, some 25 years into his career; and it’s a great movie.) I don’t feel bad for Oliver Stone, and no one felt bad for him, then, either.

But. Talk Radio is alive. It does have crackle. It has something.

Oliver Stone and the persistence of false memories, part 2.

2. The soldier cum journalist cum scriptwriter cum director.

Stone was a soldier first, then a journalist, then a scriptwriter. He wrote the screenplays for Scarface—which has some good lines although it’s hard to tell if it isn’t just Pacino’s great performance—and Conan the Barbarian, a slightly campy movie that I absolutely love. Both movies have large cult followings; both movies have hordes of critics. Right from the start Stone was a divisive figure. After knocking about for a while, he got behind the camera and began making movies under his own banner.

In places, Salvador is an excellent movie. It’s an un-Hollywood look at insurrection and U.S. foreign policy in Central America. Woods plays the role with a light, comedic touch in what is a very grim movie. The crowd scenes are fantastic, and the last thirty minutes are harrowing and unforgettable.

But Oliver Stone’s weaknesses, in retrospect, are noticeable from the start. It must be said, Stone is bad with actors. (Only Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen have delivered good performances in his movies.) He isn’t a great storyteller; the pacing of many of his films seems off. Unimportant scenes drag on too long, and crucial scenes are cut off too quick. His films are often shaggy, overreaching with too many characters. Salvador, for example, doesn’t really have a plot, just some political exposition and then a bunch of people being slaughtered, with Woods running around with grime on his smirking face. Half a dozen characters sort of appear and then are gone. It works when the movie is about war or political chaos, but doesn’t work when the film is about, well, anything else.

Mounds of dead bodies awakens one American’s damaged conscience.

Salvador was criticized for being leftist propaganda by the right, and attacked for being reactionary blather by the left. (The crucial scene has the revolutionaries shooting captured soldiers, with James Woods screaming at them, “You’re going to become just like them!”)

Stone leans left, but has a pulp sensibility amplified by his tough guy machismo. He’s Mickey Spillane spliced with Upton Sinclair. The result is an odd mixture; he’s a thuggish presence in his movies, almost a bully. (His later movies are precisely designed to bully the audience.) This has caused some very strange scenes in his films. The combination makes him an interesting man but a problematic artist.

Oliver Stone and the persistence of false memories, part 1.

1. Throat-cutters in El Salvador.

When I was twelve, I saw Oliver Stone’s Salvador for the first time. The movie follows a handful of American journalists in El Salvador in the early 1980s. James Woods plays Richard Boyle, a real-life photojournalist who ends up allied with both left-wing peasant revolutionaries and the right-wing military junta. Woods plays Boyle as a brave, confused, fast-talking hustler, hopeless in his personal life, drug-addled and often drunk but daring and basically decent. James Belushi plays his bullish drunken friend. John Savage plays a photographer willing to risk his life for the perfect shot. They all end up in El Salvador as the military junta is taking over. It’s quite a movie.

About 75 minutes into Salvador, there’s a scene where Belushi and Woods are ambushed by military thugs. It’s night, the thugs are drunk, and Belushi is killed senselessly, his throat slashed with a knife. I can still see the scene, it’s what shocked me as a child. It’s one of the first times in my life I’ve felt unsafe while watching a movie.

I’ve carried this scene in my thoughts, and have even discussed it with other movie fans.

A few weeks ago, I re-watched Salvador.

And the scene doesn’t exist. It isn’t in the movie.

Instead, it’s Woods who’s attacked, and John Savage saves him at the last second.

He makes it through the movie, despite the terrible hat.

No one dies.

I can’t get over it.

Memory is tricky, unreliable, persistent. I now know that James Belushi lives through until the end. But in my memory, there he is, bloated and sweating, cut down by El Salvadoran government thugs.

My memory of it is so strong, I started looking around for other James Belushi/James Woods films set in Central America, convinced that I had just inserted a scene from one movie into another. It sounds silly, but I’m still convinced that there’s a movie out there, with essentially the same cast and a similar plot, that has Belushi killed. The memory is stuck, even when confronted with the truth.

(The socio-political implications of this are scary as hell.)

So I began to wonder, do I have Oliver Stone wrong, too? Is my opinion of him misguided, based on false memories? Is he actually a great director?

I decided to work my way back through his films. Perhaps I have him wrong.

Post strike post script: Brizard gets the axe.

I said I wouldn’t write about politics for a while, but this is a juicy postscript to the strike. Jean Claude Brizard—oh, he of such profound professional failure—“resigned” this past week. You can read some of his carefully considered response here.

I’ll summarize for you. He takes no responsibility and lays no blame: the perfect political speech.

He came in with a parade of red flags. In Rochester, NY, a whopping 82 percent of the teachers’ voted no confidence in his abilities. They ran him out of town. There were two federal lawsuits. There were rumors of bullying, discrimination and bull-headed stubbornness. Sounds familiar.

Rahmbo liked this so much he brought Brizard aboard. (Who doesn’t admire autocratic arrogance and public failure?) Rahmbo wanted a yes man, a personal hatchet man, to cut and chop and rip and wrench and mangle and slice and dismember the teachers’ union. By all accounts Brizard has two modes. As a yes man for the mayor, and as an overconfident autocrat who fixates on a handful of tiny “reforms,” but can’t communicate effectively, resulting in mutual frustration all around.

Brizard was Rahmbo’s smiling assassin. He publicly said how much he cared for the teachers, and in an almost weekly email sent to Chicago’s teachers, he continued to express his concern for us. He even offered little nuggets of praise. But he worked against us from the start. He was the point man on the longer school day, refusing to slow the process down so that the extra time could be planned for and used wisely. He tried to bribe schools—illegally—to enter the longer school day voluntarily. He tried to circumvent the teachers’ union in a variety of sneaky ways. Like so many other political appointees, he expected the rank and file to take a pay cut while he made no sacrifice at all. He was opaque, often missing in action, deliberately misleading the public about basic facts. He was aloof from the contract proceedings and a champion of charter schools.

Karen Lewis says that he was brought in “to blow up the union.” Fortunately for teachers, he was ineffective at his work.

His exit an expected move; politicians (and kings) always pick an underling to take the blame for a mistake. Brizard, by all accounts, was a good soldier and did what he was told. He was a hired gun, a henchman. His mistake, it seems, was giving Rahmbo bad advice early in his job.

“He promised Rahm,” Daryl, my friend and colleague, said, “that the teachers would never strike. And Rahm believed him.”

Don’t shed any tears. His tenure as the head honcho at CPS lasted less than two years. He takes with him a year’s worth of severance pay. That’s some $250,000. In a cash-strapped public school system in an underfunded city in a struggling state. To add a little extra spice to the whole thing, Rahmbo lied about Brizard being on his way out, while already having Byrd picked as Brizard’s successor.

(For a full accounting of Rahmbo’s bungling of the whole mess, read here.)

Goodbye, Jean Claude, our sweet, toothy failure. We shall not miss you.

Wild Things with Baby Faces, part 5: The Monster with Human Feet.

5. The monster with human feet.

Sendak uses his clean, simple-faced alter ego to feed his childhood desires. In feeding his inner child’s narcissism, he offers readers the chance to indulge in their own. Max is the id, the untroubled pleasure seeker who can only be induced to return home by a simpler, but no less gratifying, pleasure, the security of a mother’s love and a hot meal.

This reading of the story offers one answer to its enduring popularity; Max gets to live the childhood the rest of us missed out on.

Max is a Peter Pan figure, a child who gets to become ruler of a faraway world. He is Tarzan without the tragedy and without the civilizing presence of his Victorian breeding. He is Mowgli, loose in the forests of time. He is the untamable thing in the human mind, imagination and its discontents. This type of character has an intense allure, and it is this aspect of the book that accounts for its popularity with adults.

The story allows Max to sail across the world, conquer the monsters, and return home unscathed. It’s a straightforward twist of a timeless, ancient storyline, as ingrained into our collective consciousness as Gilgamesh or Beowulf. Sendak, with this simple little story, harkens back over 2,000 years of recorded history, following almost exactly Joseph Campbell’s classic hero’s journey. Max is the monster killer, Captain Ahab in a wolf suit.

This reading of the book—that the story’s timelessness appeals to some deep, innate sense of narrative symmetry we carry inside—offers another answer to the question of the book’s appeal.

The simplicity of Max’s face, the blank contours of his body, pulls the reader into Max’s wild fling into the far reaches of his self-indulgent imagination. The beautiful backgrounds, recognizable and concrete, add to this reader projection. This idea, that we push ourselves into Max because his face is a universal symbol of everyman’s face, offers yet another explanation to the book’s appeal.

And yet, this approach too—of seeing the book in terms of psychic reader projection—misses an essential piece of the story’s power.

There’s an undeniable melancholy about the book, a streak of loneliness and desperation. Max is alone. He sees no other people, and must spend his evening in the comfort of fictional beings. On page 9, when Max is standing angry in his room, there are no toys, no pictures, no signs of life save for a single plant. The plant has no flowers. Behind the plant, the chalky outline of the dead moon. Max looks at the closed door. And beneath the doorknob, there’s a locking mechanism that locks on the outside. It’s a subtle image, full of the lurking menace of loneliness, and Max standing in the unadorned locked room is a great record of a child growing up in isolation. It’s a hidden melancholy, a little dash of existentialism.

The cover illustration highlights this point, with a lonely, horned giant, sleeping with a slight grin (or is it a grimace?), with large human feet, sitting at the shore by an empty boat. (And why is it empty?) He is waiting for Max to return, but Max is gone, and probably gone forever. The giant is surrounded by an unearthly paradise, but all he can do is sleep. He, too, is alone, and all the beautiful wildness in the world cannot make up for this fact.

The

Combining the loneliness of a little boy with the brash adventures of an epic hero, Sendak merges his artwork, writing style, and plot into a cohesive, balanced story, reveling in the best and worst of youth. But it is the hidden melancholy that sticks with the reader. Sendak snatches the true eternal fire—the human capacity for loneliness, the endless manifestations of sadness—showing that the wildest things live not outside the world but rightly in it.

Sources:

Bangs, Molly. Picture This: How Pictures Work. Chronicle Books, San Francisco. 2000.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. MJF Books, New York. 1949.

Marcus, Leonard. Minders of Make Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. 2008.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Kitchen Sink Press, New York. 1993.

Paul, Pamela. “Rules Meant To Be Broken.” New York Times Book Review, Sept. 18, 2011.

Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. Harper Collins Publishers, New York. 1991.

(All images belong to the Maurice Sendak estate; I have used them here for review purposes.)

Wild Things with Baby Faces, part 4: “We are all little beasts.”

4. “We are all little beasts.”

Another way of interpreting this little story is as a tale of authorial wish fulfillment. Reading the book this way—where Sendak gives his little narrator all the things the real world will not and cannot—is limited, however. Of course, part of the book’s appeal lies with the not so subtle glorification of bad behavior. Readers, for a few brief minutes, get to romp and roar and yell and scream without repercussions. Max is all of us, and Sendak himself confirms this interpretation. In a recent interview, Sendak calls Max “a normal child, a little beast, just as we all are little beasts” (Paul, 35).

The boy is Sendak, but also everyone else.

Joseph Campbell, in A Hero with a Thousand Faces, offers up an argument for narrative that is universal, wherein a hero must travel through a number of stages in the process of self-discovery. The essence of his argument is that all myths—and almost all stories, really—are the same. (If you’ve never read Campbell, despite some occasional academic-y prose, he’s a pretty wild ride.)

Sendak’s book follows Campbell’s outline. Max’s journey, in a number of interesting ways, mirrors Campbell’s classic hero’s journey.[1]

The story is simple, clean and elegant, a classic quest motif, where the main character travels around the world to destroy a monster. On pages 18-19, the story reads “ . . . and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks for almost over a year . . .” The timing here is essential, giving the story the feel of an epic, and providing the necessary time to allow our hero to make his journey. Without these crucial lines, the book would feel insubstantial. Max must travel far and wide, leaving the safety of his home to wander the earth.

“. . . the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the ‘threshold guardian,’ at the entrance to the zone of magnified power” (Campbell, 77). Campbell goes on to describe these guardians as “leviathans . . . and other powers of the deep” (Campbell, 78). On page 19, Max, on his epic journey across a vast ocean comes across a dragon, just before he lands on the land of magnified power, where the wild things live. It’s an apt creature, a guardian of the untamed lands. And here, he meets the monsters.

But, he doesn’t destroy them, and therein lies a possible clue to Sendak’s reasons for writing the book. Instead, the boy becomes the leader of a clan of monsters. He vanquishes nothing. He tricks the monsters with his wits, and then leads them through a wild days-long romp of roughhousing, a child’s version of paradise.

At a later stage in the hero’s journey, Campbell says that the hero “ . . . is covertly aided by . . . amulets . . . . that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage” (Campbell, 97). On page, 25, Sendak draws Max with two new accoutrements: a crown and a scepter. Both are classic examples of magical talismans. It’s as if Sendak had plotted Max’s story with Campbell in mind.

Max with two magical talismans.

According to Campbell, all heroes must return home and eventually, Max must, too. He misses his mom.[2] He misses being needed and loved. Thus spent, slaked, and satisfied, he leaves his acolytes to return home. He isn’t punished for his misdeeds. He is rewarded. In the parlance of the times, he gets to eat his cake and have it, too.

Max is the narcissistic little boy and the epic hero; the plot holds both of these components, the mythic and the personal. And like all great epics it ends with the hero safely returned home.

“‘Who having cast off the world,” Campbell quotes the Upanishads, “would desire to return again?’ . . . And yet, in so far as one is alive, life will call” (Campbell, 207).

The simple pleasures of basic living, food and shelter, are enough to pull little Max back from the island of uninhibited life amongst the fierce creatures.

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[1] An entire masters’ thesis could be written on Wild Things and Campbell, so two examples will have to suffice.

[2] The author, Marcus, reveals that Sendak struggled with the ending, unsure of how, or why, a boy would leave paradise to return to the normal world.

Wild Things with Baby Faces, part 3: Scaled Creatures with Enormous Eyes.

3. Scaled creatures with enormous eyes.

Molly Bangs offers a different way of looking at Sendak’s pictures. If McCloud gives us a theory of reader projection onto blank faces, Bangs breaks down pictures into a primal, emotional geometry. Using Bangs principles as a cipher, we can see some of what makes the book so powerful, and timeless.

First, Bangs argues that smooth, horizontal lines are comforting (Bangs, 42). All of Max’s journey is framed by a smooth horizontal plain at the bottom of the page, except the rumpus pages. This gives the island not a sense of horror or fear, but calm adventure. It also answers the question, why isn’t this story scarier? A boy adrift at sea, stranded on an isle of monsters that threaten to eat him, and yet, the creatures somehow feel warm. (Also, one of the creatures wears a cardigan, adding a touch of whimsy and some fuzzy feeling of home.) The white plain, in various sizes, is almost omnipresent, giving the book a soft glow, explaining the disconnect between the book’s tone and what is actually going on in the story.

Max faces the right side of the page, in classic western pictorial tradition, in the fantasy sequences. As we read left to right, we expect action in picture books to move in the same direction. Yet, in the “real world”[1] of the story, Max faces left. He also faces left when he is thinking of home while in the fantasyland.

Sendak knows what he’s doing here; Max’s eyes, in a sense, are our own. Where he looks, the reader looks, too. Max always faces the monsters. This allows the monsters to be both less threatening and an extension of Max’s own thoughts.

Second, the center of the page is also the center of attention (Bangs, 62). Max, returning to our three-page wordless spread, is almost at the center. But for most of the rest of the pages, he is—at times uncomfortably—tucked into the edges of the frame. He is a boy at odds with the real world, and Sendak doesn’t want us to forget that his jaunt into a fantasy world isn’t a race towards perfection, but rather a retreat from the hard realities. The rumpus, Sendak is saying, is the whole point; Max has escaped the rules of his home for the wild. Anything less than pandemonium would miss the point.

Max, at the center of things, where he belongs.

Returning to the monsters, they are big bellies with eyes. They are huge. They have enormous teeth and sickly yellow eyes. They are clearly of different origins, some bullish and others birdlike. But, as the colors of the creatures are similar, they are lumped together. This, too, is covered in Bangs’s book (Bangs, 74). The result is a clan of monsters, almost a family, but covering great creative width. They have something childish about them, something sweet[2], and Bangs touches on reasons why they seem this way, too. They are round, almost mushy, and thus less threatening (Bangs, 11). They look like they should be scary, but they aren’t.

The creatures look (almost) peaceful, save for the beaked monster at the end.

The mood of the book, almost soporific with its reassuring plains of white surrounding the frames or bordering them, works because of the principles Bangs’s elucidates.

The last line is delivered against a vast, calming white space. The pictures are gone, the boy is gone, the monsters are gone, only the idea of a warm meal remains.

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[1] Of course, it’s all fiction.

[2] Except for the bird creature, which has more than just a touch of the perverse. Note the expression on page 25. Extrapolating why Sendak included this thing in the book would take a much longer essay, but I believe he’s intentionally placed a discomfiting creature amongst the cute and fuzzy.

Wild Things with Baby Faces, part 2: The Blank Face of Wonder.

1. The blank face of wonder

Scott McCloud, in his book, Understanding Comics, offers up a way of looking at sequential art—art that tells stories—that reveals a number of reasons why Sendak’s book has remained so popular.[1]

McCloud argues that the simpler the face of a drawing, the more universal it’s appeal. Readers, he says, project their own face onto the illustration. Placing a simple face against a complicated backdrop, the reader can see the world as a real place, but identify with the main character (McCloud, 43). All cartoons utilize this technique, just some more than others.

Let’s look at Max’s face. It’s an oval shape, with vague features, little more than a mouth and eyes with two little slits for eyebrows. The face resembles a child’s drawing, albeit with a sophisticated design. There’s a little touch of hair, and a nose composed of an unbroken single line. It could be any of ten million faces, ambiguously ethnic but touched by the Nordic. He’s a thinner Charlie Brown. With curly black hair.

It could just about be any mischievous boy.

His body, in the wolf suit, is an outline of a figure, with no muscles, skin, or body parts showing. A line of four buttons bifurcate the suit, and on either side of the face there are four single whiskers. Atop Max’s face rest two pointy ears. It’s as close to a blank canvas a human figure can be, save perhaps for a stick figure, and in this way almost works as a “fiction suit.”[2] The fiction suit is a way for writers to immerse themselves into their own stories, and for illustrators to sneak readers into their alternate world.[3]

The author’s psyche dropped into his own creation in his ingenious fiction suit.

Max’s face is simple and plain. His body is half-white, almost blank. In contrast, the locales are lush, complicated tapestries comprised of complex cross-hatching. Placing an almost blank face into a lush background is a classic tactic, common in Japanese art. The idea is that readers will identify with Max, project themselves into his persona, while also placing themselves in a very real world. The best example of this is the angry Max in his room. Although spare, the room is a detailed place, with subtle gradations between the browns and grays of the rug, the walls and ceiling. The design is uncluttered but very complex. Max rests off-center, a disgruntled face, a cipher for the reader to enter a stimulating and all-too-real alternate world (McCloud, 43).

McCloud refers to a visual term called closure. Closure, in the visual world, is the mental process of completing a picture that is only half-formed. An example is a Coke can, half-turned, where only part of the letters are visible. The brain completes the letters automatically (McLoud, 67). In terms of sequential art, closure works in terms of story, too. The reader closes the story gap between the pages. The reader, in a sense, becomes the author of the unseen parts of the story.

The illustrations here don’t change the tone of the story at all, but fulfill it. The wild rumpus—giant wordless illustrations that span both the recto and verso pages—scrupulously detail Max and the creatures dancing, play-fighting and howling at the moon.  It’s the centerpiece of the story, a child’s version of a bacchanal, a pre-adolescent revelry that shrieks off the page.

The infamous wild rumpus, or is it a silent affair?

These three “silent” pages offer an example of this concept of closure. The reader’s imagination fills in the silence of the rumpus, extending the festivities. The reader can hear the howling creatures, Max’s growls, and the hooting, grunting, huffing and carousing of the scaly creatures. In each spread, Max sits close to the center, surrounded by the large, variegated creatures and the verdant forests and plush, sensual glades.

It’s clear that we’re supposed to identify with Max. We’re supposed to project our desires onto his simple features. He’s living out our pleasures for us.

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[1] His explanations concerning comics apply to all picture books, and Where the Wild Things Are, it could be argued, is a comic (or almost a comic) in its form and content. See pages 9-13 to see how close the book comes to being a straight comic.

[2] Grant Morrison–one of my heroes—argues that authors do this all the time, and that the power of fiction often rests on this strange blurring between fantasy and reality. In a sense, he’s making McCloud’s argument in different terms.

[3] There’s another way of looking at it: the wolf suit is shaded on one side, sterling white on the other; perhaps Sendak is showing the dual nature of his little boy, the good and bad in all of us.

Wild Things with Baby Faces, part 1.

1.

Where the Wild Things Are is a slight book, slender, barely 40 pages, with a total word count of some 330 words. Upon publication, it won the top award in the field. The book was and is immensely popular, a best-selling children’s title for the last 40 years. The iconography of the book as well as its language has burrowed its way into the foundations of popular culture, culminating in a big budget film adaptation, as well as an opera.

The book is a gigantic success story, a constant in libraries, and a beloved favorite of both adults and children. In a word, it’s a classic.

They even made action figures.

The question is, why?

Max, the main character, is the only named character in the book. He is a narcissistic, violent little kid with no impulse control. He chases the dog. He yells as his mother, who remains unseen. The monsters, although differentiated from each other by beaks, wings, or strange claws, all resemble each other and act in a uniform manner. The message of the book is unclear; the book seems to be an argument for the power of imagination, but at the end of the book, Max appears to have learned something, it just isn’t clear what.

But this story of a budding sociopath and his imaginary monsters comes across as a warm, loving paean to childhood, families, and imagination.

This contradiction lies at the heart of the book.

I’m going to take three different looks at Sendak’s masterpiece—I’ve adapted this series of blog entries from a graduate school paper; I needed a break from writing about politics and have numerous essays and pieces in progress— first through the eyes of Scott McCloud, a pioneering sequential arts thinker and creator; then through Molly Bangs, a children’s book artist; and finally through the prism of Joseph Campbell’s theory of the monomyth. Taken together, the three reads of the book offer some insight into how it works, and why it’s remained so popular over the years.