Okay, deep breath. Why did I have such a visceral reaction? I didn’t respond this way—well, I was troubled, but not horrified—to the adaptations of The Cat in the Hat or Horton Hears a Who. (Full disclosure: I’ve not seen either of those, and I won’t. I am the opposite of interested.) Why indeed? Well, the power of Where the Wild Things Are resides in its simplicity—it’s made up of maybe a hundred and fifty words (many of them repeated, particularly at the end, where the words that bring him home are the reverse of the words that open up his new world), drawn over maybe forty pages. The images are clean yet lush. They start simple, almost incomplete, and on single pages, with words opposite; then they grow to take up entire spreads, with the words nearly incidental. And the entire thing is a dream. The power of childhood, the simplicity of childhood, the ability of imagination to free us from negative emotions, a child’s need for home, for comfort, for love, for supper—all in a hundred and fifty words and forty pages. What movie could possibly do what this does? I mean, first of all, any writer would have to expand it, and I (still) don’t see how that could do anything but kill it. Just. Kill. It. Combine that with Hollywood’s history of successful adaptations—a very short history indeed—and maybe the reasons for my horror become clear.
Well. Last week my wife and I went to see the movie 9. One of the trailers was for… yep, you guessed it… Where the Wild Things Are. I was entranced. Really. It’s… beautiful. And funny. And cute. The kid playing Max, a newbie I think, is… well, at least three years too old, but his lines are great.
Wild Thing Judith: “You have a home and family?”
Max: “I had one of those once.”
Wild Thing Judith: “But you ate ‘em all?”
Max: “No! I have no plans to eat anybody.”
It’s so damned cute you almost want to spit. But then… The sets—oh, my, the sets. Sumptuous. The humor—all there, particularly in the ram wild thing (who’s on, I think, a single page in the book). The wild things? They are not CGI, not animated. They are puppets, outsize, lovingly rendered, warm-spooky-unsettling-comforting puppets (with voices by an amazing array of unlikely actors, who must be doing it because they too love the book, perhaps as much as I). The costume—Max’s costume—is perfect, down to its floppy ears and sensuous velvet; I just want to touch it. Maybe becoming a dad has made me a sucker, but this stuff just hits me. Right. There. (The heart. You have to imagine the hand gesture.) So far, so good; right? Well, maybe not.
The crux of my problem is this: books are not movies; movies are not books. The experiences are wildly (er, widely) different. Where the Wild Things Are lives in my imagination. It is there, never to be lost. When my first child was born, it was one of the first books I turned to. I could not wait. And now, we can all recite the book without even looking at the pages. While the movie looks perfect, down to the last feather, down to the last gnashed tooth and terrible claw, I can’t help but feel that a movie version is a loss. A loss to readers and to children of all ages. When I shared these feelings with Carla, she said, “Well, I’m glad our children know the book already.” And that’s it, right there. No matter how faithful the adaptation, no matter how wonderful the movie, it will subsume the book. Even for me, I fear to watch it because it could eclipse my memory of the source. And it will interfere—for generations of children to come, the movie will be there; for some, it might be their first experience of the story, and they may come to see the book as some incomplete version of the film. While this is a triumph of the imagination (for the filmmakers), it’s the death of imagination (for readers).
To see the trailer, go to
Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze, opens nationwide October 16, 2009.
[book cover image ©HarperCollins; movie poster image ©Warner Bros. Pictures]
