The domination and taming of childhood nightmares? A grown-up fetish? I haven’t read Dave Eggers' The Wild Things yet, nor have I made it to the recent Eggers'/Spike Jonze film collaboration… but Janet Potter's review in the current issue of Open Letters Monthly supports a suspicion I developed whilst spending several minutes in a bookstore last week stroking the luxury edition, which has a furry cover with creepy eyes: We may have an inkling as to where the wild things are, but we'll never know what they are. But we do have an idea about Max. Max is a kid, like us. With demons. A terrified kid who temporarily triumphs over his monsters, becomes one with them, tames them. And his dark world can also be hauntingly beautiful.
A current exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco presents Maurice Sendak's art with an eye to his East European Jewish origins. In a compellingly candid interview with Bill Moyers, Sendak, whose mother called him Wild Beast ("Vilde Khaye") in Yiddish, admits that the wild things were modeled on his relatives, hairy immigrants who spoke poor English, would eat anything, and terrified the young, American children. "They have to know it is possible things are bad... but they are surrounded by people who love them." Of his 2003 collaboration with Tony Kushner, a retelling of the Holocaust opera, Brundibar, Sendak (his life partner was a psychoanalyst, after all) said, "you can't get rid of evil". To Catherine Keener, who plays Max's mother in Jonze's film, Sendak said, "Make it your own and don't pander to children. Be honest."
