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November 2009
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Vol 2, Issue 6
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Movie Review: Where the Wild Things Are
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 by Keith Miller, LICSW
By many standards, Where
the Wild Things Are is a movie made for kids. After all, there are wild rumpuses,
dirt-clod fights, and stray animals. It is packed with kid-level play and fuzzy
creatures that look like so many huggable characters at your favorite adventure
park. But don't rush your under-10-year-old out to the cinema without some
forethought. The film has themes of strong, complex emotions that could be
confusing and unsettling to little ones. (This adult would have liked to see a
PG-13 rating because of that.)
Spike Jonze as director certainly fills the creative gaps of
the under-400-word children's book by Maurice Sendak (1963). As you would
expect from something that takes five minutes to read, the book is sparse on
complexity and big on visual appeal. In some ways, the movie seems to keep this
simplicity. The creatures on Max's island, the Wild Things, are fascinating,
the way they must appear to children who see them in the book. They are some
kind of furry animals with horns and unusual powers, but they walk on two
feet-just like actors in suits!
The film develops the story of the young boy, Max, and his
imagined island where he becomes king of the Wild Things. The scenes, and occasional
wobbly camera work, follow the action the  way a kid would follow it. It feels like you're on the adventure too. Part
of the adventure is that you never know which lines of dialogue are significant
and which are just throwaway humor cut from similar cloth as The Simpsons or The
Office. This all has the effect of downplaying the inherent complexity of the
two plots, Max the boy and Max the boy in his wolf pajamas. There's no time to ponder
the unconscious entanglements of the nested plots because you are too busy
witnessing the rambunctious play of a pre-adolescent that involves lots of
physical throwing and destruction, all short-sighted, that usually ends with
tears.
Then there's Max Records, who plays the character that
shares his first name. His authentic portrayal of this little boy is alone
enough to keep you fixed on the meandering path of his fantasy, even when it
forces you to make connections with little or no support from context or dialogue.
When Max swings from adoration of his mother to rage in the introduction you
can feel it about to happen as though
it's happening in your kitchen.
Arriving in the fantasy world where Max becomes King of the Wild Things it looked like he would
learn to tame the beasts and thereby sooth his own wild emotions. The story
moves in this direction but isn't that simple. This would have been the Disney way
to sprinkle magic on the scary parts and keep kids in the audience from having
nightmares.
But spike Jonze is not Disney. Instead we witness a very realistic
treatment of emotions. In real life, as it is where the Wild Things are, leading
one's internal drives and directing the currents of emotion isn't done by
wishful thinking alone. Max wants this to be so. Just when his charm and enthusiasm seem to
succeed at forging an alliance with his mother or the family of Wild Things,
fear and mistrust rupture the connection and his world is flooded with hurt and
volatility. Adults can't put on their wolf pajamas and escape to the forest but it's not uncommon for the most "balanced" of people to do just that in our own ways.
In the end, imagination and fantasy serve a valuable and
redeeming role for Max. Clearly more than just providing him with a quick escape,
his imagination ends up wrestling with the same tangle of anger and
vulnerability as his real life but within safer confines. The tense moment, in
his real life, when Max stands on the table and commands his mother to "Feed
me, woman," becomes the tense moment, on his fantasy island, when his closest friend among the Wild Things
nearly eats him. Max finds a way, despite--or perhaps because of--his feelings, to see the good in the Wild Things, and by doing so finds the good in himself.
And that was all he needed to find his way back home.
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Fort Hood: Right Place for a Tragedy?
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From one perspective, Fort Hood was the least likely place for a soldier-on-soldier attack to occur. It was also arguably the best place for this to happen. This is because since last Spring, Fort Hood has been the epicenter for the Army's historical experiment to improve the mental health of its personnel.  Before Major Nidal Malik Hassan went on a murderous rampage at the nation's largest military deployment center this month, Fort Hood was the site of new psychological training spawned by General George Casey, the Army Chief of Staff. The initiative, called Resiliency Training, is designed to address the military's dramatic spike of post-traumatic-stress disorder, suicides, depression, and family break-ups. Instead of the usual suck-it-up philosophy, the program aims to
create an Army that is just as psychologically fit as it is physically fit. General Casey tapped the so-called "father of positive psychology," Martin Seligman, a popular researcher and author of Authentic Happiness and Learned Optimism, to create the program that will prepare all soldiers for emotional trauma instead of only treating soldiers after they show signs of distress. Says Seligman, "If you put the emphasis only on those soldiers who break down, you
have the tail wagging the dog. We're already devoting tremendous
resources to vets with PTSD. The big picture is the dog. By training
the whole force in resilience, you cut down on pathology but you also
improve the resilience of the whole force and move the distribution
curve toward growth." |
Sorry for the genocide...pass the cranberry sauce
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 I just returned from a visit to New Mexico,
and it's hard not to be more aware of the native culture of the United States. One
guide at a native cultural center there even shared her opinion of the new Native
American Museum on the National Mall saying, "Our museum tells the whole story."
She may have been referring to the more prevalent tones of disenfranchisement and
use of the word "genocide" present in New Mexican Native American history. This
made me take notice of a recent blurb in a magazine that mentioned the normally obscure and unreported content of
presidential speeches on Thanksgiving Day.
What do you think Obama will say?
One speech by a Wampanoag leader in 1970 declared Thanksgiving a day of
mourning. Would a president risk the possible political indigestion that
might come from deviating from traditional themes of nationalism and pride
during the Thanksgiving holiday? Should he? FACT: No president has acknowledged the genocide of Native
Americans in his Thanksgiving proclamation. What would make your turkey go down easier? Acknowledging the country's past mistakes or focusing on our success?
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67 Cheap Date Ideas for the Recession-Era Romantic
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Ok, so I threw in a few pieces that are on the serious side this edition. If you need to plan some high-energy FUN now, here are some great ideas for dates or time away with friends:
http://www.onlinedater.org/articles/67-cheap-date-ideas-for-the-recession-era-romantic/
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