Script Analysis: WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen “Where the Wild Monsters Are” yet, you might want to check it out before reading this article. Let’s put aside the question right now of whether or not Where the Wild Things Are is a good movie. Let’s put aside the question of whether or not you liked it (or were a little embarrassed that you liked it as much as you did).
And if you feel like you wasted your twelve bucks on a movie where essentially nothing happens, let’s put that aside too. Love it or hate it, Wild Things is a film worth looking into, because of the bold and unique ways it’s structured to reflect its authors’ premise, both in its most wonderful and its most problematic elements.
PREMISE? WHAT PREMISE?
Wild Things is governed by a simple idea, or at least a strong suggestion, that we’re seeing the entire world through the perspective of a child, as he works out his anger over his isolated life (and more importantly, his parents get divorced). playing with a bunch of stuffed animals in her room.
The writing-directing team of Jonze and Eggers make a very strong (and very risky) decision that nothing in the world of Wild Things is going to exist outside of what a kid Max’s age could reasonably imagine. This is materialized in each element of the film:
In the dialogue and actions of the Wild Things (who reason and dream and play and rage and even accept the impossible like children). In a plot limited to events one might expect a moderately intelligent child to dream up, more interested in reflecting the way children play (with over-the-top simplicity, loose ends, and non-linear, nonsensical elements) than in telling a linear narrative story .
In production design, which is much more like what a kid like Max might think is “cool and magical” than what we expect from the grown-up minds in Hollywood that bring us movies like Harry Potter or Pan’s Labyrinth. In Where the Wild Things Are, ships to magical lands appear out of nowhere, Wild Things instantly accept little children as kings, and torn off arms drip sand not blood. We’re in a stuffed animal toddler world, and if things seem cheesy, too simple, or just plain silly, that’s because they’re supposed to.
Because of these choices, the experience of Where the Wild Things Are completely violates almost everything we expect from a Hollywood movie. We come expecting magic and spectacle, and only get the simplest of special effects. We’ve come expecting a smooth ride, one that’s safe for kids and fun for adults, and instead embark on a chaotic ride that floats along on Max’s rushing currents of joy and rage. We come expecting a “well made” movie and instead experience the inner world of a child at play.
STRUCTURE? WHAT STRUCTURE?
Most Hollywood movies are based on simple structural rules. If a character appears at the beginning of the movie posing as a king, the movie doesn’t end until he learns what it’s like to be a real king. If a character appears at the beginning of the movie in a land where a bunch of lovely creatures are full of rage and misery, the movie doesn’t end until they’ve healed their pain (and their own) and found a way to bring them peace. .
As you’ve probably noticed, Wild Things doesn’t follow these rules. Max does not heal Wild Things. Max doesn’t learn to be a good king. Max doesn’t even “finish” the story. Rather, he abruptly (if reluctantly) leaves, abdicating the crown from him as a boy called to dinner.
For the most part, nothing happens in Wild Things. And yet, from the character’s perspective, a lot happens. The difference is that, unlike almost every other Hollywood movie in its genre, Wild Things builds its structure not linearly and logically, but emotionally and symbolically, through the use of archetypes.
WHAT THE HELL IS AN ARCHETYPE?
Archetypes are an idea derived from the work of psychologist Carl Jung, and later adopted by Joseph Campbell and a large number of his disciples as they sought to better understand history. You could spend years studying the different ways that different critics, professors, and screenwriting book authors have described and categorized the archetypes.
Fortunately, you don’t have to.
Your job as a writer is not to categorize or memorize archetypes, but to understand them. And understanding them starts with this simple concept:
An archetype is a character that embodies some repressed element of your main character’s psyche and exists structurally in your film to force your character to deal with that repressed element. All movies have archetypes. Great Hollywood movies. Small independent films. broad comedies. Serious Dramas.
Even big dumb action movies. Everyone has archetypes. They have to. Otherwise, your main character would never have to deal with the repressed elements in her psyche and would not have to go through the story. The difference is that within Wild Things, instead of existing in a traditional linear plot, these archetypes exist within an emotional and symbolic one.
THE NORMAL WORLD
One of the truly remarkable things about Where the Wild Things Are is how quickly writers Jonze and Eggers establish all the emotional and symbolic elements of the real world that will comprise the structure of Max’s mythic journey. The isolation and loneliness of him. The emotional and physical pain from him. His feelings of betrayal by his sister and his mother. His feelings of being left behind while his mother and sister build relationships with new people he doesn’t like or understand. Shame on him for being out of control. And most importantly, his violent and destructive reactions to those feelings.
These emotional elements have symbolic counterparts: The snowball fight that ends in tears. The Destroyed Fort. The heart he made for her sister (which she destroys when she trashes her room). And the moment he bites her mother after seeing her with her new boyfriend.
THE EMOTIONAL/SYMBOLIC WORLD OF WILD THINGS
On a metaphorical level, Max’s journey into the world of Wild Things is simply an attempt by a child’s mind to make sense of its own destructive rage. Every emotional and symbolic element of the normal world has its equivalent in Wild Things World, creating a system of metaphorical mirrors through which Max can finally see himself and his world more clearly (while calming himself through guilt and trauma).
Wild Things bite, just like Max bit his mother. The Wild Things destroy their homes, just as Max destroyed his sister’s room. Max tries to connect with Wild Things by building a fort and throwing clods of dirt, just like he once built a snow fort and threw snowballs at his sister’s friends. The connections are simple, giving the film the clarity and line it needs to take the audience along for the ride. But also complex, in honor of the complexity of Max’s psychology, as he navigates the complexities of his parents’ divorce and his feelings about it, navigating his relationships with one archetypal wild thing after another.
CAROL: The loving but violent father, whom Max’s mother no longer wants to live with despite Max’s love for him, and whose behavior Max is emulating in his own.
KW: The perfect mother figure, who “inexplicably” no longer wants to live with Carol and instead has a crush on “boyfriends” Bob and Terry, the owls that neither Max nor KW can understand.
JUDITH: The embodiment of her jealousy and discontent, who feels that Max’s job is to make her feel better, just like Max wants his mother to do for him.
Even Max himself is an archetype: the quintessential Jungian “hero.” The developing Ego that wishes to be King of his own world.
Throughout the story, by interacting with his archetypes and trying to do for them what he wants to do for himself, Max develops empathy and understanding that prepare him to return to his new world. He is forced to confront who his father really is, who his mother really is, and even who he really is. He is forced to face the consequences of his choices and the terrifying idea that he may not be in control, that he may not be king, that he may, in fact, just be a “boy, pretending to be a wolf, pretending to be a king” and that, in fact, kings may not exist at all.
It ends with the gift of a heart from Max. It’s no coincidence that it looks a lot like the one he once made for his sister and destroyed at the beginning of the movie. Linearly, nothing happens. But metaphorically, emotionally, and symbolically, Max undergoes a profound change. He must do it, otherwise he wouldn’t need to go through the story.
THE WRITER’S JOURNEY
On an archetypal level, Max’s journey echoes every writer’s journey. We must reduce ourselves to children, allow ourselves to play, bring our own archetypes to life through the words and actions of our characters, create metaphorical and symbolic equivalents for the confusing and contradictory events of our own lives, and ultimately create a forcing structure leads us to unearth our own pent-up emotions, and takes us and our main characters on a journey that changes us both forever.
Although his own work may not be structurally as radical as Where the Wild Things Are, if a film in which so little happens can create such a profound journey for its main character, imagine what could explore these emotional, archetypal, and symbolic elements. . do for your own work.