Lost and Found: Where the Wild Things Are & Citizen Kane

When I was 11 my Dad rented Citizen Kane for me. I can't remember if I asked for it or he just gave it to me, but I do remember him saying that he thought it was important I see it. At the time I had no clue that it was the greatest American film. The AFI Top 100 was 7 years away. So that afternoon, all by myself in our living room I watched Citizen Kane. And when it was done, I looked around, to see who else had experienced it with me. No one was there. I experienced it all by myself. It was as if Citizen Kane was all mine. I had no idea every film critic and scholar regarded it as the #1 film. Citizen Kane was my #1 film. And for 7 years I had it all to myself.
Life had sort of changed a little for me afterward. I got the film, it's meaning sunk deep into me. I knew what Rosebud meant, I knew what the tragedy of Charles Foster Kane meant. Citizen Kane was like every other tragedy, it sinks in like a drug that relieves our souls of guilt and haunted taste of wanting self-disaster to make our own tragedy. We watch Romeo and Juliet or Oedipus because we want to feel the tragedy in our heart and in a small way we want failure in our own life so we can be a tragic hero and people would say what could have been.

Fast forward 10 years to when I was in college. When I say college I mean it, I went to Orange Coast College in beautiful Costa Mesa for about 5 years. My first year back after taking 2 years off, I took a Mythology class, which I ended up loving. I really liked the teacher and took her in other classes, but this first day I had my doubts. She read aloud "Where the Wild Things Are." It was a lovely start to the class, which covered folk tales and fairy tales. After the read, I raised my hand to make a comment, as others were doing, and brilliantly (hindsight is 20/20) related Citizen Kane to the book. I felt so good about the connection and thought since she was the teacher and had already started lecturing about..scholarly things, that she would respond in a scholarly way back. But instead she just smiled and jokingly said, "Rosebud." And then moved on. Double damnit, I thought, I just laid out some scholarly gold and that's how you respond? Oh well, that's junior college.
By this point I had discovered that every other film scholar, critic and film fan knew that Citizen Kane was the #1 American film. It was no longer my film. And besides that, essays and DVD commentaries had been released by smarter and more eloquent people than me. But I was still the only person, I think, to make the connection between Citizen Kane and "Where the Wild Things Are." Until now!

Following Kane's life, we realize he never had a childhood. But yet his childhood creeps up into his life over and over again, all the way till the end. He's arrogant. Childish in speech at times. Judging by his women troubles, he's probably trying to find his mother. Even when he's older, he's extremely angered, throwing a temper tantrum, destroying his wife's bedroom. He can't connect with people, which is something he should have learned as a child. And then he dies alone, thinking about the one thing he could never have: his childhood.
These are all the same things that Max in "Where the Wild Things Are" goes through, except he gets to experience them as a boy. He's able to work through them, and at the end of his story he feels lonely and he misses his mother, just like Kane. He gets to the top of the chain, where he's the king, sending the Things to bed without supper, becoming the very thing that he hated. Except "Wild Things" isn't a tragedy. Max becomes lonely just like Kane, except Max can go home, where his supper is waiting for him. Kane can never get home, and he spends his life hoarding things, building a never ending house, controlling women (because he doesn't know how to treat people), and trying to win the love of everyone around him. The tragedy is that Kane wasn't a bad man. He generally wanted people to be happy. The tragedy is that Kane could have really been great. If only he had had a loving mother and proper childhood.

Let's hope that Max learned from his time in the Wild Place with the Wild Things. In the movie Where the Wild Things Are, they explore the story more in-depth, both in Max's backstory and the Things he encounters. They've updated Max's problems a little. He comes from a broken home, where his father is absent and his mother's time is split between him and her trying to have a life. The other life (in the form of Mark Ruffalo) makes Max extremely jealous, causing his big outburst that sends him away. What Max really suffers from is a lack of attention, from his parents and also everyone else around him. It's as if he needs to act like a wild beast to get noticed, a typical problem facing single parents of young boys. Max has all these pent up emotions that have nowhere to go. So instead, Max goes. He finds a place where all his emotions have come out and he can let them loose. The film explores the personalities of the different things, each being some part of Max himself. He's angry, aggressive, timid, a loner. The Things also partially possess qualities of those around him in his life, as well as qualities that perhaps lay dormant.
The film comes off as a slow, dreary mess on the surface, with no guided plot or development. But underneath it, we see all this. It's so internal, which is funny because the whole Wild Thing world is internal. The development is all there. At first Max is the King of the Things, but it's only a facade, he can't control them forever. He stands with Carol, the angry and impulsive Thing, going along with him, almost forgetting the others. But slowly he looses control of Carol and eventually completely sides with KW, even being swallowed by her, symbolizing their unity.
But in the end, he can't control the Things, just like a child can't totally control his emotions. All he can do is live with them and accept them. And by the end, when he's leaving even Carol is under control and reconciled with KW.
I think the film clumsily handled the ending. His leaving the Wild Place is slightly un-settled and it's unclear of what his internal motivations are. I assumed it would be that the place was too wild and he would be clearly homesick, like the book, but instead he just kind of leaves just 'cuz. I guess he was leaving because he was homesick, but it's ambiguous. Nevertheless, he does return home. He gets back to his childhood after dealing with his emotions in a wild place. A wild place that every kid needs, otherwise they'll grow up to be like Charles Foster Kane.