Will only be published if we like the mood and the films, Films that have influenced us is an occasional look at films that have brought us all here and still make us think about where we are going next.
My maternal grandmother passed away on Saturday, August 3rd. She had been battling cancer for some time and her condition worsened in late July. When we last visited, she had already started hospice medications to help with the pain. She was medicated and asleep when I was there, but I knew she heard me when I told her I loved her and when I thanked her. I know this because she raised her hand in response. I knew then that the goodbye I told her would be the last.
I don’t think there have been many moments in my life where I’ve experienced something meaningful and been able to keep that moment to myself for as long as I wanted – where the meaning is immediately clear, not something that comes after the fact. I knew she was going to die soon, I knew what I wanted to tell her, and I could be with her for as long as it took to get to the right place to tell her.
Similar moments – especially when I think of the births of my sons, which I was present at – are fleeting. These memories are heightened by photographs, videos and the sleepless nights that follow, which replay the emotional intensity. Aly delivered them, they took their first breaths, she held them, and they were taken away to have their vitals checked, measurements taken and medications taken. This was a sequence of actions. A rush. A heightened state.
That last interaction with my grandmother was just a moment captured in time. There was nothing to worry about. What I wanted to tell her was as clear as what was happening. In the grand scheme of things, it was only a second, but it didn’t feel fleeting. And it still doesn’t.
However, my feelings after her death continued to be profound. As befitted her role as one of our matriarchs, my extended family began organizing her memorial service almost immediately. My role was to help collect and digitize photographs from her life. That meant spending the morning of her death with my sister and son at my parents’ house, looking through old memories.
When I spoke to my grandfather, her surviving husband, he lamented that her new friends in recent years had never gotten to know our grandmother as well as we had. I pointed out that we had known her all our lives. He liked that.
More specifically, she knew us our entire lives. In searching for photos – and later writing down their memories with my siblings – I spent a lot of time thinking about who I was as a young boy and trying to piece it all together as best I could.
This ongoing, slightly depressing phase was compounded this week by my eldest son starting kindergarten – a manageable change in family routine for us, but a huge change in reality for him. I don’t let the anxiety consume me, but it certainly gave me a lot to think about. He is undoubtedly closer in many ways to who I was at that age than these old photos would allow me to remember – he experienced big emotions and had difficulty expressing them.
With all this in mind, I rewatched Spike Jonze’s 2009 adaptation. from Where the Wild Things Area totemic film for me, but one I rarely rewatch because it holds a very special place in my heart. It’s not because I saw it as a child (I was 19) or because I have any special memories of the book. But 19 is its own stage of transition into adulthood. The film meant one thing to me then and something completely different now.
Jonze’s work extrapolates the metaphor from Maurice Sendak’s original book, which was written as a short and sweet story of a young boy, Max, who is angry with his mother and escapes to a mystical land where he becomes king of the beasts that live there. These Wild Things are a group of silly, striped monsters. He leads their wild rampage and then sails home where he is truly loved. The film deepens Max’s character, bringing his frustration, confusion and fear to the surface of the story and making clear the allegorical nature of the Wild Things.
Here they are an expression of emotions that Max cannot control or even understand. Some are representatives of the adults and older people in his life, whose inner world seems mysterious and essentially unfathomable to him. Their physical appearance is similar to that of everyday animals, but with childlike, colorful features and flourishes.
I think it’s easy to write off Where the wild things live as indie film therapy for frustrated boys, and that’s fine. Dismissive, but fine. What Jonze manages to do in his film that I’ve rarely seen is how profoundly compassionate he is toward Max, without ever evading the difficult realities of being a boy…or, in the case of his rarely seen mother (played by Catherine Keener), of raising a boy.
It conveys, without pretense, the constant cycle of heightened emotions, big mistakes by parent and child, endless stress and the uncertainty of whether you are doing it right. The only way forward is to do your best. But your best job may not be enough when children grow up to look and sound like you, but are not actually not You.
When I saw the film as a growing adult, I could identify with Max. Now I find myself trying desperately to think honestly and accurately about a boy from 30 years ago who I never had the chance to really know, while also observing a boy in front of me whose life I have a tremendous impact on through every decision I make. He is a boy I am trying to understand, even if my understanding is inherently imperfect, and always will be.
I understand Where the wild things live different now. I feel it differently. I think there’s a lot to be said about films that teach us something, or films that are entertaining, but what I look for so often are those that really capture something that seems impossible. Of course I bring a lot to the film, but it’s also intentionally constructed to take that baggage and recontextualize it for an audience that needs that in the moment. Where the wild things live is for me an artistic construct of true empathy, of imperfect understanding that enables parents and children to survive together.
I’m glad I visited again during this strange, long week.
We held a memorial a week after my grandmother died, where my siblings and I wrote a memory of her and what she meant to us. We tried to really sum up who she was, and I think we did a pretty good job of that. During the memorial, I brought my 5-year-old to the front of the line, near her open casket. I didn’t do it to torment him, but I wanted him to have that experience. It was the first time I had ever faced the death of someone so close to me, and even though he wasn’t close to her in the same way, it was meaningful. It was meaningful to have him there. That night, he came into our room after having a nightmare he couldn’t remember. But I know what he dreamed.
The day after, I had a rare argument with my father. The circumstances had to do with our five-year-old, who he is, and how we treat him. He was between us. Crying. In that moment, we were monsters. To him, we were wild things. Distorted versions of familiar shapes. Even in my weaker moments with him, he had never seen me like that. And in a way, it cemented his most nervous fears about my father. We two adults quickly reconciled, but what did that mean to him? What had arisen?
Just as the adults in my life have shaped me, the adults in his life will shape him. If he is so inclined, what would he write about? us when the time comes for the eulogy? I now know from experience that writing about someone who loved you unconditionally is an impossible task – that most of the moments you spent with that person are so brief in retrospect, regardless of all attempts to immortalize them with photos, videos or postcards.
That doesn’t mean we can really take care to behave the way we would want those we love unconditionally to behave. That is ultimately out of our control. We can’t write the words for them. Parents and children are beasts that so often act against each other, and the best case scenario is to work toward that imperfect understanding. The final scene of Where the wild things live is a small moment where the mother and Max have dinner together after he comes home from his adventure and she calms down from her bout of stress due to Max’s bad behavior. This is the most important moment of all.
There has been a lot to write and say in the last week of thinking about my grandma. It is overwhelming, burdened by my inability to fully remember the little me in all those photos. In my heart I wrestle with the fact that I do not know who she outside of her role as my grandmother. I don’t know if it is possible that I always (She once refused to do an oral history project with me.)
This is what I know: My grandmother was never a wild thing to me. She never hurt me, never scared me, never broke me in any way, as far as I can remember. I was lucky to have a family full of people in my life who I can say the same about. But she was unique because, despite my sensitive disposition, there was never a moment when I didn’t want to see her. I never harbored any pain or fear of disappointing her, even when I knew I had disappointed her – in terms of our different religious beliefs, my incredibly foul mouth, and my struggle to keep my life together professionally for so long. She loved my siblings and me, and we loved her. She loved me, and I loved her, with the kind of imperfect understanding that betrays true love.
I could tell her I loved her. I could thank her for that love, in that forever captured moment of my life, when I was with her as she slept, just 36 hours before she died. When she raised her arm, I knew she heard me and that she knew. If I could give my son anything in his life, it would be a moment like this.
