I took a solo-trip to the movies last night, for a little one-on-one with myself. I'll be the first to admit that it's a bad idea to go alone to certain movies. Romantic comedies, horror films, action films...to see these alone, you have to be a glutton for punishment (romantic comedies can be insipidly cloying or emotional black holes, depending on your mood), a connoisseur of the strange, or an adrenaline junkie. On the other hand, thrillers (Hitchcockian) and indie-films (also foreign films, non-conventional story lines, and/or think-pieces) can border on meditative, self-exploratory processes. I'm not denying the extreme edification of post-viewing film analysis with well-versed, trope-identifying, plato-and-popcorn friends. But when those friends are 1,000 miles away, a girl's gotta fly without her wingmen.So off I went, Coca-Cola and Sour Patch Kids in hand, to take in Where the Wild Things Are. (note: still mildly disconcerting to be the only solo-flyer in the theatre. On the upside, there were no kids at the 7:35, which labeled me more as "depressed" than "creeper." Phew.)
I think it was easier to embrace the film alone. The irony is that such common themes as loneliness, love, misunderstanding, creation, destruction, and primal expression are compounded when they're re-wound to the fragile, uncertain context of childhood. Eschewing the comfort of grown-up analysis (read: giving everything definition and structure so we feel better about it) and opening oneself to the onslaught of base, uninhibited emotion, the kind that rarely comes along after we clear the threshold of adolescence, is difficult to do in the company of others.
After you peel away the network of knowledge and context we spend our whole lives creating, you get down to the heart of it:
So let's be serious: occasionally, you need to leave the trappings of erudition and maturity behind and scream at the top of your lungs, engage in a dirt clod war, and sleep in a big pile of fuzzy friends. There's something enchanting about the liberation of being wild.
images: Where the Wild Things Are promos, last image from crownlesskings.blogspot.com
I think it was easier to embrace the film alone. The irony is that such common themes as loneliness, love, misunderstanding, creation, destruction, and primal expression are compounded when they're re-wound to the fragile, uncertain context of childhood. Eschewing the comfort of grown-up analysis (read: giving everything definition and structure so we feel better about it) and opening oneself to the onslaught of base, uninhibited emotion, the kind that rarely comes along after we clear the threshold of adolescence, is difficult to do in the company of others.
After you peel away the network of knowledge and context we spend our whole lives creating, you get down to the heart of it:
So let's be serious: occasionally, you need to leave the trappings of erudition and maturity behind and scream at the top of your lungs, engage in a dirt clod war, and sleep in a big pile of fuzzy friends. There's something enchanting about the liberation of being wild.
images: Where the Wild Things Are promos, last image from crownlesskings.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment