WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. xxxxxx.
Picture
book, written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, published in 1963.
A story about a young boy, Max, who tells his mother, “I’ll eat you up!”. His mother sends him to his room without supper, calling him “a wild thing”. There, a jungle of vines grows, and Max crosses an ocean to play with the “wild things” in this forest. Max tames them and is deemed their king, sails backs to his bedroom, and finds his supper waiting for him, still hot.
On the surface level, this is a simple tale of childhood fantasy. However, the Freudian undercurrent indicates that Sendak has creatively depicted Oedipal conflict, and the process of childhood sexual repression.
In Season Four, episode 4018 shares the same title as Sendak’s book. The episode unfolds with Buffy and Riley slipping away to have sex at a frat house party in Lowell House. Besides the episode title, the most obvious reference to Sendak is that a jungle of vines grows within and outside their room, while horrors occur throughout the rest of the house. A camera long shot also shows their bed to be isolated in a dark void, while the walls and other furniture in the bedroom disappear (alluding to Sendak’s line, “The walls became the world all around”).
The Scooby Gang eventually discovers that the house originally was a home for disadvantaged children, run by a Genevieve Holt. This fanatically Christian woman had tortured the children, whenever they displayed signs of sexual expression. Buffy and Riley’s lovemaking, then, served to unleash the repressed sexual energy and painful experiences contained within the walls of the house.
For a page-by-page description of Sendak’s classic tale, see http://www.northern.edu/hastingw/wildthings.html