We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

“Will reality match up to the television fantasies this generation has been nursed on? These children are in a peculiar position; experience is exhausted in advance. There is little they have not seen or done or lived through, and yet this is second-hand experience.”

The year was 1956 and the blunting, desensitizing impact of TV was on the mind of art critic, psychoanalyst, and Maurice Sendak’s life partner for more than 50 years, Dr. Eugene D. Glynn. This fear of mass media’s ominous implications seemed to be melting brains everywhere in the 1950s, and it’s one that remains prevalent today—simply transposed to hand-wringing about kids growing up with constant access to the Internet. But Glynn’s casually brilliant essay, “Television and the American Character,” was different.

He discussed the form of television rather than the content, noting the ways in which television becomes an adult’s regressive substitute for a care-giving mother: “Warmth, sound, constancy, availability, a steady giving without ever a demand for return, the encouragement to complete passive surrender and envelopment—all this and active fantasy besides.” Too true, right? It’s a critique that surpasses the limited foresight afforded to the citizens of the 1950s about television’s complex destiny.

More than that, Glynn goes beyond the article’s initial concerns to embrace television’s potential as a positive social force, expanding horizons and destroying provincialism.

“Techniques will have to be worked out for educational television for showing, not a baseball game, but how to pitch a curveball; for sending its audience on nature hunts, into club activity, to the library for books. Being aware of the dependent relationship in its audience, television must look for ways to undo it—the problem of any teacher or parent.”

There’s a whole book full of essays penned by Glynn; ruminations on Norman Mailer, Lucas Samaras, developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, Michelangelo, the history of erotic art, and the ethics of exhibiting Jackson Pollock’s art therapy works (spoilers: it’s unethical). Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis was published posthumously in 2008, liberating Glynn’s fascinating writings from the back issues of obscure art journals and painting a picture of a man who was always just a little bit out of step with his time, tackling social issues with a peculiarly frank clarity. The type of man who just might be the perfect spiritual match for Maurice Sendak.

After reading Desperate Necessity I was a little bit disappointed that “Gene” had never collaborated directly with Sendak. But maybe their whole lives together were a collaboration. Sendak, as a picture book artist, changed the way we thought about childhood. He embedded deep psychological issues under the alluring surface of art for the masses. Would it all have been the same without Eugene Glynn by his side?

It’s hard to imagine the unease that adults felt about Where the Wild Things Are upon its release. While so much was changing across the spectrum of society in 1963, how could a now-beloved children’s book ruffle so many feathers? To understand the climate of that time, we must consider the popular children’s books that preceded Sendak’s revolutionary work.

“Significantly there were fewer child protagonists than child surrogates in the forms of animals and mechanical personalities,” wrote children’s librarian and scholar Sheila Egoff in 1981. “But when children did appear, there was no question as to the tone of security, affection, and familial comfort that surrounded them.” The mere fact that Max was a mischievous child, rather than a monkey or a duck, represented a subtle break with the prevailing order. Egoff paints us a picture in her fascinating collection of writings, Thursday’s Child:

The picture books of the first two-thirds of this century reveal a single vision of a secure childhood and an abiding social order. So sure did the society of the time feel about its values– safe, placid, and hopefully enriching– that creators of books for very young children could depict them implicity rather than explicitly. The picture books show a gentle control, usually played out with animals as exemplars. H. A. Rey’s monkey, Curious George (1941) ends up in a zoo because of his pranks, but it is pictured as a pleasant, happy playground where George can indulge in his monkeyshines. Marjorie Flack’s duck Ping in The Story about Ping (1933) receives a gentle spank on his tail for being late. Both animals have an order to return to after their escapades: George to “the man in the yellow hat” and Pink to “the wise one-eyed boat.” The concept of order in Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline (1939)–”twelve little girls in two straight lines”–gives a feeling of reassurance and security rather than regimentation.

Above all, children were to be protected, and writers and illustrators, however different their themes and styles, were unanimous on this point. That these protectors were sincere is unquestionable, but, even more importantly, their views were reinforced by the adult world in general. This consensus was shattered in 1963 with the appearance of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and it would appear today that not “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” could restore that phallanxed viewpoint.

While the illustrations disturbed those adults who saw the “Wild Things” as ferociously threatening rather than humorously subservient to Max’s will, the extreme reaction to Sendak’s work intimated that there was more at stake than a matter of interpretation of the pictures. As it turned out, this as yet unformulated anxiety was justified. Sendak’s underlying theme that a child has unconscious needs, frustrations, and fears unsettled society’s hitherto conceived ideals of early childhood and the book itself broke the stereotypic mold that had held for almost a hundred years.

What made Sendak an innovator was that he expressed this catharsis for the preschool children through their own medium, the picture book. He also caught, very early and creatively, a general trend of society which was to rise to the fore over the next two decades: an acceptance that the very young child matures more by sharing in the real and emotional world around it than by being protected from it.

It’s rare to find an individual with as much passion and dedication to helping people as Fred Rogers was. It’s even rarer to find an individual like that, who fights with his whole heart for everything good in this world, to courageously go up against the powerful interests of cynicism and maliciousness, and bring them to their knees in the span of a six-minute speech. But in 1969, Rogers did just that.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood had been on the air for less than two years when PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting became a target of massive budget cuts proposed by Richard Nixon, who hoped to funnel that money into the Vietnam War. Two days into a dismal Senate subcommittee hearing that would determine the fate of PBS, Fred Rogers took the floor and addressed the chilly and impatient subcommittee chairman, John O. Pastore, with the goal of underscoring the importance of educational, emotionally positive programming for children. What happens next is straight out of a Frank Capra film. Take a look, and have the tissues ready: