Of writing about his iconic book Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak* recalls a moment from his childhood: the moment in the Wizard of Oz movie, where Dorothy is trapped in the Wicked Witch’s castle, and that blood-red hourglass has just been turned over, clocking down her time left alive. Judy Garland’s acting, and that moment where she’s screaming into the crystal ball when Aunty Em’s face flashes up, “I’m here! Save me!” was, to Maurice, a “sensational fear” . It was both wonderful and frightening: “I would have killed anyone who tried to take me out of the movie house.”
I read this passage and knew immediately the scene; the seconds; to which he was referring because that scene would be frightening for a child. It was for me. When I was little, I remembered thinking at this point, “Boy, I’m glad it’s her and not me.” Then of course, putting myself in the protagonists shoes as I so often do, I would then wonder, “Well, OK then, if that WAS me, what would I do next?”
At that age, it’s so easy to step in an out of a narrative. Perhaps we lose that as we get older; we are told at school that life must take a certain path and we, if we are to succeed, should choose it early. Our parents may make this point also, mores the pity. I am lucky that my mother (I don’t remember dad ever saying anything on the subject) never pressured me to ‘pick’ a career. Then many people wake up when they’re forty and go, “Wow, how did I end up here?” and realise they’ve had an unfulfilled previous twenty or so years because they’ve never actively narrated their destiny. It was easier to “go with the flow”, when really that flow was a rip taking them out to sea.
What movie moments have made you ‘wake up’ to certain truths (good or bad) in your life? Or haven’t you ever thought about it before?
*Sendak, M ‘Visitors from My Boyhood’ in Worlds of Childhood: The Art and Craft of writing for Children. ed. W. Zinsser (1990) Houghton Mifflin: NY.
