18 July 2016 // Puck Gall //Amsterdam

//THERE IS ONE INSIDE ALL OF US

It has been a rough week with everything going on in the world. It scares me how my eyes are almost used to the horrific images in the news but even more how I can just continue my week as if I am numb to the horror. Even when it makes me angry it just makes me feel so small that my anger seems almost pointless.

Which way you turn it I think I have come to accept that we life in a truly chaotic time. Personally when I see everybody walking trough the streets catching Pokémon’s it has never been more symbolic. We have turned into zombie’s bored and waiting for life to end. This might sound rough but it is my honest opinion. We are angry for brief moments, sadness comes and goes and this all makes happiness almost impossible to reach.

“I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more...What I dread is the isolation. ... There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready.”

                       -  Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

I guess everybody has their own ways to deal with conflicting emotions. I have one favourite saviour called “Where the Wild Things Are”.

A film directed by the wonderful Spike Jonze and inspired by the children’s book of Maurice Sendak. I can watch it over and over and never get enough. It is difficult to explain what the movie is really about because I believe everybody will see something else in it. For me it is a tale about the purest emotions that run inside all of us. Frustrations we cannot understand or anger we can’t control.

Max is the main figure, he is a young boy with a wild imagination who often feels a bit lost and for most lonely. He runs away from home to discover a new island with a group of big odd monsters living on it. He becomes their king and there for has promised to help them out. Promises that seems to good to be true like protecting them from sadness. The Monsters are all quite down and angry but have difficulty explaining why. Their emotions are all over the place and are set immediately into action, which makes them quite destructive and rude. The hope of a new king and therefor better times makes them unite as a group and super productive. Up until reality kicks in and they find out that the king is just a boy and therefor sadness will never disappear from life.

The one cannot life without the other just as in real life. There is no king that can unite us no person that can protect us from pain. But next to all the negative there are also people we love, around us up close. That we should tell more that we love them, good friends and lovers. This is what the movie tells me to love more and help each other deal with the negative.

So thank you Spike for creating this masterpiece that is next to poetic also picture perfect.

“And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.”

- Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are