Where the wild things really are: Winnicottian reflections on the film Beasts of the Southern Wild

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Notes

1. See Benjamin (1999) for an elaboration of this process.

2. See Harris and Skylar (1998) for a call for psychoanalytic film theory to address the parallels between the viewer's experience of a film and the experience in analysis of both patient and analyst, as opposed to the tradition of analysing the characters as though they were analytic patients.

3. I do not mean to imply that this is invariably a developmentally sequential process: first witnessing, then holding, then the achievement of a capacity to exist in transitional space. Rather, witnessing and holding exist in a dialectical relationship: witnessing is a form of holding and being held allows us to make use of a witness.

4. This is reminiscent of the scene in Where the Wild Things Are in which Max stares into the yellow eyes of his beasts “and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all” (Sendak, 1963).

5. See Jeremy Butman's (2012) interview with the film's director Benh Zeitlin.