I think think a utopian impulse is a natural and health human response to a dystopian reality. Nicolini always offers insightful film reveiws.

Spike Jonze Re-envisions "Where the Wild Things Are"

Max's Hollow Utopia

By KIM NICOLINI

"Where the Wild Things Are presents the legacy of the 60s counterculture as a world of burnt-out disillusionment. The Wild Things in this movie talk in a perpetually stoned residue of hippie culture full of “bummers” and “downers.” They aren’t so much wild as they are decaying, sad, lonely, angry, terrified, terrifying, bitter, resentful, resigned, and lost, not unlike the multitudes of ex-hippie adults that haunted the childhoods of those of us who were born in the 1960s. Like the Wild Things in this movie, these aging hippies wore their tired Utopian ideals like some kind of dirty laundry. Their glazed eyes remember a time when things were supposed to be better while resigning themselves to the fact that things will always be the same"