be a shipwreck

i don’t really feel like summarizing the movie because i’m not focused on the plot. the gist of it is, max dreams up shit and it comes to life. he makes a cool planet just for kids, but oh no! his class bully Linus fucks it all up and he has to travel to planet drool and make it all better.

this isnt an essay really. more of a collection of thoughts because? ??? what the actual fuck is this movie. moving on.

max as the author ≠ max as the god

ok, max is a lonely and aimless kid. to him, real life is the Adult's World. hes out of place, so in his dreams (and daydreams) he makes up friends. friends with superpowers. normal kid stuff. they live on planet drool, basically a paradise for kids. but when dreams become reality, so do all of its flaws. because a god can only create in it's own image, sharkboy and lavagirl are equally as purposeless as max is. sharkboy grieves his dad and lavagirl longs to be around people without scalding them. They both feel uniquely isolated (which they are. main character syndrome) and take it out on max because he caused these problems by making them exist.

this concept is par for the course regarding the morality of authorship. to create a story is to have your characters suffer; little playthings with no say. naturally, sharkboy and lavagirl don’t like this. but i doubt this even occurred to max before they brought it up, considering he didn’t actually create them to Exist in a narrative. more on this later.

on the topic of gods, the biblical themes in this movie are pretty heavy handed, honestly. what with max's bible - the dream journal - and his very own adam and eve in the form of cool older kids with shark and lava powers which are like definitively two of the sickest things for a preteen. his Eden is corrupted, though (as Edens are wont to do), and therein lies the beginning of the story. the line between creator and author begins to blur.

the dream journal

The dream journal is the wellspring. its easily the most important part of the movie to me. its the fount of Max's power.... for a time. everything he's dreamed has been recorded in the bible. There's one scene where Max reads aloud that he once dreamed that Lavagirl had a motorcycle, and instantly it comes into being. But... didn't it exist before he read it? He wrote it down, didn't he? This scene shows us just how godlike Max really is - he needs to be believed in. At least here, interacting with his creations, ideas just existing in his head are functionally useless. Well, more specifically, existing to a singular being rather than many. the act of reading the journal to Lavagirl* is what causes the words to exist, a conjoining of consciousness i guess.

In this case, we have to assume nothing in his dream journal exists without a second party to believe in it. which makes sense.

but then they lament that max forgot to write down a full gas tank... and the bike becomes useless. Lavagirl accidentally takes the dream journal, and destroys it. (de-storys it, to borrow the phrase from that one tumblr post.) this is to show that his control of the universe comes from the writing, i guess? the act of putting to page is the power, and the next act of speaking the words makes the power real. this is why it's interesting to me that the movie itself opens on a monologue about sharkboy and lavagirl themselves. Max is reading from his journal to us, the fourth wall*, thus the characters come into being because we believe it.

max as the child

yes, he is the Dreamer or whatever the fuck and created a whole planet, but it was only because he felt so alone. he is still a kid. behind the dream journal, he just wanted friends. people who saw him. It's clear from the beginning of the movie he was bullied and we didn't see any friends to speak of. and his parents, well. your average fraught relationship. There isn't much to talk about regarding their scenes except (!) how they're portrayed on planet drool.

in the land of milk and cookies, literally a childish, comforting place, his parents, two giants, roam the area. their size indicates how max feels: small and hardly noticeable. but this is Max's dream world. exactly what he wants. his parents are madly in love and perfectly content. counter this to real life, where they don't notice max because they're too busy arguing. here, they're too lovey-dovey. but even in his garden of eden, he's still not... a part of their life. he's just too small. i dont even think max has conceptualized this because its so normal to him - and probably the way a lot of kids feel in real life, like being detached from the unified front of their parents. its actually really sad to think about, poor kid :c

linus as the author; max as the god

so it turns out that the corruption spreading through planet drool is due to the influence of linus graffitiing the dream journal.

so i mentioned previously that max's dreams don't exist until there's someone to believe. once that motorbike scene happens, it recontextualizes a fair bit of the story. so… when, exactly, did planet drool come into being? was it just out there somewhere in space ever since max had the first inkling? i doubt it.

i believe that it was Linus who really created planet drool. he stole the journal. thus, by reading, it came into being. in-universe and in, um… our universe. real life i mean. he's an active, hostile audience as opposed to the viewer who is utterly passive. he defaced what was a private sanctuary of one person’s mind both literally (editing the story) and figuratively (creating conflict creates narrative. it isn’t private anymore. it’s worthy of an audience, now.)

by doing this, though, it's Linus who gives the power to max. he’s the reason Sharkboy and Lavagirl come down to get him. like, he believes in max and his stories just to be a hater about it. respect??

i’m unsure what to make of linus having powers too, though. maybe it’s the fact that he wrote in the dream journal and even though he messed it all up, believers (i.e sharkboy and lavagirl, plus linus to some extent.*) can’t pick and choose what to believe in. it’s all or nothing. or maybe it’s supposed to be a kid thing, like anyone can make their dreams real but you grow out of it as you become a boring adult. that was probably the message.

anyway, all this is to say that if max is the Dreamer, this makes linus the Actor. the Enactor. (the subtractor. because… minus. get it?? ok sorry.) to return to the title quote (which is more explicitly applicable to sharkboy and lavagirl, but i digress), linus and max are mirrors of seeing. seeing=reading=existing. max creates the world, linus makes it real. yes, there is a difference.

i don’t think planet drool ever existed in its perfect state because it didn’t need to. any memories of it were created by the narrative, the bible / the journal, to give our protagonists a goal to work towards. getting the planet back to ‘how it used to be’ is easy for them to understand because there’s a clear divide between how max writes in the journal and how linus does. erasing his scripture is to erase all problems, and fade back into irrelevance (for all but max). the author-slash-editor has been defeated and the characters can go back to existing in the utopia of Max's mind. there might be a discussion to be had regarding the purity of non-existence, and once it becomes real it’s tainted. hmm.

*[all this talk of gods and authors and i've neglected to discuss the believers. its a bit scattered, theres the max–SB+LG relationship, max+linus–viewer relationship (which parallel each other), and the max-linus relationship. not very important, just notable. I just wanted to asterisk certain places because I wonder if those people are just extensions of the viewer at that point in time. the first time he ever reads the journal, it's to us. so, maybe, when i said the motorbike became real because he read it to lavagirl, it was still just us? maybe im just being overly literal. i mean of course it's us.]

not sure what all this means in the end, though. from this perspective, the author (linus) and the god (max) are evil and good respectively despite doing basically the same thing. but i guess it's the intent that's important - max, the god, had innocent intentions. he wanted his planet and Sharkboy and Lavagirl to be happy, it's just that by creating them at all he imparted his anxieties onto them. Linus, the author, had ill intent, creating secondary problems on purpose. the desire to share ideas, to have it exist in many minds, is what seems to be the issue.

they grapple for ownership over the universe but of course Linus can't win, he merely wants it. Max needs it. Max is it.