This is the first review I've ever written about a movie that I walked out after only fifteen minutes. It riled me up so much that I had to pour out my complaint. This movie purports to be some kind of edgy, "new wavish" social criticism, but as I will point out, it is simply a version of Saturday Night Live for the carriage trade.
Tod Solonz wrote and directed "Welcome to the Dollhouse," an "indie" film just like "Happiness," his sophomore and sophomoric follow-up. "Welcome to the Dollhouse" focuses on the unhappy life of a homely high school student and her dysfunctional New Jersey middle class family. The high school itself is just one cut below the concentration camp depicted in Lina Wertmuller's "Seven Beauties" in terms of debasement and physical abuse. As somebody who fled high school at the tender age of 16 to go off to college, the movie struck a resonant chord with me. The one thing I did have trouble with was the meanness of the central character, whose losing ways did not inspire her to turn against the mainstream. She remained anxious to join the in-groups even though none of them would accept her. I preferred to thumb my nose at the jocks and the cheerleaders, no matter how many times this got me beat up.
Since "Welcome to the Dollhouse" received such glowing reviews (still worth seeing in video), it must have convinced Solonz to make his next film more of the same. Much more. In fact, too much more.
"Happiness" begins with a prologue involving one of the female leads and Saturday Night Live alumnus Jon Lovitz. They are on a date in a fancy restaurant. She, a plain but not unattractive woman in her mid-30's has just rebuffed Lovitz. He proceeds to give her a tongue-lashing, telling her that she is "shit" and that he is "champagne". She sits there passively accepting his insults. This exercise in humiliation sets the tone for the remainder of the film, at least I presume it did since I walked out shortly.
Next we meet the woman's sister, a "successful" housewife married to a psychotherapist, and living in a spacious suburban house. The sister picks up where Lovitz has left off and in a conversation with her in the kitchen tells her how much of a loser she is. The sister listens to the insults passively.
Meanwhile, we discover that the psychotherapist, who is in psychotherapy himself, is a closeted homosexual who is about to begin an incestuous relationship with his pubescent son. In a conversation between the two, the father explains what it means to "come". The purpose of the scene is not to reveal complexity of character or to establish dramatic conflict, but rather to shock a jaded audience in the manner of "epater le bourgeoisie."
When it finally dawned on me that I was seeing an extended Saturday Night Live sketch, I decided to walk out. The prologue set the tone for the rest of the film, even to the extent of including a signature SNL star Jon Lovitz. In the mid-80s, SNL developed a brand of humor that went hand-in-hand with the dominant Reagan-era sensibility. It depicted ordinary Americans, either suburbanites or the urban underclass, as clueless losers. One was supposed to laugh at the overweight, unsophisticated, culturally backward masses. If you were a member of this group, you would laugh at yourself in masochistic fashion. If you were a "hip" college student with more advanced sensibilities, you got your pleasure in laughing sadistically at the masses. This aesthetic eventually was reflected in the Letterman show, where it was honed to perfection.
With Solonz, you are getting the aesthetic overlaid with an "underground" sensibility. This is not the college fraternity ambiance of the SNL or Letterman shows, but the lower east side hipster bars that Solonz presumably attended while attending NYU film school.. Solonz, born in 1960, seems very much a product of this TV/pop culture environment. He actually produced a short for Saturday Night Live, titled "How I Became a Leading Artistic Figure in New York City's East Village Cultural Landscape" in 1986.
The aesthetic of humiliation that Solonz has fine-tuned is shared by other young film-makers. You will discover it at work in Neil Labute, who directed the awful and misogynist "In the Company of Men," a film that I also walked out of after fifteen minutes. His latest, "Friends and Neighbors," appears closely related thematically and aesthetically to "Happiness." Mr. Cranky, one of my favorite film reviewers, describes this Labute film in the following terms:
"The names [of the cast] are straight from the press packet, since I don't recall hearing them once in the film, which is LaBute's simplistic way of reinforcing that 'everyman' quality. Barry is self-absorbed and dependent. Jerry is self-absorbed and co-dependent. Cary is self-absorbed and psychotic. Mary is indecisive non-aggressive. Terri is decisive aggressive. Cheri is non-aggressive co-dependent. Basically, this all amounts to a movie in which not a person has a clue about anything, and they are all eager to demonstrate that point in protracted, never-ending conversation."
Sounds like a Saturday Night Live sketch, right?
What interests me above all is the self-delusion that is at work in directors like Solonz and Labute. They enjoy the reviews they get from mainstream publications like the NY Times, which represent them as "daring" and "experimental." But they are not creating anything which deserves such adjectives. Instead what they are producing is highbrow versions of television comedy. Television is the ultimate media of late capitalism. It has the propensity to debase society while returning maximum profits to the huge corporations which make the awful spectacle possible. When you watch a Saturday Night Live sketch, you get the message that you are a piece of shit while having to sit through beer commercials for the next dose of abuse and degradation. We should expect much more from a movie.
-- Marxist discussion is at: www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html
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