Welcome to the Dollhouse directed by Todd Solondz starring Heather Matarazzo rated R (mature themes, some strong language)
Middle school is the beginning of academic hell for young people. It is a difficult experience with other kids verbally maiming other kids because they are different. It isn't fun. However, my middle school experiences were never as horrific as those of the suburban jeer-target seventh-grade girl shown here, Dawn "Wiener Dog" Wiener. Played by Heather Matarazzo in a near-flawless performance, Dawn is a misfit, an outcast. She is the butt of countless jokes because she is, to put it as simply as one of Dawn's classmates did, "ugly." She isn't ugly, but she looks different and that is what spawns the mockery and violence in this school. Dawn is disliked/hated by nearly everyone except her timid, small male friend who is the only other member of her Special People Club.
The film begins with Dawn trying to find a lunch table to sit at (poor girl). She finally ends up at the table occupied by a scruffy-looking girl who later joins a group of girls who begin to banter Dawn, calling her a "Lesbo". Her teachers are no more understanding. During a test, a boy sitting next to her named Brandon continually bothers her by mouthing obscenities. She raises her hand to get him to stop and the unjust result is that both of them have after-school detentions. Whenever Dawn tries to do right, she ends up ruining her life more. There is a scene at a school assembly where she is the target of an endless stream of spitballs. The two boys behind her are performing this well-known middle school ritual and she plans to keep quiet and ignore. She soon busts, as anyone would, and plans to hit them with spitballs, too. She ends up hitting a teacher in the eye, resulting in her near-expulsion and the teacher nearly becoming blind.
Her parents are the pinnacle of movie-parent scum. They claim to they love all their children equally but that's basically a load of crap. Here is a list of their children, in order of how much they love them: 1) Missy, a hopelessly awful young ballerina, 2) Mark, a nerdy teenager whose only goal is to enrich his college resume, and 3) the loathsome, unloved Dawn, who refuses to take down her Special People Club House to make room for her parent's twentieth anniversary in the back yard. Mark has formed a garage band (to further adorn his college resume) with the most popular hunk in high school, a long-haired dude named Steve. Dawn immediately falls head-over-heels in love/infatuated with him and plans to weave a web of niceness towards him to capture him, seduce him. She finally gets him alone in her house and fills him up with junk food to please him. He is indifferent. She holds religious prayers in her bedroom in which she speaks to Steve's ID card (which she stole) in front of a fire and whispers and chants "You will love me!"
Back at the dreaded inferno of a school, the scruffy girl we saw in the first scene tells Dawn to leave her man alone- Brandon is hers!!! The truth is that Dawn was never pursuing Brandon. Later, Brandon sets a date with Dawn to "rape" her and tells her to "BE THERE" and it is hilarious when she actually turns up to get "raped". Both of them, I think, have no knowledge of what the word "rape" actually means so nothing like that really happens, just mindless smooching. Turns out, Brandon and Dawn are falling in love. And the sparks fly.
Welcome to the Dollhouse has a wonderful, fresh comedy that coats the infuriating drama of Dawn's middle-school voyage. This is the perfect antonym for TV shows and movies that depict middle school as a child's haven. Dawn, as Roger Ebert said, will hopefully become famous and successful and those she was hurt by will be a part of society's lower-class. I enjoyed this film because of its honesty (maybe the horrors of middle school were a bit too dramatized) but I loved it for its comedy - its satirical derision of all those kids you just hate in middle school, those kids who hated you. Here's to the memories of those years of pre-adolescent suffering.
By Andrew Chan
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