Re: [PEN-L:531] Tod Solonz's "Happiness"

[Peter Dorman <dormanp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Since I saw Happiness just a few nights ago, I am only now taking the
opportunity to respond to Louis attack/review of Oct. 15.

Im not sure I like this movie.  It is extremely funny, clever, observant,
misanthropic, embarrassing, and tasteless.  Oh yes, and subversive.  It remains
troubling to me, days after sitting through it.

I think Louis evaluation is partially on target and mostly way off.  He is
right that the film treats all of its characters with complete disdain.  (They
are either pathetic or odious or both.)  The question is, what are we to make of
this?  I strongly disagree with what I take to be the doctrinaire social-realist
tenor of Louis critique, which is that films should not denigrate the working
masses.  In the interests of staving off wholesale depression, I think it would
be bad for *all* films to mock us, but I see nothing wrong in principle
with individual films that do so.  (A few corrections should be made to Louis
summary of Happiness, incidentally: upper-middle class types, a psychiatrist
and a successful writer, are savaged, along with regular working people, and
the evil shrink rapes boys from other families, not his own.  Also, the shrink
is not presented as gay in any recognizable sense; he doesnt seek male
affection.)

Actually, Happiness reminds me of nothing so much as the R. Crumb cartoons
from the late 60s and early 70s: Whiteman, the Snoid from Sheboygan, etc.
These comics, like the film, satirize common sexual fixations (in Crumbs case
with a heavy dose of Wilhelm Reich) with almost no sympathy for either
perpetrator or victim.  They are indeed twisted, and we can see this even more
clearly today in light of what we now know about Crumb himself.

What is most painful about Happiness are its moments of clarity and
recognizability: the lies we tell ourselves to justify our shoddy behavior, the
emotional armoring, the clumsy attempts at achieving happiness that devastate
our lives and those of our friends/families/lovers.

Yes, this is in-your-face and nasty.  By urging us to laugh at these hideous
displays, the film guides us toward two possible responses.  The intended
response, I think, is that we face up to criticism which, if not lubricated by
humor, we would be unable to countenance.  The other possible response is that
we trivialize the viciousness and stupidity we are laughing at, and thereby
perpetuate it.

I saw the movie surrounded by a sea of 20 year-olds who were laughing and
cheering throughout.  They broke into applause at the end.  Ive been wondering
how to interpret their reaction as much as the movie itself.  I can recall when
Diner was released.  I remember liking it, thinking that this was a wonderful
expose of sexism, one that would cause males across America to rethink their
assumptions.  Instead, the movie became popular as a *celebration* of sexist
values, despite the obvious intentions of the film
maker(s).  This experience has left me confused about the politics of subtlety
in mass culture, about how much weight I should be given to the potential for
well-meaning movies, songs, etc. to be misunderstood.

I think I know what Solondz attempted to do in Happiness.  I wonder what
effect its having on its audiences.

Peter Dorman

Louis Proyect wrote:

> 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.
>
> Louis Proyect
>
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)