Of all the easy targets that the independent American film industry takes shot at each year, the suburbs are a popular choice. When you need a vision of mind-numbing banality it's always the green lawns that are analysed instead of the more esteemed culturally worthies. The film industry exists in something of a Blue Velvet state of mind. The deliberate archetypal game played in Lynch's masterpiece is taken as concrete truth rather than an ironic game. All the perversity and erotic reverie is bled out, yet the grinding stereotypes are re-enforced. Almost in response to this arrives Todd Solondz's Happiness. The beauty of Solondz's film is that while he doesn't deny the banal and repressive aspect of his material (almost an impossibility here) he challenges our lazy assumptions and offers us insights that operate far above the symbolic. He adds to our understanding of the mundane.
All the characters who inhabit this film are, in one way or another, unhappy, yet the reasons for their depression vary greatly. There is however, a meeting point for all these individual miseries, and that point of connection is sexual. What motivates all these characters, in a perverse and wrong-headed fashion, is an instinct controlled by a pornography, a juvenile drive towards satiation over consideration. It may sound like I have just metamorphosised into Fred Nile, so let me qualify my claim. The perspective of most of these characters is one of total sexuality, lust acted out completely, without any perception of a greater picture. The talk shows and magazines seemingly opened these characters minds to a greater dialogue on sexuality, but instead it merely drove them into a deeper stage of infantilisation. The choice here is between complete denial (the overweight woman who finds sex disgusting) and complete obsession (the next door neighbor who delights in heavy-breathing phone calls. Other characters seek fulfillment in random acts of mistaken lust, or in ridiculous conceptualisations of sex (the poet writing about "rape at 13").
Here there is no imagination to compare to the sexual imagination. There is no dualism of mind and body. There is no balance between sexual function and human function. There is just fucking and come shots, the unifying metaphor of the film. These characters see climax, regardless of who gets screwed, as the transcendent moment. The fact that they have no other life to return to is what trips them up. The escape is suburban and horrifying.
Despite some very funny scenes (found mostly in the first half of the film) Happiness is a very bleak experience. The despair in this film can be summed up in a scene near the end of the film between a father and a son. I do not want to reveal anything else here, suffice to say it is one of the most affecting moments I have witnessed at the cinema for along time. In a film full of loose ends and disconnection, this scene attempts to reconcile father and son on any level possible. The sight of a son desperately trying to understand his father is the most disturbing scene in the film. With the most sensational and repellent of topics comes the bravery to try and understand. Todd Solondz is a great new American filmmaker. His debut feature Welcome to the Dollhouse is now available on video.
Adam Rivett
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