Todd Solondz’ Dollhouse

Dean DeFino

Contemporary Filmmakers, ed. Yvonne Tasker (Routledge, 2001)

            In a late scene from writer/director Todd Solondz’ Happiness (1998), psychiatrist/pederast Bill Maplewood has a frank sexual discussion with his adolescent son, Billy, while awaiting arrest for raping two of the boy’s schoolmates.  It is an excruciating cinematic moment, where father reveals unspeakable desires and son pleads for affirmation of his own sexual self-worth, and the one most often cited in a heated debate that continues to surround the film.  Like all controversial art, the cultural meaning of Happiness tends to precede it.   Rejected by its original distributor (Universal/October Films) for its unflinching look at such sensitive subjects as pedophilia, rape fantasy, incest and adolescent sexuality, Happiness was the subject of polemics concerning art and obscenity long before the public had a chance to see it.  When finally released by Good Machine, a distribution entity created by the film’s producers, most critics had already either hailed it for exposing the dysfunction beneath the veneer of American life, or condemned it as prurient and exploitative.  The unfortunate effect of such debates is to obscure the individual merits of artists and their work.  With controversy, the substance of Solondz’ work has been subsumed into others’ causes of liberty and morality. 

To understand the controversy surrounding Happiness, and the significance of Solondz’ work in general, we begin with a question of mode. Film vaults are filled with pedophiles, sex-obsessed adolescents, rapists and suicides, but these figures exist only within accepted narrative boundaries.  Child predators are monsters of fantasy (the Kid Catcher in Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang) or fops in comedies of manners (Lolita’s Humbert Humbert); emerging sexuality is the stuff of teen comedy (from Andy Hardy to American Pie); rapists are the savage “others” of tragedy (Silas Lynch in Birth of a Nation) or the madmen of thrillers (Max Cady in Cape Fear); and suicides haunt melodramas (Ordinary People).  But Solondz mixes and matches these modes.  In Happiness, a poet renowned for elegizing the rape of an adolescent girl fantasizes being raped herself; a rejected lover on the verge of suicide berates his jiltor with words better suited to The Way of the World than As the World Turns; in a perverse revision of teen sex comedy, Dr. Maplewood (a pederast who is also a psychologist) arouses himself with a teen magazine; and young Billy’s angst over his sexual prowess plays as tragedy.  Characters and scenes confound our expectations of appropriate actions (melodrama criminalizes voyeurism, teen comedy embraces it) and types (the nerdy dad, the feckless loser), compelling us to reconsider their relative merits.

If Solondz’ compulsion to deconstruct expectations marks his work as truly independent (the experience of watching Happiness is like no other), it also describes the trajectory of his career.  Born and raised in the suburbs of Newark, New Jersey, his love of cinema developed while an undergraduate at Yale.  It would lead him briefly to Los Angeles, where he tried is hand at screenwriting in the early 1980’s, then to the film school of New York University.  Though the technical aspects of filmmaking alluded Solondz--who claims to have had a dispensation excusing him from handling a camera—he distinguished himself as a writer and director: so much so that one of his comic shorts, Schatt’s Last Shot, was chosen among NYU student work for an industry screening in 1986.  The next day, Solondz found himself in the executive offices of 20^th Century Fox.   Schatt’s Last Shot, which mines the familiar territory of dysfunctional relationships and the New York art scene, encouraged Fox, and later Columbia Studios, that they’d found a Woody Allen for Generation-X.  He was soon signed to multi-script writing contracts with both, and to write and direct a feature for the Samuel Goldwyn Company.  But when Goldwyn finally released Solondz’ first feature, Fear, Anxiety and Depression (1989)--which stars the writer/director as Ira Ellis, a neurotic nebbish rehearsing his romantic failures—critics turned on him, audiences barely noticed, and Fox and Columbia terminated his contracts.  The film’s self-pitying tone and crude humor play more like a parody of Allen’s monologic narcissism, and Solondz’ ill-conceived blend of romantic and dark comedy frustrated rather than engaging viewers.  In a particularly troubling scene, Ira stands by making desperate jokes while his girlfriend is being raped.  Here the filmmaker tries to force an Allenesque theme--nerdy wit in a world of horror--upon a scene that Allen would never attempt.

For a time, Solondz chose to accept the judgment of his critics and left filmmaking.  After being rejected by the Peace Corps, he spent several years teaching English to Russian immigrants (as will a character in Happiness), and hiding his professional past.  But fear that early failure would be his cinematic legacy eventually led him back.  In the early 1990’s, he convinced backers to support production of a script written some time before: a dark comedy about a gawkish adolescent, Dawn “Weiner Dog” Weiner (to be played by Heather Matarazzo), who attempts to navigate her way through a world of Jobian torments.  If Fear, Anxiety and Depression strained against the conventions of the romantic comedy, the setting and characters of Welcome to the Dollhouse were custom-made to communicate Solondz’ sensibilities.  Again, he mixes modes.  Dawn Wiener’s story is the waking nightmare of the social outcast, told not as surreal horror/fantasy but a dark comedy of manners.  Her daily tortures are neither exaggerated nor justified: they merely occur as a matter of social course.  As Dawn’s classmate tells her when she asks why no high school boy would ever touch her, “Sorry, Dawn, that’s just the way it is.”  The cruel logic of social order stabilizes the narrative and allows Solondz to amplify issues raised in the earlier film.  For example, sexual aggression: Brandon (played by Brendan Sexton Jr.), the only boy to show interest in Dawn, repeatedly threatens to rape her.  She first responds to these threats with fear, then resignation, and a brief romance ensues when, meeting no resistance, Brandon admits his affection for her.  By combining the hegemony of social order borrowed from the comedy of manners with dark comedy’s cynicism, Solondz is able to resolve the victim/aggressor relationship in one of the film’s rare moments of humanity. 

Such talents were rewarded when Dollhouse won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and seven Independent Spirit Awards (including Best Director, Best Feature and Best Debut Performance for Matarazzo and Sexton).  Success returned attention to a filmmaker long forgotten and, in words strikingly similar to those used earlier by executives at Fox and Columbia, critics hailed Solondz as a visionary of his generation, harbinger of what was being called the “New Geek Cinema”: an emerging body of work that would give voice to outsiders and the brutalized.  Unlike misfit voices to come before it—from James Dean to Johnny Rotten—these would be sustained not by bravado, but persistence.  Like Dawn Weiner in the very last scene of Dollhouse, drowning out the gibes of her fellows by insistently repeating a tune to herself, Solondz’ rehearsal of geek life would mediate horror by drowning it out.  Many critics read the film as an elegiac revision of Solondz’ own past (citing as evidence physical similarities between the director and young Heather Matarazzo, and the film’s suburban New Jersey setting), though the filmmaker admits no more than sympathy with Weiner Dog’s plight, describing it as a story of survival and applauding her for resisting the self-destructive impulse.

Challenging Dollhouse’s near-universal approbation, Solondz’ next film complicates issues of sympathy and advocacy by giving voice to a set of outsiders many of us would rather not hear: pedophiles and rapists, murderers and thieves, the feared and the despised.  If Wiener Dog’s tune serves to keep her head above water, these are people deeply submerged in their own desperation and ugliness.  Happiness is much more raw and direct than Solondz’ previous works.  If Fear, Anxiety and Depression is crudely playful (it is, after all, a romantic comedy of sorts) and Dollhouse entangled in the social strata of adolescence, Happiness is an uncomfortably intimate look at lineaments of the world we all occupy.  Where David Lynch uses the manufactured surface of American life as a springboard into a bizarre alternative, Solondz reveals what exists just below its surface, by carefully peeling it away and compelling us to look in.  Unlike the news media, which Solondz accuses of turning criminality into titillation or moral grandstanding, Happiness stirs the viewer by revealing rather than reading subtext.  The result is disturbing precisely because it so little mediated.  We applaud honesty and disclosure in principle, but are sickened when it exposes us directly to perversion.  He is careful to avoid letting the camera signify too much, and for this reason does not to show us the many criminal acts that occur during the course of the film (child rape, murder, theft, etc.), nor the condemnation and punishment of the perpetrators. We infer our own judgments from a skeleton of words and impressions.  As witnesses, our role vacillates between voyeur and captive audience: we watch from a fixed position.  He employs relatively few cuts, and usually figures a conversation with participants framed together.  The scene, setting and drama are self-contained, and reveal only as much as the characters will.

This intimacy is further complicated by the comic nature of the film.  Comedy is, after all, a matter of spectacle and contrast: the striding confidence of the victim before he slips on the banana peel, and the chaotic motion of his fall.  A common objection raised to Happiness is that it plays these scenes like a sick joke, where the pretense of familial order contrasts the outrageousness of the discussion.  Others describe the film in terms of parody or satire.  Parody is, after all, the upending of expectations and accepted models.  But unlike parody, which exaggerates the generic discourse by reflecting it through a comic hall of mirrors (John Waters’ Serial Mom, for example), Solondz’ film neutralizes the effects of its discourses—where fantasy equals escapism, tragedy catharsis, and comedy pleasure--by subjecting them to opposing forces.  What results is not a mutation like tragi-comedy, where alternating discourses heighten the effect of each, but a flattened narrative, where the audience is denied the fear, pity and pleasure we normally associate with tragedy and comedy.  His is the sort of comedy that rarely compels us to laugh, and a tragedy that preempts tears.

Happiness does not lack action, emotion or expressive performances, but because characters are so isolated and closeted, words and actions effect their local space rather than extending it (dramatic narrative is, in part, catalyzation from scene to scene).  Solondz’ execution of dialogue and action has drawn comparisons to Hal Hartley and David Mamet, but where these writer/directors create rich, ornate, self-involved games with dialogue and action, Solondz’ characters attempt to speak plainly and out of their isolation.  It is their honesty and self-awareness, not their irony, which makes the words so razing.  Similar comparisons have been made to the raw, immediate work of John Cassavetes who, like Solondz, favored an ensemble approach, intimate settings and uncomfortable subject matter, and to neo-realism, with its halting, fragmentary movement and naturalistic pace and setting.  But Solondz’ work is far more mannered.  Cassavetes relied heavily on improvisation and neo-realists allow reality to reveal its truths and contradictions in fits and starts, while Solondz proceeds with a didactic, if ubiquitous, formalism rooted not in art cinema, but in television. 

Dollhouse began as a reaction to the Wonder Years, which Solondz describes as a fantastical representation of youth.  His version tells the story of a family trapped in an ideal that it will never realize—of an Ozzie and Harriet family in a Brady Bunch home--and of an adolescent who recognizes the limitations such an ideal imposes.  Here all things must stay in their place, including scapegoats and victims.  The film is about naming the pretensions of our existence: the “dollhouses” in which some of us live (and from which others are excluded), the values we hold (trust, self-love, talent, family, etc.) and what lies behind them.  Primary among these values is the pursuit of “happiness.”  But in a world where such is tangled in a web of necessity and ambition, we locate its model in the cultural simulacra of Andy Taylor’s Mayberry and Jerry Seinfeld’s Manhattan.  To breach this utopia, Solondz populates his films with extreme versions of television types (the Brady Bunch family that really does scapegoat the middle child, the Ward Cleaver dad who rapes children) and casts actors best known for their television roles (Louise Lasser, Jon Lovitz, Molly Shannon, Lara Flynn Boyle, Camryn Manheim, Cynthia Stevenson).

Solondz is not the first director to mine this vein of popular culture.  Perhaps the best example is Quentin Tarnatino’s resurrection of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.  But if Tarantino fetishizes popular icons and forms (the gangster myth, the pulp novel, the blaxploitation film), Solondz transcribes them to exploit and manipulate their functionality. Compare Tarantino’s use of Travolta in Pulp Fiction to Solondz’ of Jon Lovitz in Happiness.  The first plays very much to type: a cool, sweet, confident tough guy in danger of losing out to his own self-indulgence. Vincent Vega is a latter-day version of Vinny Barberino from Welcome Back, Kotter or Tony Manero from Saturday Night Fever.  But Lovitz’ character, the vengeful suicide spewing words of heart-felt hate and pain, is the ugly, repressed side of Lovitz’ glib, self-enclosed liars from countless Saturday Night Live sketches.  If much of our pleasure in Travolta’s Pulp Fiction performance depends upon our knowledge of earlier roles (particularly the dancing sequence at Jackrabbit Slim’s), what we know about Lovitz complicates our response to this performance.  Rather than cutting the bitterness of the scene by playing the false bravado that has made Lovitz famous, he allows associations to sour against his deadpan, making the scene still more bitter.  The Lovitz we know from television haunts this version, rather than enlivening it.

More than an interest in and appeal to a television sensibility, Solondz’ films exploit specific narrative elements of the form as a way of plugging viewers into an otherwise nebulous narrative order.  In the situation comedy, for example, narrative action is merely a structure to support a series of jokes, product placements, and public service announcements about teen sex, racism, drugs, and other topics of the day.  Sit-coms are designed to deliver messages, not catharsis or clarification, and are driven by inevitability, not revelation or intrigue.  Like sit-coms, Solondz’ scenes are episodic and self-contained.  Though the intricate web of relations he creates in Happiness (where each character is in some way connected to all others) has been compared to multi-narrative work of Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson, Solondz does so to emphasize how very disconnected his characters are from each other.  Their deeds and words occur in isolation, in the intimate settings familiar to television viewers: the family room, the restaurant booth, the office.  When connected, these scenes reveal not narrative continuity or resolution, but a profound level of misunderstanding or miscommunication (primary narrative functions of sit-coms).  If Altman and Anderson revel in tracking shots and elegant editing sequences to establish a unity of actions and characters, Solondz uses the static staging and framing that are the legacy of the live television audience to atomize and flatten characters and their actions.

Television’s ubiquity and flatness allow Solondz to figure grave subjects as forces of gravity. The force that brings a character like Bill Maplewood down is an entropic one: a movement towards self-betrayal, instability and death.  Solondz describes Maplewood as one who struggles with, and finally gives into, a desire that he can no longer bury or modulate.  He is what the director calls “a bleeding soul,” in a losing battle with a monster living inside of him.  And, as with all entropic forces, the inevitable result of this battle is flat, undifferentiated chaos.  Solondz is often criticized for being sadistic to his characters, for forcing them to occupy that chaos with no room to navigate, but it is here, ironically, that he discovers the greatest hope.  Chaos lacks alterity or “otherness.”.  As Solondz explains in a 1998 interview with the Boston Phoenix, “to not dismiss something as other makes us more fully human.” Chaos breeds the desperation that forces a sex offender to reach out to his frustrated son, and the understanding that is only possible through the greatest degree of honesty. 

In a world where the bounds of isolation are everyday fortified, where television and information technology mediate our primary contact with the global village and personal revelations are made using electronic aliases, the best and worst truths about ourselves emerge (witness the prevalence of pedophilia on the internet).  Todd Solondz’ films attempt to address these truths: not to shock, but to communicate and comprehend all that makes us human.  If Bill Maplewood finally does succumb to the monster inside of himself, his confession of weakness is a father’s gift to the boy, who imagines his delayed sexual development a measure of personal weakness.  In a scene echoing the intimate father-son talks that complete most episodes of Leave it to Beaver, Bill Maplewood bears the paternal mantle with a seriousness beyond Ward Cleaver, restoring at highest personal cost his son’s self-esteem.  In the ultimate mixing of modes, the monster of fantasy attempts to restore the familial order ravaged by tragedy.  It is a feat as unlikely as dead Laius restoring blind Oedipus’ sight, but what makes Happiness, and all of Solondz’ work, so controversial is that the film holds out a vague hope that the monster may actually succeed.

REFERENCES:

Axmaker, Sean, “A Chat with Todd Solondz,” Nitrate Online (posted 30 October 1998), http://www.nitrateonline.com/fhappiness.html

Cardullo, Bert, “The Happiness of your Friends and Neighbors,” Hudson Review 52:3 (Autumn 1999), 455-62.

Chang, Chris, “Cruel to be Kind: A Brief History of Todd Solondz,” Film Comment 34:5 (Sep/Oct 1998), 72-5.

Conn, Andrew Lewis, “The Bad Review Happiness Deserves Or: The Tyranny of Critic-Proof Movies,” Film Comment 35:1 (Jan/Feb 1999), 70-2.

Cross, Alice, “Surviving Adolescence with Dignity: An Interview with Todd Solondz,” Cineaste 22:3 (Summer 1996), 24-8.

Keough, Peter, “Welcome to the Filmmaker,” Boston Phoenix (posted Oct 22, 1998), http://bostonphoenix.com/archive/movies/98/10/22/SOLONDZ.html

Pincus, Adam, “In Profile: Todd Solondz,” Sundance Channel Online (posted January 1996) http:// www.sundancechannel.com/profile/solondz/

Pitman, Randy, “Fear, Anxiety and Depression”(video review), Library Journal 115:12 (July 1990), 148.

Roesch, Scott, “Todd Solondz Welcomes the World to His Dollhouse,” Mr. Showbiz (posted June 19, 1996), http://mrshowbiz.go.com/interviews/122_1.html

Solondz, Todd, Happiness (screenplay, London: Faber and Faber, 1998).

Welcome to the Dollhouse website, maintained by Sony Pictures Classics Online (posted May 1996: includes “Director’s Notes” and “About the Filmmaker” by Todd Solondz), http://www.spe.sony.com/classics/welcome/index.html

FILMOGRAPHY:

Writer/Director:

“Feelings” (student short film, New York University, 1984)

“Babysitter” (student short film, New York University, 1984)

“Schatt’s Last Shot” (student short film, New York University, 1985)

“How I Became a Leading Artistic Figure in New York City’s East Village Cultural

Landscape” (short film for Saturday Night Live, 1986)

Fear, Anxiety and Depression (Goldwyn, 1989)

Welcome to the Dollhouse (aka Middle Child, Sony Pictures Classics, 1995)

Happiness (Good Machine, 1998)

Producer:

Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)

Actor in Feature Film:

Married to the Mob (Orion, 1988, dir. Jonathan Demme: as “The Zany Reporter”)

Fear, Anxiety and Depression (1989: as “Ira Ellis”)

As Good As It Gets (Tristar, 1997, dir. James L. Brooks: as “Man on Bus”)