Admission: I never enjoyed Todd Solondz’s films. Moreover, I came to dislike his work. Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) remains the director’s most popular (and palatable) film. Its story of a middle-school misfit and the emotional complications of adolescence is relatable to experiences many of us admit to having. However, the handful of films he released since are harder to take. The downturn point, Happiness (1998), features a pedophile dad coaching his son in masturbation and a woman inviting her own rape at the hands of the guy next door.
Julian Murphet’s Todd Solondz (published by University of Illinois Press) makes me willing to at least give the director another look. Murphet defines the filmmaker as a satirist; Solondz isn’t just trying to be disgusting but composes his bleak humor as a critique of a disgusting society. His subjects seem to represent the contemporary middle class’ downward social mobility. Their culture is largely junk culture and they live in—quoting architect Rem Koolhaas—“junkspace.”
As Murphet describes, Solondz’s protagonists make their way through a suburban splatter “devoid of any distinguishing features; its pale stucco and brick surfaces repel aesthetic attention” and “the free parking just outside traps commuters like gnats on flypaper.” They live in “a placeless commuter bubble,” a “vast, tasteless blur in their peripheral vision, blandly reassuring in its Teflon-like resistance to memory and passion.”
Solondz’s mordantly unapologetic screenplays aren’t about shock for its own sake but try to arouse a shock of recognition about the fractured, fitful state of the American Dream. Although criticized for lack of cinematic style, Solondz’s approach is an “ethic of subtraction,” his stories so fully stocked that Solondz doesn’t want form to compete with content (or maybe the banality of his form perfectly packages his content?).
Murphet teaches film and literature at the University of New South Wales; his writing sometimes falls into stretches of arid academic prose and convoluted theorizing. And yet his core ideas rise above those limitations as he makes a case for Solondz as an underrated auteur. In Murphet’s interview with Solondz (an appendix to the book), the director says that movies are “ultimately an entertainment. And I think even Ingmar Bergman understood that—that you have to find a way to hook and seduce and entrance your audience in some sense so they have to keep watching.”
Each of Solondz’s films sold fewer tickets than the one preceding it and he wonders whether he’ll ever find funding for another production. Ironically, Solondz isn’t following his own insight. Interesting as they may be, the films he made after Welcome to the Dollhouse have failed to hook or seduce.
