Last night, I went to see Todd Solondz’s new film Happiness. When it ended, I strode purposefully out of the theater and down the stairs to the ladies’ room, locked myself into a stall, and sobbed for five minutes. I can safely say that I have never felt as profoundly disturbed by a movie in my entire life.

I had a similar, if much less intense, experience with Solondz’s first feature, Welcome To The Dollhouse. Dollhouse catalogued a few days in the life of a morbidly unpopular seventh-grader named Dawn Weiner, and when I saw the movie I could not believe how accurately and unflinchingly Solondz told his story. First of all, I grew up in a part of New Jersey not far from where the film took place, and while I didn’t recognize any landmarks per se, I certainly recognized the accouterments of suburban middle-class living in the Garden State; Ang Lee’s attention to mid-seventies detail in The Ice Storm had nothing on Todd Solondz. The actors had genuine Jersey accents, not the Brooklyn-Long Island knock-offs you usually hear. Dawn’s mother wore shiny sweatsuits everywhere; the slutty girl sported skin-tight leggings and long over-permed hair piled up just so on her head; the characters made references to carpools and “the city” and Dawn’s computer-geek older brother had a pen-pal girlfriend from camp. Perhaps you have to come from New Jersey to understand the hilarious precision of these details, and of the set design, but as someone who does come from there, I couldn’t get over it. Second of all, Solondz didn’t back down. When he wrote Dawn Weiner’s character, he didn’t make her noble, or a genius, or a beauty in disguise, and he didn’t stop at awkward and unfashionable; he created a spineless and socially inept loser of only average intelligence who flirted with genuine ugliness, and surrounded her with even less sympathetic characters so that we rooted for her anyway.

And he got everything about Dawn Weiner exactly right — her regrettable wardrobe, her hunched don’t-notice-me shuffle, her Walter Mitty-esque fantasy of not just acceptance but reverence by her peers (“we love you, Dawn”), her pathetically clueless crush on trashy hunk Steve Rodgers, and most of all her willingness to treat those lower on the food chain with the same cruelty she suffers every day. I myself resided on the second lowest rung of the junior-high ladder, and the so-called popular kids mocked and derided and excluded me on a daily basis, and it hurt my feelings terribly, to the point where I still to this day resent certain individuals for the way they treated me, but instead of taking a lesson from the behavior of the “in crowd” (to which I desperately wanted to belong even though I would never have admitted it), i.e. “do unto others,” I turned around and mocked and derided and excluded those on the lowest rung, and I did it because I could. Thus, Solondz got everything about junior high culture and its perverse interactions exactly right also. The little cheerleaders call Dawn a lesbian, and then Dawn turns around and calls her little sister a lesbian; the kids barely know what it means, but they know it constitutes an insult. The same goes for the delinquent Brandon, who has no intention of raping Dawn when he threatens her, only of passing on the belittlement he himself has received. I remember a couple of scenes during which other people in the theater laughed hysterically, but I just felt a sad sense of recognition, like the scene when it becomes wickedly apparent that Cookie has invited everyone in the entire class to her birthday party except for Brandon and Dawn, because this girl in my class whom I had gone to school with for close to a decade invited everyone in our class to her sweet-sixteen except me and maybe two other people, and she billed it as a formal affair, and the other non-chosen few and I had to listen to our classmates talking about their dresses and their dates and who got drunk and kissed whom blah blah blah for weeks before and afterwards, and never mind the fact that in the abstract I found this girl insufferably stupid and tacky, and never mind the fact that I did not exactly have a revolving rack of floor-length gowns nor a stable of willing escorts from which to choose had she invited me in the second place — I have never felt so small and insignificant in my life, and ten thousand times a day I wondered to myself, “Why couldn’t she have invited me? What did I ever do to her?” and then I remembered that I hadn’t done anything to her, but that she just didn’t care enough about me one way or the other to bother sparing my feelings, and I wouldn’t mind getting famous and running into that girl and pretending to draw a blank on her because I don’t recall her tiny and inconsequential existence, nope, wouldn’t mind doing that ONE BIT.

Whatever — I enjoyed Dollhouse a great deal, for the sharp writing and fine detail, and for the fact that Solondz did not and would not blink. It brought up a couple of painful memories, but I respected Solondz’s verbatim rendering of them. Although I felt physically ill for several hours after watching Happiness and had nightmares all night, I still respect the fact that Solondz did not blink. He stared at pedophilia and masturbation and suicidal depression and wife-beating and casual sex and dismemberment and loneliness and rape and obsession and denial, and the audience stares along with him, and this audience member waited for him to blink and hoped he would blink and prayed he would blink and he DID NOT BLINK. The scene in which the pedophile’s son forces his father to confess himself with horrifying bluntness nearly killed me; I badly wanted to jump out of my seat and take off, and not a few other people dashed out of the theater during this exchange. But Solondz stood his ground. The exchanges between the dorky masturbating prank caller and his overweight neighbor frequently made me cringe with awkward close-ups of their sweaty, stammering faces. But Solondz stood his ground, and I admire that. I found the movie and all of its characters deeply unsettling; it unsettled me even more when I found myself laughing at some of their machinations. I didn’t want to laugh at the pedophile as he tried to drug his son’s friend without his wife and three children noticing — but I did. Solondz timed the lines well, and Dylan Baker, who will probably never get work again after this role, played them superbly (I won’t even mention the innocent burbling of the Nintendo game in the background). I didn’t want to laugh at the overweight neighbor’s description of the demise of her doorman, but I did, for the same reasons — excellent writing, and excellent acting by Camryn Manheim. Sometimes I laughed nervously, but other times I just laughed. Most of the time, though, I felt very uncomfortable; the child-abuser using a teenybopper mag as a stroke book in the back seat of his car made me shudder, as did the scene when the Russian cab driver who has seduced one of the main characters has his orgasm and then rolls off immediately and leaves without another word. The characters get no mercy from Solondz, and the audience doesn’t either.

But did he go too far? Well, I found the film so disquieting that the Biscuit and I joked on the way home that we should watch some footage of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps just to lighten our mood, but in terms of artistic taboos, no, I don’t think he did. A lot of people view movies as escapist entertainment, and they don’t want to think about these things — they want a love story, or an action adventure, something fluffy and sparkly and unrealistic, and I want that too sometimes. Frankly, if I had it to do over again, I would rather sit through a double bill of Breaking The Waves and Pink Flamingoes than have my gut wrenched by the intensity of Happiness, but I don’t think Solondz made an irresponsible film, or even a particularly sick one. We don’t want to think about these things — fathers of three preying on little boys, lonely overweight nerds jerking off, fat women having unrequited crushes, perky housewives deluding themselves, marriages breaking up after forty years, little kids looking at porno mags, girlfriends getting beaten up, snotty writers questioning their existences. We don’t want to think about these things, but these things happen. We don’t want to think that we might actually know these people, but we do, and Solondz refuses to step off and give us the happy ending we have come to expect. He refuses to respect our comfort zone; he doesn’t fade to black, ever. He leaves it up to us to turn away, because he won’t. Many people have objected, and will object, to his attempt to make these people sympathetic, but I don’t think he tried to make them sympathetic, exactly. I think he tried to make them real, to make them familiar, to get them right, and I think he just doesn’t stop rolling tape until he thinks he’s told the whole story. It gets ugly sometimes, but he doesn’t try to pass his own ugliness off as the flaws of his characters the way Neil LaBute does. Solondz just sets himself a job and finishes it.

And yes, Todd Solondz scares me, not because he made a pedophile into a somewhat likable character, and not because he used Air Supply on the soundtrack (though I did find both of those things more than a little frightening). Todd Solondz scares me because he won’t NOT do these things. Todd Solondz scares me because he tells stories about things I don’t want to think about, and then I DO NOTHING BUT THINK ABOUT THEM. You can call his work repugnant, if you like, or exploitative (you have to wonder what the parents of the child actors in Happiness had in their minds when they looked at the script), but I call it the mark of a great artist. Big words, but ask anyone I spoke with today and they’ll tell you that I can’t shut up about this movie. He writes crisp, realistic dialogue, he casts intelligently and gets good performances from the actors (two words: Marla Maples), he knows how to design a set down to the last afghan thread, and most importantly, he won’t stand quietly behind the yellow line. Not for all the gold in Fort Knox would I see Happiness a second time, and I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone without a shrink on call, but with the exception of a couple of instances of gratuitous irony, Solondz made a fine, tight film.

But he still scares the hell out of me.

Share!