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THE ASCENT OF VOICE
There have always been film storytellers whose voices were more dominant than the stories and their characters. Luis Buñuel and Jean-Luc Godard are among the most important. As we saw in the last chapter, Stanley Kubrick and Quentin Tarantino have been very assertive in using structure and character to focus their ideas—about power in the case of Kubrick, and about the influence of the media in the case of Tarantino. What is notable in the past twenty-five years is that filmmakers are far more bold about their own ideas than was the case in the past. This may be because of the perceived power of the medium. For the longest time, particularly in the United States, film was considered an entertainment medium, and consequently the level of ambition of its storytellers was circumscribed by their perception of the medium. Chaplin and Welles were exceptions. Today there are far fewer exceptions, and the consequence is that there are far more film storytellers who view character and structure as the means to express their own views, particularly about society and power in that society. This ascent of voice is not only an American phenomenon. We see it in many other national dnemas as well. It is to this ascent in voice that we now turn.
JUZO ITAMI—THE SOFT SATIRIST
Juzo Itami stands apart from the formal aesthetic and exotic layers of film storytelling in Japan. I have labeled his approach soft satire, but it is actually richer than that label suggests. His voice is quite distinct. We will look at his films The Funeral (1986) and A Taxing Woman (1987) to illustrate that voice. Later in the book, Chapter 12, “The Search for New Forms,” we will also look at his film Tampopo, which combines the themes and narrative strategies he explores in The Funeral and A Taxing Woman.
On the surface, The Funeral seems to be a straightforward film. It begins with the death of the patriarch of a family and concludes with the end of the post-funeral family gathering. The narrative could almost be viewed as an anthropological document of the process. But that is not Itami's intention. Although he focuses on the salient events—the death, the identification of the body by the family, choosing the casket, organizing the formal funeral in a manner respectful to the deceased and the family he has left behind—Itami is more interested in the gap between grieving in a personal sense and the public acknowledgment of the loss. In that gap he satirizes the selfishness of individuals who are too wrapped up in their own loss to do more than pay lip service to the dead. In the course of doing so he poses questions about the meaning of the public process of burying a person. For Itami, burying and mourning are different, and in the film the burial implicitly overshadows the mourning.
To make his point, Itami uses humor. In the prologue, Mr. Amamiya at that point alive returns from a doctor's visit. He was pronounced in good health, and consequently he has bought his favorite foods—barbecued pork, avocado and eel—a cholesterol-heavy feast on which he gorges himself. Shortly thereafter he falls ill with severe chest pain. His wife, with the help of a neighbor (a psychiatrist), organizes a cab to the hospital. Mr. Amamiya walks into the cab on his own. At the hospital, Mr. Amamiya has another heart attack and dies. The approach Itami takes suggests that this sixty-nine-year-old man challenged his system, it rebelled, and he died. In other words, the victim brought on his fate.
The family is alerted, and when they gather they don't seem overwhelmed. They seem distracted. This sense of distraction finds its apogee when his son-in-law's mistress comes to pay her respect at the country home where the wake will take place. What she really wants is reassurance that the son-in-law still loves her. And so he must reassure her, missionary-style, in the woods adjacent to the house where the father-in-law's body lies.
This level of self-absorption is prevalent among the mourners. They can't wait to get the formalities over with so that they can return to their careers and to their possessions. If there is a prevailing voice in The Funeral it is that selfish people don't experience feeling; they go through the motions and do what is expected rather than what is more deeply respectful. Itami makes this point in as bawdy a manner as possible.
If The Funeral is treated as a situation comedy, A Taxing Woman, which is also very humorous, adopts the form of the western—the struggle of primitive or virtuous values against civilization or materialist values. The hero is a female tax inspector, Ryoko Itakura, who is zealous in catching and reforming those who defraud the government. Gordo, the antagonist of the narrative, is everything “the bad guy” should be in the western. He is cruel to his mistresses. He is insatiably cunning and greedy. His schemes to avoid taxation require a team of accountants and powerful people. He doesn't ride a horse, but he is driven in a white Rolls Royce. As in The Funeral, Itami is bawdy in his humor and aggressive in the cruelty of the antagonist. The ritual character of “the gunfight” is replaced by the ritual of the tax raid. Although the film is set in modern Tokyo, the narrative structure is the frame of the western. The frame also allows Itami to mock the values of Ryoko, the tax collector, as well as of Gordo, the tax evader. His voice—his use of soft satire—takes up a national pastime, tax evasion, and skewers it and the members of the society on both sides of the issue. The real target for Itami is the social behavior of individuals in a society where public behavior masks private intention. This is his real target.
For those of us in the audience, our connection to Itami is enhanced by the lack of an empathic character for us to relate to. In The Funeral, Mr. Amamiya, the victim of the heart attack, as well as the members of his family, are in turn held up to scrutiny and a measure of contempt. In A Taxing Woman, the narrative shape, framing a modern tale of tax fraud in terms of the old-fashioned western with its heroes and villains, also distances us from Ryoko and Gordo. They become caricatures to be moved away from identification and toward service to the satirical view of Itami. Both form and character are used to enhance the voice of criticism—all are held up to ridicule by the filmmaker.
NEIL LABUTE—THE CRUEL SATIRIST
Neil LaBute, a playwright as well as a writer-director, has made his reputation on the basis of two films, In the Company of Men (1997) and Your Friends and Neighbors (1998). Both are contemporary narratives about relationships, and both, present their subject from the male point of view.
In In the Company of Men two corporate males, Chad and Howard, are temporarily transferred to a big city in the Midwest. To amuse themselves they make a wager to see who can bed, Christine, the least appealing woman in the company, in this case a young woman who is deaf. They proceed to compete with one another for Christine. The more aggressive of the two, Chad, wins, although Howard really falls for Christine. Before leaving, but after making commitments and securing favors, Chad confesses to Christine that it was all a hoax, he doesn't really love her. He leaves her crushed and moves on, out of town, back to the real jungle, presumably to continue in his predatory ways.
It would be very easy to conclude that the film is misogynistic and hateful in its cruelty. In a sense it may be. But on another level LaBute is making a comment about the war between men and women, a war that's been in high gear since the sexual revolution. What he's saying is that men have to assert who is in control more than they need the relationship. It's about power. Who better to illustrate your power over than a woman who is made powerless not only by virtue of a lower position in the company but also by her physical impairment. And the fact that Christine can't hear makes Chad and Howard more bold in their open cruelty.
This is not a very flattering portrait of a man. Indeed, LaBute is rather scathing in his lack of sympathy or empathy for Chad and Howard. They are scavengers. LaBute's real target is the cult of male behavior that feeds on conquest, humiliation, and manipulation. The fact that wagers born out of boredom are used to excite Chad and Howard also suggests a level of narcissism that is plainly destructive. Whether it's corporate life or something more systemic, LaBute doesn't find redemption or hope in this behavior. Quite the opposite. The behavior is likened to the behavior that led to the fall of the Roman Empire—read American Empire. Not a very pretty picture.
It doesn't get any better in Your Friends and Neighbors. This time three couples are involved. Jerry and Terri, Barry and Mary, and Cary and Cheri may be couples, but they don't seem to derive any solace from being together. Indeed, when the three men get together they are competitive, but nevertheless there is a greater bond or trust than is present in the relationships of the couples them-selves. As the couples migrate in and out of each other's beds we get the sense that sex itself doesn't quench appetite and need. There is dissatisfaction with the self here, and the different characters adopt a quantitative strategy to a qualitative problem. What we are left with in the end is a portrait, again cruel, again from the male perspective, of man as predator and woman as victim.
It's as if LaBute is using chess as his narrative model. In the end there is only one winner. But when checkmate is declared, LaBute is using the concept ironically. There is only the satisfaction of winning; the characters are alone spiritually and consequently lonely. It's an empty victory.
As in In The Company of Men, the male characters in Your Friends and Neighbors are not very sympathetic. The level of self-absorption, manipulation, and cruelty distance us from them, particularly from Cary, the most assertive and cruel of the males. What is interesting structurally is that there is no plot, only character layer, and that the structure has a loose, nonlinear shape. The result is episodic and inconclusive. The absence of plot also places disproportionate narrative expectations on character complexity and dialogue. Here LaBute is as cruel as he is elsewhere. The dialogue is manipulative, evasive, parrying, and not at all confessional as the characters present it. LaBute does not let them off lightly. Nor does he let us off lightly. His voice is aimed directly at contemporary, self-absorbed men and women. These are people who don't trust others and can't seem to develop nurturing relationships that will sustain them. The self is too protected. This is the tragedy of his characters and his view of the tragedy of contemporary American life. We are the target of his cruel satire.
NEIL JORDAN—THE VOICE OF TOLERANCE
Neil Jordan has been prolific and ecumenical in his work. He has moved through various genres, ranging from horror in Interview with a Vampire (1993), the gangster film in Mona Lisa (1985), the political thriller in The Crying Game (1992), a class melodrama in The End of the Affair (1999), and the unorthodox melodrama The Butcher Boy (1996). Perhaps the quintessential Jordan film, the film that illustrates his tolerance beautifully, is his romantic melodrama The Miracle (1990).
James, the protagonist of The Miracle, lives in a small coastal town that is a train ride from Dublin. He is a musical teenager who overcomes his boredom by making up literary stories about romance in the life of the least likely citizens—a group of nuns, for example, or a lonely elderly gentlemen. The setting is romantic, but the population isn't. James, however, is romantic, and his view of the world is that everyone else is as well. This is a suitable projection for the views of the main character. A real woman comes into James' life. She comes off the train from Dublin. She is beautiful. She is mysterious. James and his girlfriend speculate about this mysterious woman. Before Act I is over, James has spoken to the mystery woman and she has kissed him. The act turning point poses the problem. The woman who James has fallen in love with is the mother whom he thought was dead. He will find out who she really is by the end of the second act, but before he does, James pursues her with passion. His alcoholic father tries to warn her off, but she too is drawn to this boy-man who is her son.
I have suggested that Jordan is the voice of tolerance because he is very willing to explore a taboo—incest without judgment. James is an innocent romantic boy. His mother is also a romantic, and a bit foolish, but she is accepted by Jordan as is the son. James does fall out with his mother when he discovers the truth. He is angry, but in the end, he resumes his romantic outlook. Jordan has simply conveyed that love, romance, and passion do not know boundaries and that that state of unfiltered love is important in life.
Jordan displays this same tolerance for the main character in The Butcher Boy (1998). A twelve-year-old boy with the face of an angel, Francie, aboy whose alcoholic father and suicidal mother leave him unable to face life realistically, turns to making up a life. But in the course of this created life, he finds a negative polarity: a middle-class woman who overprotects her son.
As the narrative progresses, Francie's life goes from bad to worse. There's his father's alcoholism and abuse, and then there is the deteriorating state of his mother. At one point, she is hospitalized. Clearly her way to deal with her life situation is to manically bake. But her manic phases are always followed by depression. After hospitalization, she is better but a visit from a former lover and relative sets her back. Neglecting to take her medication, she commits suicide. And Francie's father sinks deeper into alcoholic rage toward Francie.
As Francie's real life situation deteriorates, he constructs greater internal fantasy. But he also focuses on a real target for his rage. That target is a schoolmate who has a real family. He loathes the boy for being nurtured (and overprotected), the opposite of his own family life.
Francie particularly views the schoolmate's mother with disdain. First he is only insulting, but later as his own inner life becomes chaotic, he externalizes that chaos and hatred upon this target, the mother of a boy who is receiving what he himself needs, but doesn't receive from his own family.
In the end, Francie murders her. Actually, he butchers her. This insane act is the irrational act of a boy whose life has been scarred continually by loss. His anger finds its outlet in a target.
Although the narrative is dark and tragic, Jordan uses a voiceover to present the inner voice of the main character as a creative and imagined antidote to his reality. It's not confessional, if s compensatory, seeing the world as a better place that it is; its invented it's created, and in being so Jordan tightens the darkness of the narrative. We hear Francie and we wish, as he does, that life had been better, but for Francie it hasn't been. Again Jordan tolerates the intolerable.
Jordan's capacity to empathize is also notable in the conversion of Fergus, a killer into a loving man in The Crying Game. It's worth mentioning that, without irony, Fergus falls in love with Dil, the transsexual lover of his actual victim, Jody, a black soldier. By moving the heterosexual Fergus into a homosexual love affair and relationship with DO, Jordan is pushing the notion of tolerance forcefully but nevertheless believably. The film conforms to the realism necessary in both of its layers as a thriller and as a melodrama.
The fact that the gangster, George, in Jordan's earlier film, Mona Lisa, falls in love with the black madam, Simone, he chauffeurs around town, and the fact that in the end he saves her from death by killing Mortwell, his own employer, highlights how far people will go when they care about others. This is particularly poignant because when we are introduced to George at the opening of the story he is violent and apparently racist. For George to save Simone, a black woman at the narrative's conclusion is a transformation very much in keeping with the Jordan voice of tolerance.
Before we leave Neil Jordan, it's important to mention that passion, romance, friendship, and loyalty are all dimensions of tolerance taken up by Jordan in his work. But to achieve a believability factor, Jordan always sprinkles pixie dust in the environment or in the behavior of his characters. There's always a little magic in the air in Jordan films. It's an enabling magic that makes more believable that tolerance does exist.
SPIKE LEE—THE TEACHER/PREACHER
Spike Lee has from the outset of his career favored educational over entertainment goals. In his most powerful works, Do the Right Thing (1989) and Jungle Fever (1991), there was a fervor about the ideas, about racism and its consequences, and about interracial marriage, that added a zealous sense of outrage to the work. It is this dimension of the work that I view as Spike Lee the preacher. Spike Lee the teacher is on best display in his pro-family ideas expressed vividly in Crooklyn (1994) and in Clockers (1995). Both dimensions come together in his film Summer of Sam (1999).
Although Summer of Sam has a plot, a series of killings in New York in the summer of 1977, the plot, including the apprehension of the killer, the son of Sam, forms the background to a mood in the city that can only be described as a fear so palpable that it unleashes personal behavior more in keeping with the plot of On the Beach, the post-nuclear holocaust novel by Neville Shute. The behavior of the characters in Summer of Sam, then, is impulse-driven and emotionally violent, and the behavior is out of proportion to the life circumstances or personal choices made by the characters.
The characters are a tight group of twenty-so me thing young adults, particularly Vinnie and Richie and Dionna and Ruby, Italian Americans who grew up together in a small Italian neighborhood near the beach in Brooklyn. The film narrative focuses on two relationships within a larger peer group. That peer group is macho, racist, and aggressive. What binds these young men is the notion that if you are in any way different you are the enemy and have to be brutally excluded. The two men who are the focal points of the narrative are Vinnie, a hairdresser and Ritchie, a would-be musician. Vinnie (John Leguizamo) wants to belong to the group. Ostensibly he is the main character as conformist. He is married to Dionna, but he is obsessively unfaithful. Women for him are “Madonnas” (mothers and wives) or “whores.” This ideology and behavior cements his membership in the peer group.
Ritchie (Adrian Brody) is the non-conformist in the group. He takes up with Ruby, the local prostitute, and treats her respectfully; here is a real male-female relationship in the making. This nonconformist behavior makes him a threat to the group. Taking up with the local “whore” and treating her like a “Madonna” is unacceptable, and he is punished by the group with the accusation that he is the Son of Sam.
In this community at this time, 1977, given the unprecedented heat and the paranoia around the actions of the Son of Sam, society is upside down. It's upright citizens, such as Vinnie, the philandering hairdresser, become betrayers of their families (his wife, Dionna) and of their friends, such as Ritchie, and Ritchie is punished because the other, the outsider, has infiltrated the community and must be purged.
There is no character here that we can hold up as a victor; everyone loses. This is the fevered message of the preacher Spike Lee. When values become subverted, the individual and the community suffer. There is no tolerance here. The group hates Ritchie because he's different from them. Dionna hates Manhattan because it's an uncontrolled environment. Its music and its drugs loosen the social constraints under which she's lived. And Vinnie has lost himself in the obsession of proving that he's a man and in his confusion about Dionna as a Madonna and somehow different from other women. Lee the preacher is saying that betrayal and murder occur in an environment, a community that has lost its values.
Spike Lee the teacher, in the same narrative, points out a society obsessed with celebrity. The night clubs, bar, and parties seduce the characters, particularly Vinnie as the epitome of manliness and importance, arriving in Manhattan in the right set of wheels. Lee the teacher treats Vinnie and Dionna as novices, innocents, in our advanced class in cool behavior. The wife-swapping that follows is too much for both Vinnie and Dionna, and on the journey home the marriage dissolves right before Vinnie's eyes. Lee uses the couple's breakup to illustrate how playacting at sex has serious consequences. Lee the teacher is making the point that relationships require less playacting, less lying, and a more honest exchange between the parties. If this isn't present, the relationship will fail as it does here, with a ripple effect that is unforeseen. The implosion of the other layers of Vinnie's life, both personal and professional, are a direct result of the failure of the marriage. The failure is the moment of truth for two characters who have been avoiding the truth throughout their relationship.
Summer of Sam provides Spice Lee with an opportunity to synthesize both dimensions of his voice, teacher as well as preacher. He does so with enormous force.
THOM FITZGERALD—THE VOICE OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
There are very few films that defy interpretation, but Thorn Fitzgerald's often do. Thorn Fitzgerald's film The Hanging Garden (1998) powerfully evokes a sense of fable. Fitzgerald has used the hyperdrama form to make a statement about sexual difference.
The narrative swings between a past story and a present story. The character that links them is a young man, Willy, in the present story and an obese adolescent in the past story. He is the same person. Is he real or imagined? There are three “chapters” to the film: The Lady on the Locket, Lad's Love, and Mums. The first and the last are in the present, and the middle chapter takes place in the past. The first chapter focuses on the wedding of the main character's sister, Rosalie. We are introduced to the family. The father is an angry alcoholic; the mother supervises the events of the family, and then once the father is put to bed, she literally leaves the home for good. Willy has returned from the city. He clearly is gay, and his sister's husband seems more interested in him than in his wife. At the center of the wedding party there stands a tree, and the body of an obese adolescent hangs there. It is Willy as an adolescent. Current references made to his weight suggest they are one and the same.
The middle chapter focuses on the obese adolescent. Here Willy is abused and belittled by his father. His mother, who is worried about his sexuality, pays a local woman to sexually initiate her son and dissuade him from his sexual preference—being gay. He does have a sexual encounter with the young man who in the earlier story marries his sister. The story ends when, again belittled by his father, Willy hangs himself in his father's garden.
In the third chapter we return to the present. The mother has left. The father is lonely. The newly married couple are not on steady ground as the husband has a sexual encounter with Willy. In the end, Willy cuts down the body that has hung in the garden and buries his dead self. And then he leaves with his young sibling, Violet, beside him to prevent the destruction, at the hand of the father, of a sibling who also has a blurred sense of gender.
A family tragedy is generated from being different and not being accepted. That tragedy has hung over and destroyed the family, and forced its members to leave where they have grown up. This is the moral of Fitzgerald's hyperdrama— if sexual differences are not accepted, families and lives are destroyed. If the father had accepted the adolescent Willy, had accepted his gender blurring as well as his physical appearance, Willy would not have been destroyed. So, too, with the rest of the family, who could not live with the consequences of Willy's fate.
CLARA LAW—THE MODERN TRADITIONALIST
Clara Law is a Hong Kong filmmaker who has made at least two films about the place where the past, with all of its traditions, meets the future, with its globalization and its postmodern disconnectedness. These films, Autumn Moon (1992) and Floating Life (1996), examine present relationships under the pressure of the past and the anxiety about the future.
Law uses a nonlinear structure and an ironic humor to examine these relationships. Autumn Moon takes place in Hong Kong: not an overcrowded Hong Kong but an almost lunar landscape version of Hong Kong—cool, cerebral, and empty. Two characters are equally central: Tokio is a Japanese tourist, Lui Pui Wai is a Chinese schoolgirl. The film begins with his arrival and ends with his departure. The two meet while he is fishing by the harbor and she is en route to school. They can't speak each other's native language, so they resort to English to communicate. Tokio is hungry for good food. He asks Li to take him to her favorite restaurant. Li takes him to MacDonalds. Tokio is a tourist—materialistic, acquisitive, and unhappy. At one point he gestures that he has a broken heart. Li, on the other hand, is happy. She lives with her grandmother, for her parents have already immigrated to Canada. She will follow at the end of the school year.
By spending time with Li and with her grandmother, Tokio is nurtured by what I will call tradition. His materialism is tempered by this experience. Whether Tokio is altered by the experience remains unanswered. But he definitely is the beneficiary in the relationship.
Li gains a preview of adulthood. It's not a very appealing preview, but this too is left unresolved. In the encounter, however, Clara Law is exploring the virtues of tradition, of family ties, and ironically pointing out the price of detachment, the price of being a tourist in life. The price seems very high. In this sense she seems to be validating the benefits of family ties and traditions.
This thesis that tradition is valuable is even more strongly stated in Floating Life. Here the film begins with the elders of the Chan family together with their two young sons leaving Hong Kong. The Chans are migrating to Australia. The film ends with a semblance of adjustment to their new home in Australia. In between, we follow the lives of the diaspora of this particular family—the daughter is already in Australia, the oldest daughter is in Germany, and the adult son remains in Hong Kong. Each of these lives is braced by a husband or lover, but because they are apart, all the members of the Chan family, including the parents, are diminished. They are unsettled by virtue of being outsiders in cultures that may not welcome them or that they don't understand. The responses of the children differ: the oldest daughter in Germany worries constantly and feels guilty that she is not taking care of her parents. The daughter in Australia is a neurotic en route to a total breakdown. And the son in Hong Kong has become a libertine living in the moment. The two youngest sons are rushing to assimilate, and the parents in Australia feel lost and in despair, particularly the mother.
What saves these members of the Chan family are the other members of the family. When they embrace tradition, whether it be about their ancestors or about herbal remedies or superstitions, they progress, they adjust, they go on productively and with an aura of knowing and believing in a future. The despair lifts.
Although Law uses irony and humor in both films, her voice is clear: that traditions strengthen the members of the family. It should not be abandoned as they become internationalists. In her narrative approach, Clara Law is avant-garde, modern, but in terms of her voice, she is very much a traditionalist.
TOD SOLONDZ—THE SCREAM AS VOICE
There is no writer-director who has more powerfully personified the ascent of voice than Tod Solondz. In his two films Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and Happiness (1998), Solondz has pointed his lens at suburban American life, first through the eyes of a single character, an unpopular teenager desperate for acceptance in Welcome to the Dollhouse, and then toward an entire suburban family in Happiness.
Although Solondz deploys irony and humor in Welcome to the Dollhouse, his position remains vested in a single character, Dawn Wiener. Her parents are presented as preferring the “angelic younger sister,” Missy, or the oldest child, “the male brain,” Mark, all of which leaves Dawn, the middle child, a pubescent girl, as an outsider even in her own family. What is clear in the presentation of Dawn is that she is also isolated by virtue of being creative relative to her parents and her younger sister. Her peers are also presented as conventional rather than creative. Essentially, the main character probably wouldn't fit in no matter what adaptive strategies she might undertake. We have to assume that she is the stand-in for the writer-director, Solondz. In Welcome to the Dollhouse, Solondz relies on the conventions of positioning the main character as a victim wanting to be victimized no longer. Dawn is a typical teenager in her desires. How the other characters push the narrative away from realism is their propensity to be over the top. The Wieners in their adoration of the youngest child; Mark's devotion to his band in spite of the lack of talent demonstrated by the band; the banal good looks of the lead singer, Steve, who she idealizes—all of these characterizations are excessive and consequently ironic rather than realistic and available to us in a manner with which we can identify. These are not characters we can identify, which leaves only Dawn as worthy of identification. In terms of characters, then, we have a schism—a main character who is victimized with the consequence that we care about her, and a set of other characters who are separate from the main character in the sense that they are ironic.
When we look at the story line we see the same schism. There's nothing wrong with Dawn's goal—to be accepted. It is understandable. But it is the aggressive reaction of the others to her that isolates her further and makes her efforts ironic and futile. Welcome to the Dollhouse mixes realism and irony, thereby making the film available to us with a clear voice of the writer-director, criticizing family and community for its indifference, its insensitivity, and its cruelty to an important member of the community, an artist in the making, the main character.
If Welcome to the Dollhouse functions as both melodrama and satire, Solondz' next film moves far from melodrama and, in its way, beyond satire. I would suggest that Happiness is Solondz's voice as scream, a scream about family values, about suburban life, about therapy, about communication, about honesty, and about hope. Happiness is as dark a vision of American life as we have seen; as dark as Fritz Lang's Fury (1935); as dark as Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951). It's useful to examine Happiness in relation to Sam Mendes' American Beauty (1999). Both are focused on the inability of the members of a suburban family to help one another. They live together, but that's as far as one can go. Both culminate in a death or the acknowledgment of responsibility for a death. Both have satiric and melodramatic layers. But if American Beauty is a satire about the ineffectiveness of the family to satisfy its members, and about the tragedy that befalls the member who calls the family a charade (the enlightened one), Happiness is the cri de coeur: the Jordan family is more than a failure, it's the purveyor of illusion and those illusions destroy people. There is enormous pain and anger in Happiness. It is a profoundly troubling experience, and it is important for us to understand how Solondz moves from the satiric voice in Welcome to the Dollhouse to the voice of something else, what I have called the scream.
Only Luis Buñuel in Un Chien Andalou (1929), Pier Paulo Pasolini in Salo (1975), and Nagisa Oshima in In the Realm of the Senses (1976), have managed to create the sense of outrage Solondz does in Happiness. To do so he has had to move us over the edge of taste, and to utilize a number of narrative strategies to subvert our expectations. Those narrative strategies begin with a nonlinear structure; there is no main character, and if there is a stated goal, it is to find happiness in a relationship— within a family or outside the family. Solondz also adopts an MTV approach to the scenes—each has an intense feeling state as its goal. A therapy session fuses the aggressive sexual fantasy of a patient with the boredom of the therapist. A visit of two sisters, Joy Jordan and her married sister Trish, moves between Joy's loneliness and Trish's aggressive rivalry, all under the guise of help. The dinner breakup of the relationship of Joy Jordan and Andy Kornbluth fluctuates between social convention and aggressive payback.
An elaboration of the MTV style is to make the dialogue intensely aggressive while the body language, the visual, is the opposite. Another elaboration is to give fantasy—aggressive, sexual, or both—space to overtake other feelings, such as love and compassion. The result is that each of the individuals presents as self-absorbed. They are incapable of being genuinely with the other, whether it's a sibling, a son, or a neighbor. Finally, there is the issue of boundaries. Solondz doesn't recognize boundaries. And so Bill Maplewood, a therapist who is a pedophile is a pedophile with his son, Timmy. A lonely obese woman sees men as predators rather than as potential companions. For her, murder and dismemberment are not too good for men. The narrative events themselves are so shocking, so naked in their desperation and anger, that they are not funny as irony can be, they are not sad as melodrama can be, they are not imaginatively creative as powerful satire can be; they leave us without resources or recourse. This is the upshot of Solondz's scream.