The more I study the 1990s, the more I accept that it was a fairly troubled decade. How could it not be when a man deemed rock music’s savior committed suicide, where a beloved and innocuous appearing sports star was on trial for murdering his wife, where cinema’s voice of a generation burst onto the scene by tearing somebody’s ear off? There was a grit and discomfort that I feel has slowly been edged off, preparing the next millennium for a somewhat more docile outlook. This isn’t to say that culture has become any more “mannered,” but that Gen-X felt like the generation that was busting down doors, presenting the vulgarities of the world for dark amusement in hopes of recognizing that the nuclear family image the previous generation used as their bedrock was a complete façade.
There is something uncomfortable and shameless baked into the DNA of 90s culture. On some level, I think it’s one of those grotesque sights that might not age well or will, depending on your outlook. The defiance has all the tact of teenagers discovering the boundaries of the larger world, where pushing back against societal norms has that allure. To look at Sundance is to see dozens of now iconic filmmakers who pushed the R-Rating to its taboo limits. David O. Russell started his career with the incest-heavy Spanking the Monkey (1994). There was a game to see who the most perverted, most daring filmmaker could be, who could still get a meaningful distribution. Gen-X was a generation going beyond the pale to ultimately shock audiences like they had never been before.
To use more contemporary parlance: Todd Solondz has entered the chat.
My journey to Happiness (1998) was a long time in the making. To listen to friends talk about it was to suggest something mythic, as if you were bound to witness the most brain-expanding film imaginable. When you grew up in the early 2000s when raunchy comedies were a box office staple every few months, there was this attraction to edgy storytelling that kept Solondz relevant. Even then, he wasn’t making Happiness to be the least bit marketable. Despite hitting the explicit hallmarks as one of the maddest filmmakers since John Waters, his appeal felt more centralized to a culture that worshipped Jerry Springer. There was a desire to lean in and see the macabre, the low points of human nature play out in a way that could be mistaken for exploitation had it not been so elegantly written.
To be clear, Happiness is a profoundly disturbed movie. Anyone who doesn’t provide a preamble about how “messed up” it is should have their values questioned. At the same time, it’s one of those works that feels undeniable. Unlike Tom Green, the obscene works to convey something greater about its characters. In a time when filmmakers were keen on exploring pure dysfunction, there was something to stripping away formalities and seeing a cast really go to town on the characters’ awfulness. Gone were the squeaky clean days of Reaganomics. In its place was Philip Seymour Hoffman calling random women to fulfill his horny yet antisocial kink. In typical Solondz fashion, the viewer doesn’t have to guess what comes at the end.
At times, Solondz is as reliant on the Springer nature of gawking as he is on the theatricality of soap operas. While never reaching the absurd peaks of your daily dramas, there’s still a constant need to second-guess what one is watching. The opening scene alone is subversively shot to find a couple reaching the end of a date and accepting that they’re not compatible. Happiness as a title never feels sincere. To look at Jon Lovitz’s face during this scene is to see a man who is somewhere between nervous and absolutely depressed. He is on the verge of a grand romantic gesture (an embroidered ashtray) only to take it back when his date calls their relationship off. Ironically, the woman’s name is Joy and, by the end of the next scene, she’ll be berated by a loving friend who admits that everybody thought she wouldn’t amount to anything. Joy is 30.
Somewhere in the continual drudgery is a recognition that nobody is happy. Whereas some filmmakers would use a title like this to explore a spiritual journey, Solondz’s brilliant choice to rob people of any association that’s not layered in absolute filth forces viewers to delve below the niceties. Like Lovitz’s smirk, everyone is struggling to fake the mandated emotions because, deep down, they all have their own struggles. At the end of the day, Joy’s isn’t necessarily the worst… though it does feature an impressive amount of abuse from friends and foes alike. Even when she becomes empathetic, she takes it away by revealing how shallow her poetry is by admitting that the sexual assault she’s writing about isn’t real. Because of Solondz’s script, these abysmal moments work as comedy, reflecting the audacity of people who wish to be functional members of society but can never get there. Joy may be the closest, but that’s only because her colleagues include a wide range of perverts.
Dylan Baker delivers undoubtedly one of the most notorious performances of the 90s as well as one of Happiness’ most complex characters. He is a therapist who is introduced in a state of distraction as his client recalls walking through a park only to shoot down a whole lot of innocent people. Baker never seems bothered by this fantasy, though it’s become more and more disturbing as American history has progressed. As the man who is supposed to be shilling out advice on how to get better, the best joke in the film is that no matter what he does, he’ll never be able to for one simple reason…
He's the most messed-up character. It would be difficult to talk about him at length for a variety of reasons, notably the way he interacts with children. While Solondz knows how to work around the truly abhorrent potential of the material, there’s still enough coded language and images here to make one’s stomach churn. His absurdity works because he’s at times no different than the bright-eyed image of a Reagan era family. He’s got a wife and kid along with a decent job. Why does he need to ruin it with a sickening compulsion? Solondz pushes the boundaries of discomfort with Baker, making brief conversations about his child’s schoolyard escapades into fodder for his own fantasies.
For me personally, the reason that Baker never loses his magnetism over the runtime is because he embodies the larger worldview of Happiness. He is hiding a part of himself that is demonized by society. To share it with anyone risks public humiliation. Instead, he hides behind a smile. If his dignity and soul are fading away, he’s not showing signs too well. Sometimes it’s clear that his passions are finally breaking free, ready to act on something repressed. While Hoffman calling women just to defile them in between self-pleasuring moans may be a clearer deviance, Baker pushes the line until suddenly he’s off the cliff altogether. In theory, the audience begins by thinking of him as the voice of reason. The fact that he ends as the only one who faces consequences shows just how strange Solondz’s vision of the world is. The audience is left to reconsider who gets to be happy and why it has to be somebody with a history of murder.
Most of all, Solondz has sympathy for the outcasts in the world. While he doesn’t keep any of his characters from facing harm, they still are given enough room to be questioned. Like Harmony Korine around the same time, the stranger one is, the more he’s intrigued by allowing a few minutes to understand how lonely and desperate they are. It also continues the strangely specific trend of stories set in New Jersey where everything is completely off the wall. Without delving too far into visual ugliness, Solondz has found the line where suggestion really messes with the viewer. There’s a playfulness to every scene that forces the viewer to recontextualize a character’s worst tendencies as humorous. It may just be because the animosity is recognizable, reflecting people who assume good intentions despite having anything but. It could also be because it’s the ultimate demystification of The American Dream the year before Sam Mendes packaged it more commercially in American Beauty (1999).
Even then, it’s hard to not admire the way Solondz builds set pieces. In one of my favorite moments, Joy is at work when she learns of Lovitz’s death. She is a telemarketer whose job is, again, to communicate with the public. Given how broken Jane Adams comes across in her performance by this point, having Joy deal with her coworkers is another level of awkward. Lovitz used to work in a corner booth, yet nobody seems to know he exists. What starts as simple gossip between her and a neighbor quickly evolves into a six-person operation to “kind of” know who she’s talking about. Given that Lovitz will publish a suicide note blaming Joy, her misery seems more soporific than the larger ensemble full of divorcees, closeted therapists, murderers, perverted phone callers, and children who probably could do with being dumped in child protective services.
Happiness works because somewhere in all of the awfulness is a recognition of what America has always been. Many have critiqued it through kinder lenses, but Solondz seems absolutely jazzed to dig deeper. This is a film meant for the loss of innocence, to question if happiness could ever be achieved past adolescence. If anything, there comes a point where moral decay sets in and everyone is inherently doomed to the faults of their lineage.
Even knowing that this was the hallmark of Solondz’s career, I was somewhat discouraged by the film’s sequel. I had seen Life During Wartime (2009) a few years prior and found it to be underwhelming. While not a conventional continuation, it still carried the themes started in 1998 over a caustic dinner. I had trouble finding a lot of it interesting enough to care about. Even as a work by Solondz, it didn’t have the level of shock that would make me sneer while leaning forward. It was no Wiener-Dog (2016): a film that I really wanted to see in theaters but, shortly after home release, realized why not a single theater in Los Angeles County was giving me that chance. It’s no Happiness, but it pushes the nihilism into some of the most artfully crass set pieces imaginable. Let’s just say that the central dog has a fate worse than Jane Adams in Happiness.
Deep down, I think I love Happiness for having the audacity to explore the disturbing societal woes of 90s America with such a forceful blow. In a time where pre-millennium nostalgia is at its peak, it’s easy to get lost in the idea that everything was copacetic. On some level, it was because no decade is truly good or bad. However, it’s still the period when pop culture had a strong sense of moral decay. Who could look at the rise of nu-metal and not feel initially perturbed at the request to “Break Stuff”? This was an era where everyone was hot under the collar, doing everything to keep a clean public image. Given that access to private information was a lot more limited than it is today, it was easier to take certain things for granted. One could hold onto their naivety so long as they didn’t venture outside their comfort zone. Happiness could technically be made today and go even further, but I doubt it would have the same impact because the 90s just had that air of mystery. It took a lot more to reveal how unpleasant you truly were. To know these characters did it so willingly is an incredible feat unto itself.
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