So what it all boils down to, when the celluloid's been simmering for twelve hours and the water's long since headed for the ceiling, look there, it drips down past the light fixtures, what a man sees in the steam cast from Todd Solondz' Palindromes, is a hypothesis something 'long the lines of no, we never change. The point to be made, aye, seems to be all 'bout how the essence, the soul, whatever the hell name a man wants to pin to what is, nonetheless, The Balls Of One's Character, it's the same at death as it was at birth.
For sure, says Palindromes, we might look like we changed, maybe we lost a leg in a drunken knife-fight with a Jehovah's Witness, maybe we shaved our heads, maybe we grew absurd emo fringes and started mopin' 'bout the place like puddles with pulses, but our nature is, was and will always be.
One day a man's up to the eyes in The Queen Is Dead, the next he's making a living as a marriage counselor denouncing Morrissey and everything the bequiffed fuck ever stood for.
But still, inside the brain-paste, maybe he doesn't admit it, but he's still the same. He was a shit then and he's a shit now, just a different shade is all.
Shit borne in corn flakes or shit borne in curry spiced wi Hell's granite, it's still shit.
So Todd Solondz sat muttering and battering typewriters left and right cross Solondz HQ, what he decided is that no, he'll be fucked green in the knees if he'll make a picture that doesn't address these notions, each and every one.
So what he does is he creates Palindromes, see, he takes this whole Never-Really-Changing train a thought and steers it in the direction of a fairly bleak and yet weirdly touching fable about abortion and paedophilia and Jesus freaks.
What he gets to assuming is that if he's gonna talk about The Inner and all that sorta metaphysical jazz, he's gonna have us pay little or no attention to The Outer, so fuck it, best way to go about it all is to have a buncha actors of varying genders and races and sizes play the same character, a young girl, very young, by the name of Aviva, cept sometimes she's called Henrietta or Dawn.
I get on the phone sometimes around midnight on Saturday, get to talking to a fella by the name of Synopsis, don't speak in nothing but plot points, helps me out when I got all sortsa thoughts on a particular motion flick but I'll be fucked if I could tell you what it's about.
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Article comments
1 - Greg Smyth
Great article Duke, but why are you so hard on Solondz? I mean, I can't say I *enjoyed* Happiness or Storytelling (in that they made me uncomfortable) but I thought they were Good films.
2 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
Greg, i do get especially harsh on Solondz. certainly Happiness is technically impressive, i just get the feelin he detests people, and i find it hard to get behind that sorta thing. it reminds me a lot of League Of Gentlemen at their worst, where there's just a total absense of any humanity whatsoever. Happiness had a comedy peodophile rape scene, which in itself isn't neccesarily Wrong, i mean Brass Eye did it and the episode in question was a masterpiece, but whereas Brass Eye had somethin to say, Solondz had nothin goin on whatsoever other than contempt for people, and he tried all these ever so shocking tactics for to grant the flick a credibility it just didnt have.
but this is a different matter. it still has the tiresome "oh look, controversial stuff!" tomfoolery, but it seems to have more going on than just empty exploitation.
I remember a review or an article in Sight And Sound a couple years back that compared that recent flush of controversial indie flicks to the grindhouse movies of the 70's. "Look here! How much can you take!!!????!"
The contradiction is that i love the grindhouse stuff, since at least it knew what it was and had no pretensions at being anything else. and often, intentionally or not, those films ended up saying a hell of a lot more than supposedly Important flicks like Happiness ever manage.
3 - Mat Brewster
The saving grace for me for Happinness was that he made me feel sorry for such a despicable character. I was full of anger and nausea for the pedophile for much of the flick, and then Solondz turns around and makes me sad for the sucker. I was moved by the characters frankness with his son over the whole situation.
Solondz may hate people, but he seems to also be saying that we at least deserve a little empathy.
4 - Rodney Welch
Couldn't agree less. I felt nothing for the character -- and I thought the whole movie was an empty exercise in pushing shock buttons, especially that scene you mention. What purpose did the father have in saying those things to his son? Was there any value to this so-called honesty at all? No. It strained credulity. Like the movie itself, it was contrived for the sole purpose of audience repulsion. Solondz is a pustulent sex-hating puritan.
5 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
Mat and Rodney, both fine points there. personally i dunno what camp i pitch nearest to. i do suspect that Rodney's onto somethin with how the whole father / son talk was just another calculated shock, but in sayin that, it did make me feel somethin other than shock, maybe that empathy Mat mentions. he's a complex sonna bitch, this Solondz, but i still see some horrible thought processes at work, and a shameful emptiness, a thinking that if we shock folks bad enough chances are they'll assume we just presented something a lot more challenging that it actually was.
But that father / son scene is definately a hard number to really put into that categorie, because there is at least the glimmer of a humanity in there. I just get the feelin that said glimmer is a mirage, that Solondz doesn't really care for these people at all, and presents it in such a way purely becuase he knows it'll repulse a lotta people.
Maybe that veil of irony and tongue-in-cheek he flings over everything is doin him a disservice sometimes. i dunno.
6 - Mat Brewster
I thought the point was showing the dad owning up to those terrible things rather than denying it all.
I will say I recently tried to watch the film a second time and coudn't manage it.
To me there is a real hipster irony to all of Solondz films, or the ones I've seen. Like where the chick with Phillip Seymore Hoffman finally connects with him only to admit she's killed some guy.
All of which is sometimes interesting, but often shallow.
7 - Rodney Welch
The thing of it is -- I just don't believe Solondz. I like hard-hitting realistic dramas that pull back the curtain on the sham and drudgery and what-have-you of American domestic life, but his movies never really have the ring of truth he seems to want me to hear, you know? It seems forced, made up, and hateful -- generated more by his own misanthropy than anything else. This definitely goes for that scene between the dad and the son; both of them seemed in the end like outrageous cartoons; the dad talking about jacking off over his son, and the son boo-hooing miserably -- it wasn't just punishing to watch, it seemed false, as if Solondz molded these characters only to give them this rather brutal fate. There's a great sense of contrivance to it all. Did anyone watch that scene and feel it developed truly and honestly out of all that happened before? Because I sure didn't.
8 - Coralie
Sorry, the character Bob is not a Pederast, he doesn't have a relationship with a boy. He's a paedophile either fledgling (having sex with 13yrold Aviva running away from home and then dumping her alone at a truck-stop) or possibly a serial paedophile as implied by the kid when they pass his trailer/caravan and he says he'd 'paid his debt to society and now he's just the nicest guy' and the fact that Bob is in bed with Aviva, balling. Interestingly its the first scene in which Aviva musters some coversational dialogue. Ironic since he is incapable of doing the same, so overcome by his own sexual predilections for children.
This is the worst kind of movie. It doesn't surprise me that NO STUDIO WOULD FUND IT and Solondz had to put up the money himself. People who are reading this, I wish you knew me better so you know how unsual it is for me to say anything so negative. This movie is a SHAME to the movie industry, indie or otherwise.
In addition, it basically follows a mentally and emotionally subnormal (possibly brain-damaged) child being repeatedly raped (a 13yr old cannot consent and the law is complicated around those with mental health/severe learning disability issues also) and also emotionally abused by her parents (forced to have an abortion) HOW IS IT A PG??? Completely sick in my opinion, that you would let children watch this film.
Sick that anyone should watch it really, since it is SO bad. People are universally confused by this movie because it is BAD, it is complicated, there isn't any hidden meaning - Mark, the other paedophile explains it in an uncomfortably didactic manner (the voice of Solondz, an actor who looks fairly like him too) and there is no mystery. Its just bad, bad, bad, BAD, SO BAD! ARGH!!!!!