He serves up the perversions of Happiness, the meanness of Welcome to the Dollhouse, or even the self-deprecation of Fear, Anxiety and Depression in all their lowliness. The edgelord present in Solondz’s films doesn’t wow us with the director’s brilliant technique; instead, he disgusts us with bald imagery of people at their most despicable, and bitterly laughs about it.
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Filmmaker Todd Solondz spares nobody in his films, not even himself, one could argue. In Wiener-Dog (2016), a failed comedy screenwriter turned teacher conspicuously refers to his craft. Danny DeVito plays that failure with weariness. He comes across as shabby as possible, as if the character knows he’s a dunce. “What if, then what?” he exasperatedly advises his frustrated students, until he finally breaks down mentally after being the laughingstock at film school for so long.
Wiener-Dog
From the time Solondz starred in his now disowned debut Fear, Anxiety and Depression (1989), where he channeled his inner Woody Allen, he has specialized in sardonic putdowns. His brand of black comedy excels in depicting unsympathetic people as unpleasantly as possible. His provocative oeuvre relates to the offensiveness an edgelord displays on the internet. To dismiss this as mere misanthropy, however, misses the affection present as well. At the root of Solondz’s provocations lies a call for recognition, just like DeVito’s teacher’s palpable frustrations emerge from his being snubbed.
It does appear at first glance that misanthropy colors each joke. Solondz seems to outlaw optimism. This shows in how, for instance, he follows a foster family of challenged orphans in Palindromes (2004). When the children sing a Christian gospel song, they give a performance akin to a Backstreet Boys posse. Their exaggerated enthusiasm stands out in the frontal framing, which sets the group in an ironic light. The film almost chides them. The contrast couldn’t be greater with the compassionate documentary Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids? (1977). There, filmmaker John Korty gets down to the level of the foster family of disadvantaged children with his handheld camera, to celebrate their progress.
Palindromes
Solondz doesn’t show a warm interest in his characters; he mocks them after bringing them into cringeworthy situations. Vicious acts fill a film like Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) – perhaps his magnum opus – to the brim. In it, young teenager Dawn Wiener struggles, because she gets bullied at school and neglected at home. She lives in an unforgiving universe. When she stands up for another bullied kid, that victim berates her in turn. It forms a moment of mean-spirited spitting upon kindness.
This meanness runs through the whole film. Dawn stays the butt of every joke. Thanks to the stark framing and bare-bones decoupage, this fact feels confronting. The hyperbolic facial expressions and body language of the actors further heightens the churlish tone of the comedy. For instance, Dawn’s parents’ constant fawning over her younger snobbish sister no matter what contrasts with their harsh treatment of Dawn herself. At the same time, the comedy unnerves, because the underlying disdainful attitudes of the characters make Dawn’s escaping the bleakness feel impossible.
Perhaps the vilest moment in Solondz’s filmography comes in Happiness (1998). There, therapist Bill drugs his family and the visiting young boy in order to take advantage of the latter after everyone’s passed out. Sequenced with a setback – the boy doesn’t want to eat the spiked ice cream – the film creates a mesmerizing tension when the father nervously makes him a tuna sandwich instead, and bungles in adding the sedative. Thanks to the clever positioning – his sleepy family passes through the hallway behind him – it feels thrilling when he is almost caught.
Happiness
In an earlier sickening scene, Bill plays with himself in the car holding a children’s magazine. Dylan Baker as Bill gets the space to pull off a horrendously tortured face, while an oblivious family enters their car in the background for added caustic irony. In these moments of underhanded identification, the film empathizes with the perpetrator of a horrendous crime. Yet cringe isn’t used just to conclude that humanity’s rotten; rather, it’s used as a provocation, by throwing Bill’s tribulations in our face.
The provoking nature of the films shows most clearly in Storytelling (2001). The first part of the film revolves around an insecure white college student who breaks up with her boyfriend suffering from cerebral palsy to then hit it off with their imposing black creative writing teacher.
When she goes with him to his place, she first tells herself over and over in the bathroom mirror to not be racist. After that, she meekly follows his orders, undresses, and lets him take advantage of her while she shouts racial slurs on his demand. Shot from an awkward diagonal angle, which highlights the differences in physique between the two and enhances the sordid sight of lowered pants, the act feels grotesque. Coupled with the demonstrative buildup to this moment, Solondz brute forces an exploration of the notion of white guilt.
Storytelling
For her next writing assignment, she writes about this experience. After her fellow students trash the piece, her teacher puts the final nail in the coffin by calling it not as bad as her previous work. The first part is called “Fiction,” whereas the second part of Storytelling about a documentary filmmaker is called “Non-Fiction.” Yet fiction and reality snidely intertwine throughout Storytelling.
Provocative art often misfires. For instance, the frequently touted former enfant terrible Gaspar Noé dazzles with technical wizardry to depict gruesome happenings. The convoluted scripting and cinematography of Irreversible (2002) create a hallucinatory effect, as does the drugged dance euphoria turned to nightmare of Climax (2018). Noé’s films overwhelm with brutal situations where no moral standard feels safe. His films rely on shock, something one might argue Solondz’s films do as well.
Noé relies on sensation akin to the late 19th-century Decadent movement, whose artists made a career around “épater les bourgeois” – to scandalize the middle class. In a recent essay for Aeon Magazine, Kate Hext argues how the hyperbolic scandalizing of this movement can disrupt one’s self-image and one’s values. Through excessive sensations one thus would doubt everything held dear. Yet while a novel like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) may spray easily quotable prose, the wit Wilde uses to describe Dorian’s hedonism and corruption ultimately doesn’t engage with the transgressions and stays ornamental. The shock fizzles out.
As John Dewey says in Art as Experience (1934), “that which distinguishes an experience as aesthetic is conversion of resistance and tensions […] into a movement toward an inclusive and fulfilling close” (p. 58). The elements of a work of art stand in a dynamic that “rounds out an experience into completeness and unity as emotional” (p. 43). The consummation of an aesthetic experience comes with an act of reflection, something lacking in a lot of art that relies on provocation. Excitement is generated without it being channeled toward a fulfilling conclusion.
Noé’s films, for example, do not elicit any further response apart from the shock itself. Hext puts too much stock in the dazzling displays of the Decadents being able to lead to reflection. Instead, works like those of the Decadents and filmmakers like Noé remain at the stage of the doubt they provoked. They “are works of art that merely excite. […] Energy is left without organization. Dramas are then melodramatic; paintings of nudes are pornographic” (Dewey, p. 185).
However, despite its many transgressions, Solondz’s work doesn’t fit into this notion of provocation through scandal. The cringe he whips up, rather, relies on an irony reminiscent of the persona of the edgelord. Where the Decadents create scintillating immersive sensations, the edgelord keeps people at a distance and taunts them through extremist statements. Where the Decadents tempt, the edgelord trolls.
This persona originated on the internet in 2015, driven by lonely young males. The documentary TFW NO GF (2020) tries and fails to grapple with the meaning of the online trolling of the edgelords it follows. The endless display of memes mostly relevant only during the week they were posted feels rather trite, while scenes of the subjects’ daily lives stay trivial instead of capturing any insight into their motivations. As a result, the edgelord here comes across as a role player without any grounding in a genuine personality. It doesn’t come across that unlike the Decadents, the posturing attitude functions as a shield.
To better grasp the loneliness that hides behind that shield of extreme internet postings, one can turn to the electronic dance music of Sewerslvt, who captures it in spirit. Their earlier work of abrasive drum and bass, like the album Drowning in the Sewer (2019), still feels rather crude, with its excessive imagery of suicide that comes across as too fetishistic. However, their masterpiece, We Had Good Times Together, Don’t Forget That (2021), overwhelms with its creepy sampling, harsh beats, and somber arranging. Through, for instance, the nightmarish escalations of “Blissful Overdose,” the world is painted with a sincere despair that flows from someone holed up inside their mind.
Happiness
Solondz’s own brand of misery does arrive at a similar kind of despair. He serves up the perversions of Happiness, the meanness of Welcome to the Dollhouse, or even the self-deprecation of Fear, Anxiety and Depression in all their lowliness. The edgelord present in Solondz’s films doesn’t wow us with the director’s brilliant technique; instead, he disgusts us with bald imagery of people at their most despicable, and bitterly laughs about it.
Behind the scenes, so to speak, Solondz the edgelord stands as a towering figure that punches down on all the characters equally. In that sense he subverts the default Hollywood formula, where a protagonist typically undergoes a change based on a significant insight. All elements of such a film lead to that insight, obtained through overcoming obstacles, where the protagonist learns the merits and demerits of different approaches before coming to the ultimate “truth.” Yet in Solondz’s world, such a positive psychology doesn’t exist. Instead of heroes changing their lives for the better, his characters are more like villains whose lives only get worse.
Through their depiction of moral deficiency, the films open up a space to come to terms with desolation. Solondz goes through the worst with his characters and thereby ultimately embraces them for who they are – something the director himself stated, as mentioned on his They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? profile. Wiener-Dog contains a rare moment of heartbreaking subtlety, where Dawn Wiener holds the hand of her love interest years later when they reconnect. In Life during Wartime (2009), Bill looks up his son in college after he has been released from prison. They watch each other in a tense back-and-forth conversation, which, interpolated by Bill’s stoic consumption of fruit gums, leads to a painful closure of their past. In cases such as these, Solondz acknowledges the hurt and isolation of his characters.
Life During Wartime
In that sense of acknowledgment, singer-songwriter Nicole Dollanganger’s album Ode to Dawn Wiener: Embarrassing Love Songs (2013) feels like a proper extension to Solondz’s films. Her high coquettish voice clouds the acoustic guitar-driven lullabies and turns them into troublesome expressions of intimacy, which builds up an atmosphere both moving and unpleasant. It’s as if she dares others to empathize with her in spite of all her sordid fantasies. In the same way, Solondz as the edgelord behind the scenes demands a radical empathizing with all the characters.
The failed dinner date that opens Happiness serves as an example. Both the man and the woman try desperately not to confront the fact that the latter just doesn’t feel it. In the wry back-and-forth, one holds the upper hand only to lose it soon after to the other. The awkwardness hurts, because underneath this failure of connection lies a severe disappointment in the inability of people to connect. Rather than Solondz being the directorial authority that punches down on them, it feels like society did it through its structural isolation of people.
Happiness
Perhaps one can only create such moments of agony through a deep understanding of social interaction. To unnerve like Solondz does requires empathizing thoroughly with the characters. With its accompanying radical acceptance of people at their worst, this feels rather different from pure misanthropy. Due to the naturalistic feel of the films, the characters’ wickedness comes as a tragic fact of life, their doings forming a haunted mirror that shows society’s ugliness. A sense of loneliness is palpable in all of Solondz’s films.
His style rhymes with what film theorist Tom Gunning called the cinema of attraction. According to Gunning, early films often revolved around the appraisal of the medium’s possibilities through the mechanic of surprise. One can think of the much copied frontal shot in The Great Train Robbery (1903), where a robber points a gun at the camera. In its directness the shot plays on excitement. It didn’t hold a specific narrative function, and the shot was therefore spliced into the film differently at various screenings, depending on the whims of the particular nickelodeon showing it. Solondz’s comedy of cringe relies on surprise as well, with the characters frequently doing outlandish things. Yet this surprise comes not with fanfare but disgust. The static framing, the frequent churlish tone of the acting, and sober editing enhance the sly scripting to create a cinema of repulsion.
The edgelord persona that underlies this cinema of repulsion goes beyond mere trolling. The provocations are an expression of despair as commanding as Sewerslvt. The edgelord calls for attention with transgressions as a way to lash out at the indifference of an isolating society. As such, a film like Welcome to the Dollhouse is not an expression of meanness, but as an embrace of wickedness is rather an expression of a broken spirit. Seen as a cry, the film as a whole reflects the loneliness and alienation in society.
Like the cinema of attraction, Solondz’s cinema of repulsion revolves around impressing. The cringe situations form a jolting reminder to take notice of the film itself. The way his films attack an indifferent society comes with a hope to be acknowledged by that same society by any means necessary. Perhaps the edgelord behind the films offends to gain recognition and dispel loneliness. The edginess serves as a desperate attempt at being seen. Not for the sake of it, but as a confirmation of one’s individuality, which has been nullified by society.
Solondz’s films match a pervasive loneliness with an exposure of society’s illusions. In Ghost World (2001), graphic novel writer Daniel Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff also reveal people to be frauds with a similar style. The dejected high school graduate Enid berates one poser after the other in her hometown, where the streets feel frightfully empty and the 1950s-themed diner feels cheerlessly fake. Yet, despite constantly lambasting society like an edgelord, she does try to come into her own. In her attempts at personhood, such as a short-lived punk phase or cultivating a taste for ancient vinyl records, she works through her disillusions and uses them as stepping stones to a life lived in earnest.
Where in Zwigoff’s Ghost World misery leads to a brutally honest examination of life for its protagonist, the characters in Solondz’s films keep wallowing in their misery. The failed screenwriter in Wiener-Dog, for instance, doesn’t do anything to change his situation. Like Solondz the director, he is content to merely snub the world. In his case, he uses his dog for a failed bombing attack. A final interaction with a police officer leads to a sardonic reframing of his oft-repeated writing advice of “what if, then what?”
Life During Wartime
Enid’s transformation in Ghost World points to the limitation of the edgelord persona, and with it the limitation of Solondz’s work. The edgelord’s identity is built around the offending, thus failing to develop a positive relationship with their environment from which to expand their personality. In the same way, Solondz’s films stop at the point of lashing out. They never question the edgelord within. Despite the films’ uncomfortableness, they do settle into their specific niche and never express an intention to move beyond it. Solondz’s cinema of repulsion resembles the tragedy of the edgelord – a refusal to leave the edge.
Bibliography
Dewey, J. (1934/2005). Art as experience. Penguin Books.
Gunning, T. (2006). The cinema of attractions reloaded (pp. 381-388). Amsterdam University Press.
Hext, K. (2024, June 10). All aquiver. Aeon Magazine. https://aeon.co/essays/the-danger-of-decadence-is-also-its-value-we-need-more-of-it
They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (n.d.). Todd Solondz. Retrieved September 4, 2024, from https://www.theyshootpictures.com/solondztodd.htm
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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.
