Happiness

...One thing is certain: Only if Americans learn again that democracy is the work of everyone can we hope to reclaim our collective identity as a free, creative people for whom "democracy" forms a common bond...

...Instead, in the Trish segments, husband Bill becomes the focus of interest, especially since he is played with such disturbing naturalness by Dylan Baker...

...It's just about impossible to make first-rate art featuring characters you are dedicated to unmasking and/or punishing...

...The actress Jane Adams makes Joy easily the most appealing character on the screen (not that there's much competition): compassionate, fairly intelligent, civic-minded, and, above all, ever hopeful in the pursuit of happiness...

...Scratch a banker and find a serial killer...

...Its members include David Sedaris (a frequent monologuist on National Public Radio as well as a playwright), John Waters (director of Serial Morn and Pecker), Tony Kushner (his Angels in America shows what happens when a geek has promethean ambition), Todd Haynes (creator of an extraordinary film, Safe), and the currently most visible ex-geek champ, the screenwriterdirector, Todd Solondz...

...They're not s-f, in other words, they're "sci-fi," a term that makes aficionados and writers alike cringe: because "sci-fi" is the idiot twin of "s-f," concerned not with the chances for moral survival in an uncertain technological future, but with the glories of gadgetry and the funny little, mean little jokes our gadgets might choose to play upon us...

...But, in some fundamental way, she will never, never "fit in...

...Some viewers, to reassure themselves, might kid themselves into thinking that Bill's good behavior is just hypocrisy...

...Yet the changes at both Saint Bernard's and Saint Catherine's suggest the powerful lesson of the Nehemiah story: Common work for large purpose, drawing upon the talents and capacities of ordinary people, can rebuild civic cul~res...

...Precisely because of that last trait, Solondz visits one humiliation after another upon Joy's head because optimism is not taken lightly in Solondz land...

...The simple, sad fact is that TV has done very poorly by s-f...

...Having endured a childhood full of schoolyard taunting and parental beady-eyed suspicion, the geek finally rears up and asks, "Hey, why am I called sick when all of society is sick...

...Helen, a popular writer...

...When Christine confesses to being a murderer, it's startling, but even more disquieting is the way we can't help seeing her as a big, cuddly bear of a woman, physically and emotionally quite compatible with the lonely Allen, and he sees her that way Commonweal | 7 December 4,1998 even after learning of her crime...

...In the concluding shot, our heroine sits on the school bus surrounded by the classmates who still despise her...

...But gosh, nobody's perfect and Allen is perfectly content to spend a chastely affectionate night with Christine, though one certainly hopes he won't absentmindedly repair to the kitchen for a midnight snack...

...Solondz never makes the mistake of too facilely "understanding" Bill, or implying that his sexual aberration is a mere ailment easily correctable through therapy...

...Her recognition of this is her tragedy and triumph...

...The fact that the director sometimes makes us giggle at Bill's predatory tactics simply'adds to the horror...

...here is an as yet unnamed school of American playwrighting and moviemaking which I, of course, propose to name...

...Nothing succeeds, of course...

...Oh, yeah, there's "Star Trek"--which the mighty Harlan Ellison refers to as "Star Dreck"--and its latterday clones, and there's Rod Serling's apparently never-to-be-out-of-reruns 'Twilight Zone...

...Both of these women, in fact, are such monsters of fatuousness that they can't function as heroines of their own stories because monsters can't evince dramatic growth or deterioration...

...I doubt it...

...Helen, the kinky writer, is soon overshadowed in her episodes by Allen, the telephonic pervert...

...We sense that she will grow up, probably get slightly prettier and more self-confident, hold down a job, maybe acquire a husband and children, and achieve a generally plausible life...

...The editing is especially canny: Whenever a character is about to react to some painful truth or plea, the camera cuts away, so we are kept within the climate of frustration that all the characters inhabit...

...It's as if Paddy Chayefsky's Marty had been rewritten by the Marquis de Sade...

...And so, if Joy tries to break off with a boyfriend, he humiliates her in a public place...

...That Bill abuses his son's playmate is sickening enough, but that he has been and continues to be a reasonably good father when he isn't being a pervert, dispensing liberal advice and emotional support, is somehow more disturbing...

...Calls for "community spirit" in a fragmented, unequal society sound quixotic...

...What a surprise, then, to find, this season, "Welcome to Paradox" on the schedule...

...when she seems to have found true love with a Russian 6migr6, he turns out to be a con man who steals her guitar and stereo--and then borrows money from her...

...I'm so ashamed, she sobs after confessing to Allen...

...heodore Sturgeon was one of the truly fine writers of science fiction, and at a s-f convention in the late fifties-well before the genre became academically respectable he shocked his audience by announcing what has come to be known, among fans and writers, as "Sturgeon's Law...

...The monster on the airplane wing was real, see...

...Would a nice, liberal father react with less outrage to discovering his son had been raped...

...Trek" is essentially a serial, like "Bonanza," "Ally McBeal," or (the admittedly brilliant) "Law and Order": Each week the same cadre of characters encounters a problem, and each week resolves it, so that the next week they can resolve another one (as in, "Captain, it's an alien life form of pure energy, something we've never encountered before...

...You must think I'm a monster...

...The unquenchable blackness of this black comedy springs not so much from the catastrophies in it as from the normalcy surrounding the catastrophies...

...Its junior-high heroine, Dawn "Wienerdog" Wiener, isn't surrounded by absolute monsters but only the usual assortment of Philistines, snobs, and slobs we all grew up with (and, upon occasion, were...

...She puts herself through a miserable apprenticeship in how the world works by pursuing schemes that she thinks will gain her that world's acceptance...

...Let's face it," he began his talk, "90 percent of science fiction is crap...

...At one point, Helen tells her sister, "We're not laughing at you, Joy, we're laughing with you...

...The victim is never mocked...

...But, the abiding emotion Happiness leaves you with is sadness...

...Geek is Good...

...This gives the lad a new lease on life...

...if she receives a phone call from a man she takes to be a more promising lover, he turns out to be the obscene caller...

...Und so weiter...

...In his first film, Welcome to the Doll House, Todd Solondz gave us a relatively restrained and often touching example of the genre...

...And, after the expected gasp from the assembly, he continued: "Ninety percent of everything is crap...

...They were on Earth all along, see...

...In a managerial world dominated by the values of the marketplace, it is daunting to imagine a vibrant, citizen-centered democracy...

...In fact, Bill is a psychiatrist and this physician certainly hasn't healed himself...

...Why does the father of one of Bill's victims have to be portrayed as a bullet-headed macho-fascist...

...But neither of those is really s-f...

...In his latest film, the ultra-black comedy Happiness, Solondz goes further by showing us that there is no stable society to fit into and that individuals can only pursue, in lonely desperation, whatever happiness they can, a search that is bound to end in failure since there is no such thing as happiness...

...The photography is deliberately kept as bland as a '70s situation comedy...

...A possible drawback: no one wears as much emotional armor as the revitalized geek, and no one is so concerned with proving that there are no exceptions--nay, none!--to his take on the world...

...The herd has marked her as a pariah, and a pariah she Commonweal | 6 December4, 1998 will remain...

...But the camera draws dose to her face which we see is stoically set rather than ingratiating, while the soundtrack separates her voice from the others so that she seems to be singing to herself rather than with the others...

...and Joy, an unsuccessful songwriter...

...Because Solondz's feelings for Bill and Joy are ambivalent--a sort of compassionate loathing for him, an exasperated affection for her--the two emerge as the most interesting figures...

...if she, a teacher of English to foreigners, refuses to go out on strike out of concern for her pupils, the students themselves jeer at her as a scab...

...It isn't...

...In a play or film of the Geek Revenge school, the middle class is composed entirely of practicing or potential psychos...

...This is all by way of celebrating a TV series, new this year, that just might be the first honest, canny, and responsible meeting of TV and s-f at their mutual best...

...So well do we come to understand his sodden existence and self-perpetuating hopelessness that we accept his falling into a sexless but affectionate relationship with a certain Christine, who is not only as fat as he is but (gulp) a murderer with body parts stored in her refrigerator...

...And, "Why should I be labeled a geek when, in their hearts, my jock tormentors and parental accusers are themselves creeps and weirdoes and, unlike me, in denial about it...

...The music is of the "Hi, honey, I'm home" variety, especially when it's the pedophile coming home...

...Produced by R. W. Vincent and conceived, and mainly written, by Jeremy Commonweal | 8 December4, 1998...

...He often makes us laugh, but he's not laughing...

...If similar acts of civic renewal were to take place widely, as the National Commission for Civic Renewal, chaired by Sam Nunn and William Bennett, has suggested, Americans would be able to regenerate an understanding of democracy worthy of our great history...

...It's called "Welcome to Paradox," and it runs on--the irony has not escaped me---the Sci-Fi Channel...

...When Bill tells his wife he's sick, she advises him to take a Tylenol...

...And Helen, regretful that she didn't suffer a childhood rape which would infuse her fiction with authentic angst, becomes momentarily enraptured with an obscene phone caller, who turns out to be her fat loser of a neighbor, Allen...

...Is Dawn still aspiring to normalcy...

...Joy, being not only capable of change but downright desperate for it, is the only one of the sisters who holds the center of her own story...

...Solondz is a real artist in that he knows how to make the look and feel of his movie mirror its emotional content...

...though, if Sturgeon had ever written about the quality of s-f on TV, he would probably have ratcheted up the crap-quotient...

...But the Geek Revenge problem abides and somewhat abrades the undeniable brilliance of Happiness...

...In other words: dire...

...Wise words from a good man...

...And why would Joy's class of immigrants uniformly yell "scab" at her when they're benefiting from her strike breaking, and when surely none of them are union workers or even sympathizers...

...Far from it...

...And "Zone" except for maybe ten or twelve episodes of real force, is a collection of anecdotes, all ending, as in the worst of Poe, in a punchline (They're really in hell, see...

...But, in his determination to mock what he takes to be the factitious normalcy of middle-class life, especially as embodied in Trish, Solondz goes overboard...

...The scene in which this sad pervert plies his entire family with sleeping pills so that he can have uninterrupted access to an eleven-year-old playmate of his son is sheer ski~n-crawling horror...

...Call it Revenge of the Ex-Geeks...

...To which Joy replies, "But I'm not laughing...

...But she's oblivious to the fact that her husband, Bill, is a homosexual pedophile whose pursuit of happiness is about to entail the rape of two boys...

...By so insisting upon the crassness of his characters, Solondz often comes across as mean-spirited rather than truly satirical...

...They sing the school song and she joins in...

...True, she's half-asleep at that moment, but are we to think she'd be more perceptive if she were awake...

...president, this involvement is emblematic of the type of education the college is developing: "We link students to collaborative community work where they can experience their own potential for renewing society...

...enter a suburban home and fall into hell...

...as in, "Oh, stuff it, Spock...

...That is Solondz...

...Rather than focus on career preparation, we aim for learning that deepens professional identity and prepares for a life of meaning and purpose...

...The first two seem to be successes, and Trish often burbles about her perfect life...

...Now since the Sci-Fi Channel geared up, maybe a decade ago, it's been mainly a sci-fi (not s-f) fan's dustbin: reruns of schlockmeister fifties films, godawful TV shows, and, more recently, original made-for-TV movies and series, almost all of them powerful demonstrations of the major premise of Sturgeon's Law...

...He goes on to write books, plays, and movies which prove his suspicions about the world to his own satisfaction and, if the work is funny or probing, to the satisfaction of many others...

...Happiness's nominal protagonists are three sisters: Trish, a housewife...