Happiness feat. 30 Years Later
Added 2022-05-13 08:28:17 +0000 UTCWe're joined by hosts of 30 Years Later Podcast, Ricky Camilleri and Chris Chafin, to discuss Todd Solondz's grimly funny ensemble comedy 'Happiness'. We discuss the writer/director's singular talent for handling "sticky" subject matter and characters, the film's remarkably prescient and timely themes of emmiseration and depravity in modern American existence, and why current media discourse and trends are especially averse to embracing the brilliance of Solondz's deeply nuanced portrayals.
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Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish
Comments
...Another point that maybe wasn't brought up (I can't remember), is that it isn't just that people are navigating culture and politics with a sense of feeling compelled to "align my opinion along a safe, already established take on whatever", but that it's also - I think - influenced by a pervasive sense that you can't change anything. And if you can't impact anything, if it's all the same anyway, why bother with the pretense of respectability? Just go wild. Everyone's a satanist pedophile. There are tunnels everywhere. You are a clone and a crisis-actor. I don't think this operates on a level of conscious thought (if it did you'd have to actually grapple with it) but it's an expression of a felt reality, and it's sorta alarming, in a way, that it's felt profoundly enough that people feel comfortable (openly) being this level of unserious about real things happening around them. I think what's going on - in the US especially, but here and there in the rest of the world - is a sort of slow, collective "calling of the bluff", with the bluff being "your input on how things are and work, matters". And if that is the case, you can only keep rituals like voting for stuff going for so long until people finally have a nervous breakdown. Nobody wants to live a Potemkin-life. Obviously, this also (sadly) makes any kind of collective organizing more difficult (which of course benefits those in power, so they're probably more than happy to enable it, even if they might not have a thought-out analysis on why they do what they do; they probably act as much out of emotional instinct as we do).
Jesper Ohlsson
2022-05-14 11:41:41 +0000 UTCThis was great. Loved listening to it in the garden today (yes, I am grandma). I think when I watched this movie - many, many years ago - the pedophilia storyline sorta overshadowed everything, to the point that I don't remember this movie having any other scenes. It's been fun to revisit youtube-clips from this movie after listening to the episode, and being pleasantly surprised at how different things lands today. The actual tone is so surprisingly comedic; something that was (understandably) completely sidelined at the time. One of the fun scenes I saw on youtube was Laura Flynne Boyle - in her head - wishing she had been raped as a kid, because it would make her academic pretentions more credible. It's sort of a "throw-away" sentiment (in a movie full of that), but that kind of deranged stress-induced thinking was delightful to see portrayed in a movie. That scene also made me think of Laura Flynne; I don't know anything about her private life at the time, but I feel like she was one of - if not "the" - female, sorta high profile actors that media had settled on giving an eating-disorder storyline to (while never honestly checking up on if that was true), and it was weirdly ok to do that, because she was so incredibly beautiful. I wouldn't be surprised if Solondz had some of this in mind when he cast her (he obviously has very gay sensibilities). ...I watched the Solondz interview from O'Brian after I heard the episode, and it was very sweet. Solondz isn't physically attractive, but his way of moving through the world is (to the point that I don't want to condescend by adding any qualifier to a person I've never met). It was a great episode for me to listen to, on this particular day. Cheers; love.
Jesper Ohlsson
2022-05-13 15:14:26 +0000 UTC
