Happiness: Normal Monsters, Monsters Normal

Todd Solondz’ Happiness (1998) has a reputation. It’s bleak. It’s iconoclastic. It’s perverted. It’s simply “too much.”

I couldn’t disagree more. As always, Solondz is offbeat. Philip Seymour Hoffman, for example, plays a heavy-breathing phone harasser who sticks things to his bedroom wall with the results of his telephonic adventures. There are sex offenders, sundae-eating murderers, and Russian cabby sex pests. Dads buy magazines for kids for themselves. This is, again, Todd Solondz.

But the movie is, dare I say, beautiful. It’s not just a freak show, though it is funny. It is bleak, though I’d hardly call it depressing. Its essence is the normality of its insane characters. Maybe this sounds trite in our moment, but normal people are weird. Many besuited doctors and lawyers are freaks. Not outwardly, of course. But they are freakish nonetheless.

That, of course, is disturbing in itself—potential criminals around every corner. But there’s a hopeful side of the coin too: we’re all screwed up. To different degrees, yes. And not all in a criminal way. But I can’t help but bask in Solondz’ insight and generosity, his willingness to put “normal people” under the microscope to see what’s germinating.

Maybe that’s how we got here. “Normal” in the 90s, QAnon in 2021. Maybe, maybe.