Immoral laughter: the sickening humour of Todd Solondz film ‘Happiness’
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(Credits: Far Out / Good Machine Releasing)
It’s fair to say that most of Todd Solondz’s work takes a darkly comic and satirical view of middle classic suburban America, but it’s his 1998 black comedy Happiness that seems to leave the most sour taste in one mouth, even amid all the hilarity and laughter that undoubtedly occurs.
Starring Janes Adams, Elizabeth Ashley, Dylan Baker, Lara Flynn Boyle and Philip Seymour Hoffman, as well as a swathe of other stars, Happiness focuses on the dysfunction of a seemingly normal family. However, beneath that suburban banality lies dark secrets desperate to remain hidden.
Solondz provides an unflinching account of middle-class life with an initial focus on the Jordan sisters, beginning with Joy, a woman who is desperately lonely and longs for the love and affection of another. There’s Helen, a successful author who can never be satisfied despite her wealth and critical acclaim, and also Trish, a housewife unknowingly married to a paedophile, Bill.
It’s Bill who provides much of the most sickening aspects of humour that arrive in Happiness. Bill is a psychiatrist who frequently zones out of attention while pretending to listen to his clients. We discover his paedophilia towards the beginning of the film when he becomes aroused by a children’s magazine and masturbates to it in his car.
Things become more problematic when Bill’s son, Timmy, asks his father about masturbating and his anxieties about not being able to have an orgasm. Now, in a typical family flick, perhaps this moment might be one of a wholesome, heartwarming nature, but in Happiness, knowing that Bill is indeed a paedophile, Timmy’s question gathers an entire edge of darkness, and yet, undoubtedly hilarity.
One can’t help but laugh at little Timmy’s earnestness, and he asks his father what “cumming” is, amplified by Solondz’s ridiculous use of a stereotypical emotional family movie score. Equally funny are Bill’s attempts to answer his son’s question and to comfort him whilst perhaps stifling his arousal.
Things get worse when Bill ends up drugging and raping one of Timmy’s friends, Johnny, whose father is concerned about his being gay. When Bill learns that another of the boy’s friends, Ronald, is at home alone while his parents are away, he also sexually abuses him. Inevitably, Bill is caught and apprehended by the authorities, with some of the local schoolchildren and parents spraying the words “serial rapist” over Bill and Trish’s home.
Now, mentioning rape, paedophilia and laughter all in the same sentence is naturally trick ground to tread, and if one hasn’t seen the film, then naturally, it sounds absolutely immoral. Yet, Solondz manages to detail the darkest acts of humanity and make us laugh at them, which serves to show the banality of the supposedly moral-minded middle class of America.
Around the film’s conclusion, Timmy again confronts his father, only this time, to ask whether he has indeed been raping his friends and is a paedophile. When Bill confesses, Timmy asks whether or not his father would molest him. Bill tells his son, “Of course not”, but doubles down by admitting that he would “only jack off”.
Again, it’s a moment in which the sickening reality of paedophilia and sexual abuse is laid out in the most unflinching manner and yet Solondz has us laughing about it. It’s certainly a strange thing to experience, laughing at paedophilia, but it’s that uncomfortable feeling that permeates the entirety of Happiness and perhaps shows us the great lengths we go to in order to cover up the darkest parts of the human psyche and live in desperate clinging to happiness, as the title suggests.
Solondz’s movie is not an easy watch, despite its unavoidable humour. Elsewhere in the film, the director takes on other controversial themes, particularly through Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character, but they are all doused in a generous dose of irony and satire that provokes laughter and discomfort in equal measure.
Through that emotional duality, Solondz is able to invite his audience to consider the most harrowing truths of humanity at its most grotesque and suburban life at its most affluent. Beneath the thin veneer of middle-class America lies unbridled darkness and immorality, according to Solondz, a social dysfunction comprised of truths so shocking that the only viable response is to laugh in disbelief.
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