Todd Solondz
Happiness

THE REVIEW

Orgasm is our curse.

Often, to experience those 10 seconds of pleasure, we end up doing the most foolish things imaginable. Sex makes us brutal, primal, beastly.

Freud knew well that the world is driven by sexual urges.

Penetration attracts more than gravity.

Todd Solondz, in Happiness (1998), paints, with ruthless cynicism, a modern America devoid of values, with all its vices and baseness. Murder, exploitation, pedophilia, betrayal, and falsehood are just some of the themes addressed by the New Jersey director.

Through the stories of the Jordan family, we come into contact with human misery and the age-old quest for happiness that seems like water in the desert.

A choral work that reminded me of Magnolia (P.T. Anderson's film would come out the following year) without any chance of salvation, no rain of frogs to save lost lambs.

Search for happiness that becomes a search for love.

Love that becomes sex.

Sex that is deviant, brutal, empty.

Romanticism is dead and perhaps we must simply try to settle to enjoy a little.

Do you remember the first time you had an orgasm? How old were you? 12?

The first handjob, do you remember it?

You liked it, right?

You were surely happy, while trying to understand what that white liquid on your hand was for.

The first time you came...

Do you think you became a man at that moment?

And if you became a beast instead?

...perhaps that is precisely the beginning of the end...