"Storytelling"

Todd Solondz's newest debacle drips with contempt for his audience, his characters and his critics.

By Charles Taylor

Jan 25, 2002 | In Ali Smith's new novel, "Hotel World," a teenage chambermaid falls to her death down an elevator shaft hours before she was to have gone on a date to see Todd Solondz's "Happiness." For all the injustice of the character's too-young death, you're grateful for the mercy that she was at least spared sitting through the picture.

With "Storytelling," Solondz's 15 minutes would appear to be -- finally, thankfully -- up. "Storytelling" displays the same contempt for his characters that was the defining element of "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Happiness," whatever cruelties and indignities the director can muster regarded with a stare of cold revulsion. But in "Storytelling" that attitude is so clearly Solondz's shtick that getting offended by it would simply be rising to the predictable bait.

More than any other filmmaker, Solondz represents the worst trend of American indie filmmaking over the last 10 years: the movie as freak show. He belongs to a class of directors that includes Neil LaBute and Larry Clark, and documentarians like Errol Morris, Chris Smith (the director of "American Movie") and Michael Moore, who can never resist getting laughs at the expense of those blue-collar people he's supposed to be so concerned about. The common sensibility of these filmmakers is that they invite the audience to share their feelings of superiority to the people they put on screen. And too often, the largely white, urban, liberal, educated audience these filmmakers attract have been happy to join in, looking down their collective noses at the hicks and rubes and bourgeoisie trapped on the screen like specimens under glass. This kind of filmmaking is worlds away from the genuine fascination with the bizarre and grotesque shown by David Lynch, or even the delight and love that John Waters (a camp humanist) showers on his outrageous characters.

When directors and screenwriters and novelists talk about the pleasure they take in trying to figure out the behavior of their characters, they're saying that those figures have a life of their own, a way of speaking and behaving and acting that they are discovering more than dictating. That's part of the frustration and joy of creating memorable, three-dimensional characters.

When filmmakers go the other route of displaying superiority to their characters -- and inviting audiences to join in that superiority -- they've taken the easiest, cheapest way out. Todd Solondz asks nothing more challenging of his audiences than to feel confirmed, justified and finally superior in their prejudices. See, his movies say, the suburbs really are garish pockets of hell; foreigners really do stink (the subject of a memorable aside from "Happiness"); people really will always give in to their own worst impulses; and only all you enlightened, wonderful people out there in the dark laughing at them with me are smart enough to know.

Judging by "Storytelling," the attacks on Solondz for engendering that kind of reaction are starting to wear on him. On the surface, "Storytelling" appears to be an act of self-criticism, the director wondering if his approach is feeding into something ugly in the audience. But this mea culpa is actually a j'accuse. It's not Solondz, "Storytelling" says, who's culpable for the derisive laughter directed at his characters, it's us.

"Storytelling," ostensibly an examination of how art is misinterpreted, is divided into two parts, "Fiction" and "Nonfiction." The first story (whose plot I'm going to relate in full; so stop reading here if you don't want to find out what happens) opens with Vi (the gifted Selma Blair), a college student having bad sex with her cerebral-palsy-stricken boyfriend Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick, who was in "Kids"). As soon as they're done, Marcus wants to read Vi his new short story. Cut to Marcus and Vi in their writing class, where Marcus is reading the story. Afterward, the teacher Mr. Scott (Robert Wisdom), a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, encourages the class to eviscerate it, humiliating Marcus. Shortly after, Marcus and Vi break up and Vi happens upon Scott in a bar and goes home with him. There the two have anal sex while Scott makes Vi say, "Fuck me hard, nigger." (The scene is presented to us with a red triangle over the pair, Solondz's preemptive strike against what the MPAA ratings board would surely have required cut. It's a distracting, showy device -- and it works. It's a terse comment on how the ratings board treats adult moviegoers as infants whose must be kept from seeing what they deem inappropriate. The European version of the film required no such visual blocking.) Writing about the encounter for class, Vi turns it into a rape, earning praise from Scott for producing her strongest work yet, but having the class turn on her, telling her she's merely using the words and situations for sensationalism.

Next Page: The satirical possibility of anal rape

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