The Season of Happiness
It’s that time of the year. Love, kindness, happiness, picture-perfect families with their Christmas trees as full of ornaments as Richard Curtis’ film Love Actually of shit. Yes, it’s full of shit. An emotional joyride serving you indigestion-inducing anounts of good vibes on a silver platter. A shmaltzy emotional equivalent of a chocolate souffle drenched in toffee. Yes, I’m a perpetually single, grumpy guy who tries to focus on food and alcohol in order to avoid being an asshole that treats annual family gatherings as a free therapy session.
Not that it would really matter, you’d be dismissed as a partybreaker that can’t keep his act together. Anyway, quite rightfully so, everyone’s sympathies for the day were focused on my pregnant sister in law. On top of it there’s social media with endless reels of someone else’s holidays, parties, presents and generally good times that might push a fragile individual over the edge for thinking only an Instagram illusion is a life worth aspiring to.
“Individual” is the key word here. We have put people who think outside the box and beyond the collective on the pedestal of desirable success. People like that are ready to take risks and gamble on many things the rest of us wouldn’t dare to in order to achieve something bigger than themselves and which sometimes benefits those that can’t be bothered to leave their comfort zones. But the trouble with pedestals is that there’s only room for one up there and the price of passion is loneliness.
You don’t need to be Lord Nelson standing on a tall column in Trafalgar Square, very few live up to something like that anyway. It’s merely about building a life outside the well-established system. Someone who, at least momentarily, doubts if the whole thing is worth the effort since it’s happened to so many people in a similar pattern that you feel like that proverbial brick in the wall. And it’s boring, the entropy and predictability of it. But you’re just as predictable as everyone else. Every wall has that one reluctant brick. That’s why they say that among people it stinks but at least it’s warm. Which might also be an accurate description of a turd.
My semen smells like fish and rotten eggs. It helps me to stay away from eggnog. Though it might also be a symptom of a bad diet, excessive sweating or gonnorhea. I have to remind myself not to google symptoms for anything in the future or I’ll be afraid to fall asleep even though death like that might be a good way to go. So for now I’ll just take a good shower, eat more fruit and stop googling health-scares. The last thing I need during holiday season is a gift-wrapped STD diagnosis.
There’s too much gingerbread cookies around right now to obsess about everything that’s wrong in the world around you. Food brings comfort. Alcohol brings joy. And fishy sperm too it seems. So take a dive into the punch bowl and stop being so hard on yourself at least one day in the year. Stop whining for a moment. I’m not even religious and the three wise men would be knocking in vain on my own door unless they’ve got a bottle of decent booze. What can you do with myrrh anyway? It was originally used as a treatment for cancer. You might as well try to pray it away. We know how that would work out nowadays.
But desperate people settle for every straw within reach and all you can hope for is to avoid a destiny like that. Though destiny might be too harsh of a word because that would mean you can’t possibly escape it and some supernatural force planned your life ahead for you and you’re unaware of it. It’s much less depressing to treat is as a mix of unfortunate circumstances that couldn’t be avoided because you didn’t see it coming. People rarely do anyway. It’s the single source of comfort when you’re faced with things you don’t think you can survive. That’s why this artificial bubble of holiday happiness is a double-edged cookie cutter.
You’re going through the motions of family traditions and accumulate a pile of shaving/shower gift boxes if you’re unlucky enough to be a guy. But at least they now come with a decent toiletry bag that doesn’t look like promotional merchandise. You’re aware of the escapist nature of it all and act surprised by the tasty lunch as if the menu wasn’t the same each year. Maybe I’m expecting too much but that’s ok. Minced meat wrapped in sauerkraut will have to do and anyway there’s home-made hummus, tuna paste and vegan mayonnaise for demanding guests. We have some cake, a glass of wine and watch a Christmas movie where the prosthetics department did a better job of ravaging Emma Thompson’s face than Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon ever could.
But this year, my holiday film of choice was Todd Solondz’s Happiness. A chance discovery that hit just the right place at the right time. It’s not really a seasonal film at all and you wouldn’t find it on that one channel that plays Christmas movies every day, the whole year. A story of three sisters and their intertwined lives, each with its own expectations and problems.
One is a suburban housewife in a pretty house with a family life that occasionally looks like a perverted version of that dining room from hell in American Beauty. The second one is a successful, attractive author that’s struggling with a writer’s block as deep as the Mariana Trench. And the third one is a woman stuck in a romantic dry spell so severe she settles for losers treating her like shit just to feel a single spark of attention that’s genuine and not a pity-fuck.
Solondz however suggests that’s more than she’s entitled to and you want to give her a hug but you’re afraid you’d crush her bones if you did. It’s a narrative full of disturbing, desperate and sexually perverse people who are aware of their demons, unable to control their depravities and not even very good at hiding them. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a man simultaneously obsessed with one of the sisters and addicted to phone sex, treating the phone book as his hunting ground.
It’s quite refreshing to see a printed phone book in a movie again though it’s used for masturbation followed by visibly traumatic guilt. It takes a while for him to respond to romantic advances of a chubby, insecure woman that’s the exact opposite of the one he’s pathologically obsessed with. Though the woman opens up to him about about her own personal trauma, there are barely any sparks between them and you feel sorry for both.
It’s suggested these are people that are deemed to stay underneath the social radar though their secrets would undoubtedly put them into the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. In spite of the fact that most of them are either lost in their own secret limbo or monsters in disguise this is is an unexpectedly non-judgemental story driven by the search for that eternally elusive happiness we’re all looking for. Intentional or not, there are distant echoes of Hannah Arendt’s theories on the surprising ordinarity of the criminal mind.
But just when you’re about to drift away into reading too much into it, Solondz brings you back down to earth with humor the brilliance of which lies in its childish simplicity that’s the saving grace for those unable to handle dark undertones of the rest. We’re able to relate to the troubles of the boy who’s dealing with his body image and his emerging sexuality. Maybe even with his mother who’s trying to convince herself she made the right choice yet still can’t help envying other women living a life free of marital woes.
Today I went to a funeral service which was in stark contrast with the Christian cebration of divine birth. The fragility of hapiness was dauntingly obvious. Our refusal to face the temporary nature of good and bad times might be necessary to enjoy or endure, depending on what life throws at us. It might as well be a scene from that movie. A face you still vividly remember, now hidden inside with the rest of the body in a wooden casket. Fortunately there’s no tradition of wakes with open caskets here, so you can at least pretend it’s just a box standing in the middle of the room. Shocking in its honesty and stoic sadness that hurts because life has to go on, tomorrow and the day after that, and one day it might be a distant memory, yet the pain will still sting just as sharp as today.
There are wounds time doesn’t heal. You don’t need Todd Solondz to be aware of it. I needed this though just to remind me that the essence of our stability is balance for which misery is just as essential as happiness. One can’t be appreciated without the other. Here I go overthinking again. Fuck. But that’s what meaningful cinema does to you and what makes it relevant even after so many years. By the end of the movie the boy finally learns how to properly touch himself inappropriately. And we’re all finally left with the feeling of closure because sometimes life is nothing but a big joke. What a relief indeed.
