For a too-brief swatch of the 90s, independent cinema in America flourished. Among the gaggle of buzzy new auteurs were Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Todd Haynes – and Todd Solondz, a mousy, seemingly mild-mannered guy whose work revealed a caustic wit and a keen eye for the bland kitschiness of the suburbs. But Solondz’s star never ascended to the same spectacular heights as those of his peers – something this critic would contend has nothing to do with the merits of his work and a lot to do with its prickly subject matter.
In an oeuvre peopled by the emotionally stunted, the bizarrely cruel and the sexually repressed (not to mention what one must hope is an unrepresentative number of paedophiles), Solondz’s most accessible film is surely 1995’s Welcome to the Dollhouse. A breakout that won him Sundance’s top prize, the writer-director’s second feature chronicles the junior high humiliations of one Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo, pitch perfect in her debut role) with a blunt and startling acuity. If her slumped shoulders and frumpy, girlish duds don’t give it away, Dawn’s social standing among her peers can be surmised from her schoolyard nickname: “Wiener-dog”.
At home, Dawn repurposes her classmates’ jeers: “Drop dead, lesbo!” she berates her little sister Missy (Daria Kalinina) – their mother’s favourite, perennially tutu-clad and prancing. A burgeoning crush on hunky Jim Morrison wannabe Steve (Eric Mabius) affords Dawn escape via daydreams – but he barely registers her clumsy overtures.
It’s Dawn’s elder brother Mark (Matthew Faber), far from hip himself but altogether less vexed by it, who offers his tween sister what passes for a silver lining in a Solondz movie. It gets better in high school, he assures her: “They’ll call you names, but not as much to your face.”
While some have compared Welcome to the Dollhouse to Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, another too-real tale of adolescent awkwardness, Solondz’s film possesses a far wickeder sense of irony, and is less concerned with naturalism. Dawn’s world – confined mostly to a nondescript New Jersey, also the setting for the film-maker’s own discontented youth – is heightened, or rather magnified, as if seen through her big, plastic-rimmed frames. The film is all the more emotionally resonant for it.
And yet: unlike certain other members of the so-called “Sundance generation”, Solondz’s career has been in smooth decline, financially speaking, over the past two decades. Each of his films since Dollhouse has generated exponentially decreasing box office returns (though he did pull up out of the slump with his most recent offering: 2016’s Wiener-Dog, a sort-of return to the Dollhouse universe featuring Greta Gerwig as Dawn).
This steady drop-off in Solondz’s audience is, I would wager, no measure of the films themselves, but it could be seen as perversely fitting: a success story could only undermine his distressingly, hilariously grim worldview. With his deadpan affect and penchant for tying characters (and by extension viewers) in ethical Gordian knots, Solondz makes what might be described – in crude commercial terms clearly not in the film-maker’s own vocabulary – as “zero-quadrant movies”. They appeal perhaps only to those who balk at being appealed to.
But Solondz is not the mean-spirited misanthrope he’s sometimes painted as. “My films are harder, I think, than I intend them to be,” he has said. Unlike, say, Diane Arbus, whose photographs made grotesques of their subjects, Solondz has never sneered at the members of his misfits’ gallery. It’s his sensitivity to those baser, sadder tendencies, stoked by social inequities, that makes his films fundamentally humanistic; the inhumane thing would be looking away.
In no Solondz film is this knowing tenderness more palpable than Welcome to the Dollhouse – which likely accounts for its being his only financial success, and makes it the ideal entry point into a body of work that might appear, well, less than welcoming.
“Everyone tells me they were Dawn Wiener,” Solondz noted in a 2016 interview. “Even supermodel Cindy Crawford.” His more explicitly deviant creations – like the paedophile father from Happiness (1998), his controversial (and exquisitely disquieting) follow-up to Dollhouse – will inevitably test the viewer’s willingness to identify with them. Dawn, however – all naivete and unregulated emotions, buffeted by the cruel whims of her peers – is likely to stir up one’s own memories of being pushed to the margins.
If the universality of the underdog narrative presents something of paradox, it is nevertheless true – as Solondz is painfully aware – that in the schoolyard, as in life, there are far more Dawn Wieners than there are winners.
Welcome to the Dollhouse is available to stream on SBS on Demand in Australia and Tubi in Australia and the US, as well as available to rent in the UK. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
