Welcome to the Dollhouse

Todd Solondz is one of my new favourite film-makers. This film nails so many things I don’t even know where to begin. Maybe it’s mostly that the experience of school as a place of unthinkable cruelty resonates strongly with me. School can be a place of almost surreal degrees of distress, and the fact that it is such a distant experience makes it easy for to forget. The fact that childhood is normally designated as a formative stage, a phase of non-sense because it is still forming the order, sense, rationality and even civility of adult life, of the supposedly fully formed human being, allows it to be dismissed as unworthy of serious attention. And yet, imagine the horror conjured up when trying to imagine a world where grown ups are as openly cruel to each other as kids are on a regular basis (and of course we are cruel to one another, but in ways so refined that any semblance of dirt and foul play is washed away from them). A world of name calling, of constant picking on and bullying, a place of violence, where it is absolutely normal to break into physical altercations and display your discontents publicly.
But it’s not just this experience the film shows. Throughout the film we are reminded of the penal and corrective nature of our lives, particularly the role that schools play in this. And perhaps ‘corrective’ is the wrong term to use here, for that suggests a reform, whereas in fact these institutions are there not in order to reform a subject gone wrong, but to form the subject in the first place. This system attempts to reign in the chaos and ill discipline of the child, and turn him into a good, model citizen. When Dawn is taken to the principal’s office along with her parents, she is reassured that no-one is there to get at her; this is swiftly followed by a reminder that this is the sort of incident that could go down in her permanent record and affect her chances in college and in other ways for the rest of her life. Her brother, in the meantime, is preoccupied with his adult future as though everything he does in the present holds value only insofar as it affects his future as an adult, that point where he will actually get to live life, as it were, where life will finally carry intrinsic value in relation to its present state, unlike childhood, which is merely formative and not an experience in its own right. How stifling for this poor girl, practically grappling for survival and gasping for air on a daily basis, to have to be confronted with the thought that this struggle must be affecting her future irreversibly and without her knowing how to do anything about it.

“I always felt as though God would come into my life at some point, but he never did”, said Tommy Lee Jones’s character in No Country for Old Men, and this reflects for me the way I have so often lived my life and still do, and the way I perceive so many others to live their life: forever waiting for that point in the future where they will finally be themselves, thinking of what we’ll be when we finally figure ourselves out and can start truly living life.