Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)

Of course you remember Happiness, the film that made Todd Solondz famous - a strangely tender film about misfits and all sorts of trouble. He made Welcome to the Dollhouse a couple of years before that and it is a much more ramshackle film, but just as outrageous. Let me add: in a good way, at least if you, like me, think that John Waters offers unassailable glimpses into the human soul.

You have seen plenty of films about every sub-species of Daddy's girl; the girl who does what she is supposed to, dances through life and is irresistable (?) in general (from the point of view of boring ideals, that is). Our main character is in 7th grade, wears glasses and the wrong clothes. School sucks. The kids are mean and the teachers bully her. Her parents adore her sister and brother, who do everything right (striving to get into a decent college for instance, even though it might take becoming a member in a garage band). She falls in love with the older guy (a Fabio-esque asshole) who plays in her brother's dorky rock band - the guy is to be hers, period. At the same time, she practices kissing with the guy that officially bullies her. Heather Matarazzo is great as Dawn, the kid who suffers cruelty and responds with more of the same. I can't recall when I saw a film about the world of adoloscence that felt this unadorned and well, kinda honest about how things can be in that age: hell and more hell. This sounds grim, and it is, but funny, too, in a darker-than-dark kind of way. Welcome to the Dollhouse kicks you in the stomach and offers you the most unappealing image you can imagine of what the so called social game is like, the game in which you are to pass, to succeed, to be, as a teacher tells Dawn, dignified. With regard to its non-existence positive messages (yeah, it get's better, at least they don't call you names to your face...), it's weird that such a movie is so comforting. But don't get me wrong, this is not a film in which you end up in a cute little collectivized cheering to the be-yourself. What Welcome to the Dollhouse does is showing us that it is not at all clear what we do when we say that somebody should 'be themselves'. Maybe its Dawn, resiliant, never conforming, always fucking up, but also constantly doggedly convinced what she has to do. Welcome to the Dollhouse is not cynical, it just demonstrates that even though there is no guarantee that stuff gets better, life is best faced equipped with a big fuck you to sociality: don't-try-to-be-adorable. I loved everything about this film and YOU should watch it if you haven't.