Feminist Music Geek

Based on conversations with friends, there appear to be two divergent opinions on director Todd Solondz. One camp thinks he’s brilliant. The other thinks he needs professional help. There may also be a contingent within the “Todd Solondz Godhead” faction that thinks the scene where Dawn Wiener is forced to use the bathroom in front of a schoolgirl bully is comedy gold, but I didn’t laugh. I’m of the belief that Solondz is troubled by how people treat one another and uses his films as catharsis. The final product tends to make most people feel worse.

I’ve seen three of Solondz’s movies–Palindromes; his initial masterpiece, Welcome to the Dollhouse; and his half-great, half-insufferable Storytelling. I’ll wait for Life During Wartime‘s Criterion release and catch the musical adaptation of its prequel when it finally hits Broadway with an exclamation point adjoining its title. Maybe Duncan Sheik can write a song about how pedophiles are just regular people. I smell a Tony! 

I caught some of Palindromes in passing, but was interested in watching it after Caitlin at Dark Room’s essay that links the movie to the death of Dr. George Tiller. But if it’s polarization Solondz seeks, I’ll take the bait. I didn’t like Palindromes.

Poster to Palindromes; image courtesy of wikimedia.org

We’re off to a bad start in the opening credits. For no reason beyond asserting authorial control, Solondz kills off Dawn. Sure, she was also cousins with Aviva, Palindromes‘ chameleon-like protagonist. But really, her death only serves as a way for Solondz to close the casket on his breakthrough film. Dawn’s brother Mark (Matthew Faber) gives a sadistic eulogy that enumerates all of Dawn’s humiliations before a seemingly inevitable suicide. Sure, it may have been wishful thinking to imagine Dawn’s life improves somehow at the end of Dollhouse, but I mainly appreciated that the movie didn’t offer a tidy resolution. This movie, however, begins by confirming that not only did things deteriorate considerably for Dawn, but that she became obese, stopped bathing, got pregnant (possibly by a rape), and killed herself while away at college. Wow.

Oh, Mark does have another purpose. At a family event at the end of the movie, Mark stands in for Solondz to rather artlessly deliver the film’s central thesis: people are incapable of change. That he’s telling this to a girl whose name is a palindrome that means “spring” in Hebrew and is longing to be a mother further discredits viewers’ intelligence. It’s even more insulting than cluing us into Aviva’s accidental sterilization after an abortion procedure run afoul while she’s under anesthesia and apparently too stupid to understand what is obvious to us. This will turn her thwarted attempts at conception when she leaves home because mommy didn’t let her keep the baby into “dramatic irony.” It’s also lazy screenwriting, which is the essence of insulting viewers’ intelligence. 

It would seem as though my biggest problem here would be with the film’s politics regarding abortion rights or, rather, its concerned effort to sling mud at vigilante anti-choice (right)wing nuts and callous, class-aspirant liberals. I’ll get to that in a moment. But first I have to parse out who pubescent runaway Aviva Victor is. Frankly, I don’t think Solondz has a clue. None of the eight actors in the leading role seem to have a handle on her. Thus, most of them play her as a set of parentheses with nothing to encase–vague, pouty, dim. 

Aviva is little more than Solondz’s allegorical vessel. This is offensive to me. I don’t have a problem with a pregnant girl or teen mom character out of hand, provided I’m given ample understanding of why a girl wants to be a mother. You know, when she’s rendered as complex and interesting. However, all we’re given is that Aviva is under the misapprehension that having a baby means she’ll always have someone to love. You know, like a puppy. As a former twelve-year-old girl, this is just insulting. I’m pretty ambivalent about having children at 27, primarily because I gathered well before I was 12 that having a baby required providing financial and emotional support. Sure, children are our future. But they’re not miracles. We make them, and we (as a parent, community, governmental entity) have a responsibility to care for them. Romanticizing motherhood on such inchoate terms and assuming other girls do too without providing a contrast is sexist and ageist of Solondz.  

As much as I can tell, Aviva’s unformed but ardent desire to bear children stems from her class background. Like many of Solondz’s families, the Victors are Jewish, suburban, and middle class. They’ve also inculcated their only daughter, catering to all of her creature comforts–’N Sync tickets, Gap membership cards. In these unchallenged trappings of privilege, a baby seems to be just another thing to want. Aviva–who, to abide the gender stereotype, derives no joy from sex itself–gets knocked up by a family friend’s misogynist brat (Robert Agri, later John Gemberling) who hopes to be a porn director and loudly announces this by wallpapering his room with nudie pix. Naturally he exaggerates his sexual prowess and blames her inexperience when they get down to it, but the seed is sown nonetheless. In her effort to dissuade her daughter’s plan to carry the child to term, mother Joyce (Ellen Barkin) brings in the class politics by admitting to a prior abortion. Joyce was pregnant with a son when Aviva was younger but she and her husband Steve (Richard Masur) decided they couldn’t afford to keep the boy and maintain their lifestyle. This is presented as the ultimate sacrifice, even if it’s in the service of their daughter’s mallrat existence.

One of the major plaudits Solondz receives that I don’t buy is that he’s nonjudgmental about his characters. I think he’s in total contempt of Joyce, who blithely admits that having the abortion was a huge relief. I’m certain there are women who feel this way upon making that decision, and I’ve heard women (myself included) come to that conclusion in hypothetical situations. But I’ve never actually witnessed an expectant mother dismiss her abortion so coldly. Even if she believes the fetus is nothing more than a bundle of cells. Even when she knows it was the best choice. But to represent Aviva’s mother in such a gross fashion plays directly into many anti-choice lobbyists dangerous assumptions about the gender and sexual politics of the pro-choice movement.

Solondz attempts to have it both ways when Aviva stumbles onto a foster home run by Christian fundamentals who have even less regard for human life than the Victors. The house is run by Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk, the stage mom in Center Stage who makes allowances for her daughter’s bulimia). The home is peopled by kids who perform in a Christian rock band. Many of them are disabled, some saved from abortions. I saw this sequence out of context several years ago. Now, the queasy mix of sentimental pap, sitcom staging, pitch-black humor, disturbingly cheerful musical numbers, and freak show exhibitionism play like an episode of Glee. Have disabled feminists written about this segment? If so, please direct me toward their commentary.

Casting is pretty important with Palindromes and I have so many questions for Ann Goulder and Addison McQuigg. As mentioned earlier, eight actors portrayed Aviva. When the part is played by a white woman or girl, it seems selected at random. However, when Will Denton assumes the role during a wordless sequence where an adrift Aviva floats the river, I began thinking about silencing and trans marginalization. When we first meet Aviva, she’s played by Emani Sledge, a guileless black girl. She is in a scene with Barkin, talking about her concerns over Dawn’s death and her own committment to being a mother. Her innocence is othered when put in contrast to Barkin’s age and race. Sharon Wilkins imbues the role with a childlike sweetness as well during her scenes in Mama Sunshine’s house. I cannot tell if I’m overreading Wilkins’ segment, but Mama Sunshine’s offering her fatty foods and reports from the crazed family doctor who examined her while she was unconscious that she exhibits promiscuous behavior certainly don’t seem accidental. They play like empty race baiting. If Solondz is challenging our cultural assumptions, then he could do that while still presenting us with a realized girl protagonist and not a symbol. With this clumsy execution, I’m left wondering where the fuck he gets off.

You may wonder why I wrote about Palindromes, particularly for a feminist music blog. My initial interest came from Cardigans’ singer Nina Persson’s involvement with the film’s music. Her old band was invested in giving dark subject matter a pop sensibility, which seemed to fit here. Without drawing much attention to it, I was also interested in Persson working with her husband Nathan Larson, a veteran film composer perhaps best known as the former lead guitarist of Shudder to Think.

I haven’t pieced together the significance of Nathan Larson’s childlike score any more than I have a handle on Belle and Sebastian’s contributions to Storytelling. My guess is that aligning Solondz’s work with indie musicians further establishes his credibility as an underground filmmaker in a country where film production culture is almost entirely overground. I’d imagine Solondz financing Palindromes with his own money after studios refused to touch the subject matter weakens this point. However, Solondz’s films are largely about supposedly polite, seemingly normal white people committing a variety of transgressions and societal taboos but deriving little pleasure out of their actions. Indie rock cares a lot about these sorts of folks. Nonetheless, Larson and Persson’s work here illustrates themes of innocence and regression far more deeply and disarmingly than anything this movie tries to accomplish. No wonder Aviva hums some of it to herself at one point–Solondz clearly wanted his protagonist to be associated with the best part of the film.