And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...
Happiness (1998)
"Todd Solondz's film Happiness is disgusting, vile, grotesque. Horribly like life, in fact. The bastions of moral probity at the Daily Mail will revile it when it opens here next month, just as it has been attacked in the US, but it is a bleak, quirky, excruciatingly embarrassing movie that deserves to be seen"
All the characters in Happiness are screwed up: all searching for love, sex, workable relationships, comfort, psychological stability, happiness. You will probably recognize yourself somewhere in the picture. All are doomed not to find it; instead they learn to make do. There is a lot of masturbation, but not much sex; the prototypical gleaming American housewife claims to have it all but actually has nothing. Her perfect husband, Bill, who in this dysfunctional world is of course a shrink, lusts after their son Billy's 11-year-old playmates. Bill wants to play too, and does, drugging and sodomising one of them, and making an unspecified assault on another. 
"Happiness" is a film that perplexes its viewers, even those who admire it, because it challenges the ways we attempt to respond to it. Is it a portrait of desperate human sadness? Then why are we laughing? Is it an ironic comedy? Then why its tenderness with these lonely people? Is it about depravity? Yes, but why does it make us suspect, uneasily, that the depraved are only seeking what we all seek, but with a lack of ordinary moral vision? In a film that looks into the abyss of human despair, there is the horrifying suggestion that these characters may not be grotesque exceptions, but may in fact be part of the mainstream of humanity.
It is not a film for most people. It is certainly for adults only.
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Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)
I started writing Welcome to the Dollhouse around the time of that first film. I couldn’t think of any American films that dealt in any serious way with childhood. Children in American films were either cute like a little doll or evil demons. The early drafts of Dollhouse were all darker and more depressing; it took time to find the right level of bleakness. My hope was the film would succeed well enough to let me make a living doing after-school specials [educational TV films for teenagers].
You have to break rules to get a movie made on $800,000. We sometimes worked in the middle of the night, which wasn’t really legal in the US, certainly with child actors. Heather, who I’d chosen to play Dawn, was a feisty girl who always had the energy and desire to work beyond what was required. Her mother was on set every day; there was certainly visible in Heather a kind of rebelliousness to go to places beyond what her mother felt comfortable with. On the second day of shooting, she had to kiss her tormentor, Brandon (played by Brendan Sexton). Each successive take made her mother more and more uncomfortable. That was Heather’s first kiss.
