Depicting culture of death

Catholic New Times, July 3, 2005 by Mario Degiglio-Bellemare

Palindromes, Directed by Todd Solondz, featuring Ellen Barkin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Richard Masur

Welcome to the world of Todd Solondz, a world in which he balances precariously scorn and satire, morality and misanthropy, and cynicism and ridicule.

Solondz' new film, Palindromes, opens at a funeral where Kaddish is being recited, the solemn prayer for the dead. We find out that Dawn Wiener, the' young struggling character from his first feature, Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) has committed suicide. However, as the film quietly unfolds in its own agonizingly awkward way, we realize that the Kaddish is not simply being recited for Dawn, but also for a whole culture--a culture perched in between its idea of itself as a culture of life and freedom and its death-dealing reality.

In a sense, the film is a deeply cynical post-9/ll reflection on U.S. culture, and it may be the most scornful reflection on the post-9/ll context yet to be filmed in the U.S.

The film chronicles the journey of a 13-year--old girl named A viva (which means springtime in Hebrew), who wants to have a baby. When she successfully gets herself pregnant, she is forced to have an abortion by her "concerned" parents. We then find her on the road in various situations, most significantly being invited into a cheerful, evangelical right-wing house, run by Mama and Pa Sunshine. Aviva is invited to stay in this Christian house for disabled and abandoned children, where the kids eat "freedom toast" for breakfast, sing "pro-life" rap songs and recite daily their allegiance to the flag.

But this is not a film that takes sides in the abortion debate. Solondz is much more interested in how a vulnerable young woman navigates her sense of self within a culture that ceaselessly preaches life, yet under the surface, promotes death.

Remember we are in Todd Solondz territory, and that means that identification with any of his characters is a complex affair. Solondz cast eight different women to play the role of Aviva, including 43- year-old Jennifer Jason Leigh. This gives the film a kind of episodic universality, but it also keeps the viewer from over-identifying with the main character. For Solondz, this may be a way of keeping the viewers detached from the narrative, which he uses to emphasize the sense of alienation and cultural vacuity that exists in strip-mall, hellish U.S.

The sense of detachment Solondz creates is a strange place for the viewer. The filmmaker, who made audiences gaze at a pedophile with a combination of sympathy and disgust in Happiness (1998) is again toying with the moral ambiguity of voyeurism. The scene when Mama Sunshine asks her disabled kids to per form a Christian rap song called "Every Child has a Right to be Born" verges on the carnivalesque. Solondz' satire is lethal here, bringing to mind Tod Browning's controversial cult/horror film, Freaks (1932), minus the humanism.

Solondz' interest in the horror genre is not far-fetched. The filmgoer will recognize strains of Krzysztof Komeda's score from Rosemary's Baby (1968) being mimicked in the film. And while the popular late-sixties horror film was about the anxieties around technology and birth (the use of thalidomide for example), Palindromes depicts the workings of a monstrous culture which is unable to be reborn. This is meant to be ironic considering the emphasis on being reborn in the Christian evangelical discourses presented in the film.

It's significant to note that the Kaddish is in fact a doxology, a prayer extolling God, and it says nothing about death. However, it does say that human beings lack the faculties to adequately describe God.

Solondz, who wanted to become a Rabbi before becoming a filmmaker, may be telling us something about the difficulty of grasping life in a culture of death. This is a truly awkward, disturbing, uncomfortable, idiosyncratic, and yet highly original film. Solondz pushes buttons most people do not want to have pushed. It is a bold statement about the internal mechanisms of empire, which understands itself as a humanizing project even as bodies are being colonized.

I recommend the film to those whose cinematic choices are driven by a sense of daring and adventurousness.

Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare is a doctoral student in theology, who often reviews films for CNT.