Called Storytelling

The following is an essay I wrote on Todd Solondz’s so underrated film Storytelling. After I saw it, five years after its release, I immediately bought it on DVD and watched it again and again. When I talked about it with other people who had seen it before, and when I ran through some reviews, I noticed that hardly anyone shared my opinion or enthusiasm.

So, I wrote my own dissection of the movie, over two years ago. It’s exhumed and splayed below, in all its choppy, pretentious, and verbose glory. If you’ve seen the film, I want you to read it. I’d be curious to get your thoughts...

Todd Solondz’s Storytelling is a rage against both America and its loudest, leftist critics. Its protagonists, two fiction writers and a documentarian, are storytellers lacking conscience in every way.

Fiction of artistic/intellectual/critical conscience is exposed in the film’s first part, when the protagonist, Vi, slanders her black creative-writing professor in a distorted recollection of sex with him, which she parades as truth via short story fiction submitted for class. In her memory of the incident, recounted in “fictional” form, she is a victim and he a predator. The class, oblivious to the real sex that had inspired her narrative, detects discriminatory hate and gets nasty, but only the professor’s student protégé Catherine properly exposes the complexity of racism in Vi’s story and the sexual resentment harbored within it: “It’s confessional but dishonest. She subsumes herself to the myth of black male sexual potency but then doesn’t follow through…in classic racist tradition, she demonizes and runs for cover.” Indeed, Vi’s demonizing blows her facile politics to pieces; just because she sleeps with non-whites and wears a shirt that has USA/Africa scrawled on it doesn’t make her an unprejudiced person, it merely means she conforms to what she thinks is cool in politically liberal circles. This is what Catherine calls “the Benetton rainbow complex.” Little wonder the only compliment Vi receives in the entire film is that she has beautiful skin.

Marcus, Vi’s boyfriend, is onto Vi’s superficiality as well. He notices, for instance, that she doesn’t sweat during sex, sweat being Solondz’s symbol for authentic experience and enjoyment. He deplores her for having “become kind,” kind in the false way of all patronizing. Indeed, Vi does seem to get off on how PC she appears to be to others by merely sleeping with Marcus, who has cerebral palsy and is viewed as a victim a priori.

Both she and Marcus are other-directed people who look to others to define their character, monadic individuals for whom autonomous personality surrenders blindly to infinite social dependence. Other-directedness is vanity’s maturity into a value system, partly caused and partly reinforced by ideals of equality and pity that pull to the lowest common denominator. The creative writing class exemplifies other-directed LCD mania in an early scene in which their collective praise for a bland autobiographical cerebral palsy story by Marcus spirals into a competitive listing of the diseases of famous authors. Self-victimization is the road to likability, and both Marcus and Vi try and fail to play this card in their short stories. (Marcus’s story, “The Rawness of truth,” is smacked around by the professor for being horribly written. Marcus reacts by retreating into self-hatred, and he thus remains an emotional cripple besides.)

The “fiction” portion of Storytelling crashes the final refuge of self-pity. Like most of Solondz’s work, it strikes us as unintentionally mean-spirited, revealing and refreshing.

Here’s a quote that pretty much sums up Part Two of the film: “The pressure of conformity weighing on all producers further diminishes their demands on themselves.”

The much longer second portion of Storytelling, “Non-fiction,” opens with a middle-aged man named Toby, his nose in a phonebook, looking up women he knew from decades ago when he was popular and had a promising future. We learn that he never became an actor because “he came to terms with himself,” that he dropped out of law school because “it was a rip off,” but that this was a good thing because “it got me writing!” Classism that he himself would deny is ubiquitous in his confessions that shouldn’t be confessions: “I drove a cab to pay the rent, but hey, I have some dignity; right?” and “I’m working in a shoe store now, but I’m not ashamed.”

He says he has “a much stronger sense of self now,” but nothing could be further from the truth. The archetypal sick physician, Toby sets off to diagnose and burst the mythology of teenage life in the suburbs, a la American Beauty. Toby is played by Paul Giamati at his most perfect pathetic.

Part Two is Todd versus Toby, one the writer and director of Storytelling, the other a fictional character. They’re both filming the same subjects, even though Todd is actually behind both cameras. The fictional Toby frames suburbia via his film—Todd superimposes his own frame over Toby’s, documenting the documentarian, thereby providing a fresh take on the dashing of the American dream while simultaneously displaying the entanglement between artist and subject. Storytelling uncovers exploitation, objectification, and monomania, drains that leech at Toby’s subjects as well as at his documentary. Storytelling, however, travels far beyond the American Beauty surface-level analysis Toby would settle for. When Toby attempts to present himself and his art as independent from the enervations of suburban, consumerist values, he only perpetuates its culture.

Let’s take a look at how this comparison plays itself out by examining the characters and plot of Part Two, starting with the Livingstons, a family of five and subjects for both Toby and Todd.

When invited to be the focus of Toby’s documentary, Scooby, a high school senior, doesn’t see artistic opportunity but rather connections. Scooby’s perspective on society is that of people-pods being shuttled up and down chutes and ladders of fame and fortune, and few in his world wouldn’t also settle with this perspective/meaning. Scooby wants to be socially accepted but does not know how to achieve this goal, nor does he really expect to. We travel down his daydreams of becoming a TV talk show host in which it’s clear he’d settle for the role of guest—he needs to see himself through other eyes, as object, in order to accept himself. Scooby is the despairing counterpart to the aggressive professor of Part One—both are awake to the plasticity of the societies in which they find themselves surrounded, but they have different reactions to this sometimes curse. Scooby is less conscious and more passive. He is a closet homosexual who hates his parents but only acts upon his hatred in his dreams. Where the professor seeks to confront, Scooby wallows silently in his music and drugs.

The middle brother of the Livingston family, Brady, is a receiver for the high school football team and a quintessential other-directed—he sacrifices his loyalty to his older brother, Scooby, to whom he politely asks to better repress his homosexuality in public so he, as his little brother at the same school, can best conserve a reputation worth conserving. Scooby’s unquestioning consent is a sliver of filial love the rest of the Livingstons seem largely unable to demonstrate.

The overbearing father of the family, Marty, is a cynical homophobe. Like his wife, Fern, he is proud of his Jewish heritage. He demands stereotypical economic success for his sons—they must go through the learning factory of the Ivy league school system and make lots of money upon graduation in order for them to be socially accepted as successes, and only then can they be accepted as successes by him. He is not an open-minded man; he appears to be too tired with life at this point to re-evaluate any of his values. On the plus side, Marty possesses an honesty about him that he himself puts down as crassness. For example, when Toby comes to him for permission to use Scooby in his film, he asks the filmmaker “What will we get out of this?” and makes no bones about his profit motives. He also fears being exploited, and Toby promises, falsely, that he won’t exploit the family. “Can you make the leap of faith in me,” Toby asks Marty, “in the same way that I have to make the leap of faith in you?”

The youngest brother, Mikey, is an eager student of his father’s map to success. An eleven year-old fascist with hyper-intelligence, his exceptional SAT scores for a fifth grader show him to be a standardized prodigy, although his loveless parents take little notice of this strange achievement. More concerned with power than popularity, Mikey hopes to win the underlying competition inherent in other-directed socialization through his shrewd understanding of its rules. It thus comes as little surprise when he declares that he won’t play football when he’s in high school but that’ll he’ll focus on class rank. He is too mature to have fun, or even to be a popular.

Mikey talks to the family’s maid, Consuela, more than to anyone else in the film. He speaks to her without any tact, as if she were a book with answers in the back. She should smile more, he commands her, because cleaning up for him is “not hard.” “Why did your parents have so many children,” he asks, “I mean, if they were poor, shouldn’t they have just had one or two?” Viewers may laugh at his cold, robotic behavior, but if seen as a prototype of future social interaction, there is really nothing funny about his mechanical lack of social discretion.

Livingston culture is like their symbolic dessert—Twinkies served on a silver platter by an immigrant. This is what American freedom buys. The musical backdrop for the Livingston life is the pop vacancy of “fun fun fun, in the sun sun sun…” Unless laughing from a sense of superiority, “Non-fiction” makes for a rather grim viewing experience.

The worship of impotence pervasive in the film’s first part is echoed in a family dinner discussion in which the mother declares that everyone at the dinner table, as Jewish relatives of expatriates from 1930’s Germany, should be considered Holocaust survivors. Only Scooby disagrees, perceptively noting that had the Holocaust not happened his family would have never even existed. He is sent to his room by Marty, the whole scene captured by Toby’s documentarian lens.

Toby’s documentary is narrated in a “wave of clichés so high it borders upon grotesquerie,” to quote the professor’s attack on Marcus’s story in Part One. It slips into narcissism at whims: “I walk down hallways like the ones I used to walk down in high school…I used to wake up depressed, suicidal, filled with despair. Beneath these masks of courtesy and friendliness, I knew there were [sic] darkness.” The public self-victimization in his inserted autobiography pits the storytelling problems outside of Part One’s classroom workshop, an academic bubble where the stakes were not as high. Reminiscent of Marcus’s supercilious subtitle to his story, “Rawness of Truth,” Toby says that he “knows” that Scooby is “the key to revealing the truth” as he quite obnoxiously narrates the teenager’s thought processes when he is filming Scooby: “College…SAT’s…your brothers, your friends”…all things actually very far from Scooby’s mind. It’s questionable whether or not Scooby even feels stress, but Toby would not want to acknowledge this question. He’d rather be hackneyed at the expense of getting to know his subject, as evident by his lack of skepticism at a counselor’s citation of a survey that positioned the stress levels of American high school students applying to college higher than that of youth in Bosnia.

Toby’s insincerity is called out obliquely by one of his subjects, Brady, the middle brother of the family, who asks Toby why he drives such a shitty car. Although he plays off the comment—“That’s interesting though. Is that what you value, a cool car?”—we know the teenager’s poke hurt the classist Toby, whose follow-up drips with resentment and disinterest, though invisible to the young Brady. Solondz has set us up to feel superior to Toby and so, in a chain of superiority complex, we laugh at him while he laughs at his subjects (the implication here being that maybe we as viewers should show more compassion for Toby).

The direct condemnation of Toby, however, comes from Pam, an acquaintance unimpressed by his footage. “It seems glib and facile to make fun of how idiotic these people are,” she tells him, “You’re showing how superior you are to your subject, you don’t like them.” It is of absolute importance, Pam maintains, to come to your subjects with compassion or else they will be treated as mere objects and remain misunderstood, this is why she asks him “Why are you making this documentary if you can’t treat your subjects with appropriate gravity?” Of course, Toby denies having an exploitative nerve in his body, even as he asks her if she finds funny the tragedy that befalls the family when the Brady receives a coma-inducing, termainl injury during football practice. Of course she doesn’t find it funny, and this reaction hurts Toby because as much as he says he wants her honest opinion, he’d much rather be patronized than scolded. It is his desire for approval that makes him show his incomplete footage to an audience, the same addiction that made Part One’s Marcus read his incomplete story to Vi before submitting it to the class, the hope that maybe someone will like it.

While Toby laughs vainly at the most obvious snares of consumer culture, Todd delves into its expansion—the cancerous fascism spreading within America’s cultural body, the development of which is personified in the young Mikey. To me, this is the crux of the film and its most beautiful thread. In a middle scene in Part Two, Mikey sees the maid crying late at night, and in a violation of privacy he interrupts her to demand she clean the grape juice he has just spilled onto the kitchen floor. Undisturbed by, but curious of her tears, he asks why she is crying, as if collecting data for a science project. He learns that her nephew is being executed for rape and murder. Disrespecting her age entirely, he condescends bluntly “people who are bad should be killed.” He then asks her what rape is, and she replies that it is “when you love someone, and they don’t love you, and so you do something about it.” Mikey notes that sometimes he feels his parents don’t love him, and Consuela gives him the ominous advice that perhaps when he’s older he can do something about it. Uncomfortable with the whole conversation and lacking any sense of compassion, Mikey demands once more that she clean the spill he made in the kitchen.

He does, however, decide to do something about it. A scene a few minutes later opens with him and his father looking down at the comatose body of his older brother Brady, and, in an imitation of love, he tells his cynical father that perhaps Brady will come out of a coma, that “maybe he’s that one in a million.” Marty thanks Mikey for the shallow attempt at comfort and, almost as a repayment, agrees to let Mikey try to hypnotize him. The big surprise is that the hypnosis is successful, a “rape” in which Mikey dominates his father’s free will. Mikey wanted to be loved, and since his father doesn’t love him, he’ll force him to. He tells his father to fire Consuela, who makes him uncomfortable. He wants his father in a good mood, even if the origin of this mood is with Mikey himself. If he cannot receive real love and comfort from his family, he’ll turn them into his puppets. The hypnosis scene symbolizes the apocalypse of American life, it takes shape as the psychological dominance of a semi-human.

How should we to feel about the father’s character in all this? Had he not produced this robotic monster of a son? Maybe. Here is a relevant passage from Adorno’s Minima Moralia, which had been written in reaction to the totalitarian dictatorships that had emerged in the thirties and forties:

Today we are faced with a generation purporting to be young yet in all its reactions insufferably more grown-up than its parents ever were; which, having renounced before any conflict, draws from this its grimly authoritarian, unshakable power. Perhaps people have at all times felt the parental generation to become harmless, powerless, with the waning of its physical strength, while their own generation already seemed threatened by the young: in an antagonistic society the relation between generations too is one of competition, behind which stands naked power. But today it is beginning to regress to a state versed, not in the Oedipus complex, but in parricide. One of the Nazis’ symbolic outrages is the killing of the very old. Such a climate fosters late, lucid understanding with our parents, as between the condemned, marred only by the fear that we, powerless ourselves, might now be unable to care for them as well as they cared for us when they possessed something. The violence done to them makes us forget the violence they did. Even their rationalizations, the once-hated lies with which they sought to justify their particular interest as a general one, reveal in them an inkling of the truth, an urge to resolve a conflict whose existence their children, proof against all uncertainty, cheerfully deny. Even the outdated, inconsistent, self-doubting ideas of the older generation are more open to dialogue than the slick stupidity of Junior.

The cynicism and hollow values of the father is aggravating in its latent hypocrisies and consumerist values, in his willful ignorance (“I loved college and have three wonderful kids, so if life is tough for you, well boo hoo!!!”). But the “slick stupidity” of Mikey is blatantly murderous in its will to dominate. We feel the father’s powerlessness and so do not condemn him too much. His particular interest in the success of Scooby, though warped by other-directed motivations and blinding inconsideration towards opposing values, is at least a love of sorts and reveals the love that makes him cry out over his comatose child Brady: “My son will be a vegetable!” Mikey is clearly incapable of this much.

Storytelling ends with no escape for its subjects, everyone is caught as the movie’s motif of entanglement reaches its climax. Scooby’s dreams get dashed—he rushes at a chance to see himself on screen in Toby’s documentary, what for him symbolizes a sort of forbidden mirror, and he is crushed as a room full of people laughs at him and his aspirations thanks to Toby’s thoughtless cheapshots. Consuela, the barely visible suburban conscience, is ultimately not fired, not swept under the rug. She pays back her unjust dismissal, killing all the Livingstons (minus Scooby, who was out of the house watching himself on the screen at the time) by poisoning them in their sleep. In other Solondz films we consciously identify with rapists and murderers and we do not hate them, in this one we do not even realize the identification as it happens. Do we even ask the question what is worse, Mikey’s parricide or Consuela’s payback? Who was killed?—Mikey, who was evil, a comatose Brady, their hypnotized father, and their silent, passive mother. The monster that Consuela becomes could not, should not, be “poofed.” She stands for the type of justice movies like V for Vendetta and History of Violence cannot depict subtly, realistically, or relevantly.

Upon hearing of the death of the rest of the family, Toby runs to Scooby—with a camera by his side. “I’m so, so sorry,” he tearlessly cries. “Don’t be,” Scooby answers him, “your movie’s a hit.” His icy words make Toby finally, consciously understand his inhumanity: how can he continue filming now that Scooby has called all the cards and cashed in his chips?

By criticizing the most vocal, pretentious and disparaging critics of American cultural vacuity, Solondz is able to grasp the bleakness of our times in a way that few, if any other filmmakers can.