Todd Solondz by Murphet Julian;

Author:Murphet, Julian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2019-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 11. Wiener-Dog (2016): the wiener-dogs

“I love you.” That small sentence is usually thought to be completely meaningless and banal. Moreover, people sometimes prefer to use other, more poetic, less commonplace words to say “I love you.” But what they are always saying is: I shall extract something else from what was mere chance. I’m going to extract something that will endure, something that will persist, a commitment, a fidelity. … The locking in of chance is an anticipation of eternity. And to an extent, every love states that it is eternal: it is assumed within the declaration.55

Nobody has yet uttered “I love you” to Dawn Wiener, who is not (despite the weight of an entire culture against her) unlovable, as even her sworn enemy, Brandon, was obliged to approve. It is her very all-consuming need to hear the words, to feel the embrace, that has brought her back from the dead; the eternity implicit in them, in its unspoken potentiality, overrides the death drive. And it is critical to state that this need to be loved is not a drive in that Freudo-Lacanian sense. It is more in the vicinity of a right, or an entitlement, that each of us, in our very excremental worthlessness, may miraculously come to expect at least once in our lives.

For all that, there is nowhere in particular for Dawn to go in this space of miraculous reappearance, since she is trapped by the entropy of circumstance in a round of low wages, joblessness (she cannot now return to the vet whence she stole the dog), hunger, and despair. Resurrection is not enough, then, however moving it may be, in a film that still accepts the brutal determinism of American fate. What is required is the touch of a true act that can break Dawn out of the shallow routine of the isolated working poor, an act that nothing in the Solondz universe has prepared us to believe in—an act, that is to say, of love that answers precisely Dawn’s unfulfilled expectation.

We can put it this way: Dawn’s return is, this one exceptional time, not a diminished return, but it nevertheless lacks dynamic force. It shimmers as a vibrant potentiality. It remains, then, to Brandon to supply the missing affirmation, as it had in Welcome to the Dollhouse almost twenty years before. His kiss, masked behind the spurious threat of rape, had been that film’s most decent and transformative act, taking an unexpected latency (the desire implicated within a bully’s animosity) and forcing an explicit, transfiguring avowal (which Dawn, her imagination caught by the spurious “love object” Steve, had not been able to reciprocate). From the moment that he calls out to her “Wiener-Dog!” in the Food Mart, this older Brandon (Kieran Culkin) carries with him a moral ambivalence that turns on a dime until the final seconds of the episode: will he recur to his original belligerence and cruelty, or will he persevere in the glow of his prior fidelity to Dawn’s worth?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.