Happiness

Years ago I had seen Todd Solondz's film Happiness. The film is like a rolodex of unhappy Americans, leading a seemingly "happy" suburban life, one in which they have everything that is redolent of what happiness is supposed to be.

However, as the film unravels--heartbreakingly--these are singularly unhappy campers in a land of cosmetic delights.

Happiness lingers in my mind as an exploration of profound unhappiness, and I had thought it to be an extraordinary, expectation-confounding movie.

The one scene that left an indelible mark on my mind was that of a father telling his son honestly that he likes young boys, and consorting with them makes him really happy. He is Bill Mapplewood, a white, upper-middle class (there weren't any significant characters if color) male, a father and husband, living in a sprawling suburban home with all the right accoutrements of happiness.

Bill is also a pedophile. Seen through the eyes of a judging audience, Bill is a criminal--he has sodomized two of his son's school friends. But Bill, as the film implies, is not to be judged. He is to be regarded as someone in quest of happiness.

No moral lesson needs be derived from the predicaments of the Bill Mapplewoods of this world.

These days, instead of subtle, fictional explorations of the real embedded in the seeming, we have blatant documentaries like Roko Belic's Happy.

Happy explores what makes people happy and the subjects of his exploration lurk everywhere, in the poorest neighborhoods of Louisiana to the slums of Kolkata.

In a Huffington Post blog, Belic writes of the inception of the documentary and claims Manoj Singh, a "dirt-poor" rickshaw puller, as one of his inspirations. He mentions Singh in a tone of wonderment.

What makes Singh, leading a sub-human existence "happy"? At the end of the day, when he returns home--a ramshackle hut made of bamboo and plastic tarp--the sight of his son makes his heart leap in joy.

Is Belic suggesting that the likes of Singh are truly happy, their impossible poverty notwithstanding?

Somehow, I'm not quite inspired to see Happy, regardless of its promise to deliver a cute, moral message.

Besides, having just read Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, an exploration of life in Mumbai slum, I'm not ready to ingest such simple-minded truisms like "there is no correlation between material affluence and happiness."

But I wish the documentary well, and there is evidence of it gathering acolytes: Note Belic's input on happiness in the NYT's most recent Room for Debate.

For those interested in demystifying the concept of happiness itself, I'd still suggest the Solondz flick.