An Interview with Todd Solondz

This chapter is a transcript of an interview with Todd Solondz. It mainly discusses his filmography and his career as well as his personal thoughts on the art of cinema. A major running theme throughout this interview is the consistency inherent in his work. The topography, character, and temporality of his films articulate a singular, if not always totally consistent world. The chapter delves into why that is and how Solondz approaches his work to achieve—whether deliberately or otherwise—such effects in his films. In the end, Solondz states that his engagement with his audience is one of invalidation, in other words, to encourage his audience “to question, to analyze, to open up.”

Todd Solondz

This book is a comprehensive study and appraisal of the career of Todd Solondz, one of the key figures of independent cinema in the 1990s, whose box office fortunes have been in decline ever since that heyday. The book argues that this decline is a fitting analogue for the story of American independent cinema more generally and the declining rate of US corporate profit at large. Tracking the long arc of Solondz's seven major feature-length films, the book isolates certain persistent motifs and themes—the fascination with suburban “junkspace,” the logic of repetition with disappointing variations, the stylistic and formal category of “left classicism,” the indulgence of subjective fantasy counterpointed by an insistence on discomfiting long takes, and the thematic obsession with the “gift of shit”—to account for Solondz's art of diminishing returns under the rubric of satire. The book is more than a simple auteur study in that it establishes a new understanding of the stakes of independent cinema in today's context of economic crisis and decline. It argues that no other contemporary film artist has explored as astutely and perversely the contradictions of aesthetics under the conditions of senile capitalism.

Sentiment and the ‘Smart’ Melodrama

Examines the ‘camp’ sensibility of two contemporary art-films, Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Todd Solondz’ Palindromes (2004), focusing in particular on their respective treatments of melodrama as a genre attuned to the experience and suffering of women in US society. Meditating on the problem of gender and childhood in pastoral America, the analysis seeks to explore the negotiation of sentimentalist conventions borrowed from traditional film genres like the musical and the ‘maternal melodrama’, focusing in particular on issues of ‘play’ and camp performance. The discussion thus raises problems introduced in earlier chapters with regards to the self-reflexive bracketing of sentimentality as a discourse of sincerity and ethical subjectivity, emphasising its ambiguous presence in the art-film as a mode of fantasy and self-reflexive mythologizing.