Take Me To Your Secular World

Superdiscount “Someone Like You (Fast Track Vocal Mix)” – This should appeal to the people who liked the Metronomy song from a couple weeks ago. Like that song, this is a pop song firmly rooted in house music, but built on a bassline straight of gothy post-punk. The vocals take a few minutes to kick in, but once they do, the music shifts from “oh, is this another Rapture remix?” into a song that sounds like the musical equivalent of a shiny black corset and torn fishnets. (Click here to pre-order it from Soul Seduction.)

Palindromes – Well, this was a pleasant surprise. I came in to this film knowing nothing about it, and having disliked Todd Solondz’s two previous features, both of which wallowed in misanthropy to the degree that they seemed like either cynical pandering to the worst impulses of indie elitists or the work of an emotional adolescent. Though Palindromes is set within the same grotesque suburban milieu as his previous films (he even includes a few characters from Welcome to the Dollhouse, a la that other frustrating New Jersey-based auteur from the ’90s, Kevin Smith), its storyline and characters are rendered with greater soul and empathy than anything Solondz has done in the past. (Well, maybe not; I’ve never seen that debut film that he’s since disowned, though I’ve heard it’s like Woody Allen in the Lower East Side, and includes several musical interludes.)

Palindromes is structured as a palindrome. Seven actresses (who appear in a palindromic pattern) play a 12 year old girl from the secular suburbs named Aviva (read it backwards) who wants nothing more than to be a mom (hey look, there’s another one.) She gets her wish, but her parents force her to have an abortion. Distraught, she runs away and eventually finds herself in the home of a generous Christian family who have already taken in several unwanted children. Eventually, Aviva returns home, and has barely changed at all in spite of her journey and traumas.

Solondz’s position, which he asserted in a Q&A following the screening, is that we never really change, and that we are all essentially palindromes. Or as Chuck Noblet would say: “You can’t unfry things, you can’t be something that you’re not.” Though Solondz generally takes the faith of his Christian characters seriously and deflates his own nihilistic viewpoint via a character who spells out the “we are all palindromes” theme in a brief soliloquy near the end, the film can’t help itself but to be pessimistic and misanthopic at its core. I don’t believe that people cannot change, but Solondz clearly has not in this respect, though he has obviously developed and progressed as a writer. The movie works best when it sticks to Solondz’s strengths, ie dark, absurdist comedy. As a political satire, Palindromes is only so-so, and does not quite measure up to Alexander Payne’s thematically similar Citizen Ruth.

In the Q&A session, Solondz explained that Aviva is intended to be regarded as an innocent, which raises some interesting questions about his notion of innocence. Aviva is dumb, naive, and driven almost entirely by basic desires – procreation, self-preservation, social acceptance, and vengeance. Is Solondz conflating innocence with the id? Are we more innocent when we are stripped of human constructs of morality and civility and are fully in thrall of our biological impulses? If only I had thought to ask him this directly when I had the chance.