Anal sex at noon taxes Lana
an interview with Todd Solondz
by Josh Tyson

Todd Solondz’s name backwards is, Ddot Zdnolos. Or I guess it could be, Zdno Losddot. Or even, Zdnolos Ddot. Regardless, it’s no palindrome. See, Solondz’s new movie is called Palindromes, and I thought it might be cute to try and, well. Sorry.

You likely remember Solodnz as the writer/director who got you to sympathize with/want to club to death a child molester in 1999’s, Happiness. His new film is about a young girl on a quest to become a mom. Aviva is only 12 years old but is trying relentlessly to have a child. She comes pretty close, too, but her liberal parents fix the situation, and soon enough, she’s hitchhiking out of town, in search of a willing mate.

Naturally, this makes for some very uncomfortable scenes. Case in point: Aviva and a creepy truck driver in a seedy motel bed. Aviva asks him something to the effect of, “Can I still get pregnant if you put it there?” Vintage Solondz, but yeeesh.

Palindromes is shown in chapters. In each of these chapters, Aviva is played by a different actor. The most engaging episode is called “Mama Sunshine.” In this section, a black woman who looks to be upward of 300 pounds plays Aviva. She ends up in the care of Mama Sunshine, a portly Christian woman who has a family of adopted children that would likely be overlooked by most parents hoping to adopt: an albino girl, a boy with cystic fibrosis, a girl with no arms, a really gangly white kid, etc. Aviva falls for Mama Sunshine’s ragtag family, but eventually they prove to be even more obsessed with babies than she is, and the time comes to move on.

While not as effective as Happiness, like all of Solondz’s work thus far, Palindromes offers a bleak but insightful cross-section of our nation‘s strange psyche. But what’s really awesome is that this interview, while not palindromic, is circular like a palindrome. The way it ends takes you back to the point where I’m writing it. It’s like a continuous river. Sort of.

Are you a fan of George Carlin?
I know who he is. He’s the one who had the heart attacks, right?

I’m not sure. He’s a socio-political comic.
Yeah, I thought he had some serious heart attacks. I, uh, well evidently maybe [I don’t know him] as well as I should.

The reason I ask is that the Mama Sunshine chapter in Palindromes reminded me of one of his bits where he points out several reasons why anti-abortion activists are hypocritical. One of his points being, that most of these people who say that they care so deeply for children, and who are professed Christians, aren’t out adopting crack babies or caring for unwanted children—that being something that Jesus himself would do. I felt that the Mama Sunshine character serves as an example of how a true Christian, who opposed abortion, might go about building a family.
Of course the movie is structured in such a way that you have this secular liberal family that is pro-choice, but gives no choice, and this conservative Christian family that’s pro-life but kills … I tried to keep it as balanced as I could. I have my prejudices, my biases, and so if I was to err, I was going to err in favor of the pro-lifers. It’s very easy simply to mock. At a certain point, the laughter has to become hollow if one is recognizing that this is, in fact, a beautifully-run family—a paradise of love and affection for all these kids that have been abandoned, discarded and so forth.

How did you find the kids in Mama Sunshine’s family?
I had a casting director who, after approaching conventional resources, used, I’m sure, the internet and did some research to find organizations that had kids with disabilities that seemed likely to be interested in acting in a movie.

How do you think they saw their characters in the movie?
Every time I cast a kid—in all my movies I’ve had kids, and kids in very delicate situations—no kid is cast without not only the approval, but the support of the family. I certainly would never want to persuade anyone to take part in this. They do it because they very much want to, and believe that they will have a certain dignity, and take pride in their work. I don’t have any kids, but if I did and I had one that was clamoring to act, I would much prefer him act in one of my movies, than doing a commercial for The Gap, or for detergent, or something where he functions as a kind of shill to sell consumer goods. To me that’s the obscenity.

There was a statistic I read in your press kit, a Gallup poll result that said 48% of Americans believe in creationism. Tying that in to the way that people react to your movies, both seem indicative of the fact that Americans are hugely in denial about a lot of things.
Well when you say Americans, I think you're talking about the blues and not the reds. It’s certainly a reminder to many of the more liberal-leaning people that the country is a religious one. That there is a very large population that is not concentrated in Greenwich Village, and West Hollywood, they have a very different sense of morality from what others might have imagined possible. We do live in such a polarized world, of course, as we know, as the media is ever reminding us. The film is much more reflective of that than I had realized when I was writing it. It’s, of course, significant of the United States, because what happens in the US has ramifications for the rest of the world. But this secular versus fundamentalist divide, is one of the defining conditions of the time that we live in.

It seems like a lot of people in this country are in denial about the effect that our lifestyle has on the rest of the world.
In many ways, the rest of the world has a better understanding of the way we live, than we do of any foreigners. So few foreign films enter this country, and are screened here with such a tiny audience, and so few books are translated into English. But if you go abroad, so much is translated from English into these foreign languages, and so many American movies, of course, fill up the screen. So there is an imbalance that distorts our understanding of the way the world operates.

Getting back to the film, I like the idea of people as palindromes. Especially the way the character Mark Weiner (Matthew Faber) describes folks as being basically the same, front or back, at 10 years old or at 83. How does that factor in to being a filmmaker. You essentially say in this movie that people don’t change, but when you make movies, do you feel as though you’ve changed at all after the experience?
Of course it’s indisputable that at every moment we live we are changing, biologically, intellectually and so forth. [Mark Weiner]’s talking specifically about that palindrome part of ourselves that part of ourselves that resists change, that stays the same, that in some ways is defining of who we are. He says whether gain fifty pounds or lose fifty, or if you have a sex change, in some sense it won’t affect something at the core of who you are. This young girl, at the center of the movie, is an innocent from beginning to end. At the beginning she says, “You’ll always be you,” and there she is at the end, saying “I’m going to be a mom.” ‘Mom’ is, of course, a palindrome, but more significantly, she may not become a biological mom, she may become a Mama Sunshine. For all of the change that we see, there is a certain constancy to it. In the same way that any of us, if we look back to when we were 10 years old, if you seriously contemplate how you perceived the world at that age, in obvious ways we’ve grown up, but there’s something instantly recognizable that has not altered.

Was it nerve-wracking making this film, as you did, with several different actors playing Aviva?
Nerve-wracking? No. Of course, I made this kind of leap. It’s a radical conceit here. I was very excited, very charged by this idea; by the novelty of this. In some sense you could say it’s something of a TV convention. When actors replace other actors who quit, or for other reasons leave a role.

Like in soap operas.
Soap operas, all the time: another actor, same character, it just continues on. It’d always been a kind of fantasy of mine. I might have three actors, each with a unique quality, for a particular role, and I could only choose one, but it would be great if I could combine all three. Here I can have eight, it could be eighty. In some sense the movie asks everyone, the audience, to understand that any one of us could, at some point, be this character.

I like that the movie deals with hypocrisy on both sides of the abortion issue.
It’s easy enough to go out there with a placard, but it’s another thing to try and examine the moral consequences of what this all means. There is all sorts of demonization from both sides, towards the other. Depending on where you stand, of course, it’s hard to resist the impulse to characterize the other side—it‘s hard to lend any dignity to those who are opposed to your way of looking at things … pro-life is just another Orwellian term. Pro-life is just to assume that those who are pro-choice are anti-life. Or for that matter, those who are anti-pro-choice are anti-choice. They’re both Orwellian doublespeak. In this movie, Mark Weiner goes on about the nature of choice, of free-will and so forth. If you are of a religious turn of mind, you have to believe in the possibility of free-will, otherwise you cannot accept faith, you cannot make that leap. Others, of a more secular, atheist turn of mind, may see choice as a kind of vanity, a kind of illusion, that we are, as [Mark] says, but a genetic code combined with life experience and randomness, that shapes us to such a point where, when it comes to voting for Bush or voting for Kerry, we imagine it’s a choice, but in fact our whole life dictates that we cannot but chose one or the other.

There’s grey area with either argument. If you take the religious route, you’re overlooking a lot of science and logic, and things like that, but if you take the other route, there’s still those unnamables. Like how poetry is, shit you cannot define, but feelings. It’s hard to suppress that within yourself, accepting a notion that being alive is just bullshit.
Well, it doesn’t mean bullshit. I’m certainly not implying any such thing, or trying to remove any meaning. I think that, in fact, our inability to change can be a freeing thing; to acknowledge one’s limitations and failings and so forth can be liberating, a good thing.

Does it feel like a sand trap to you? To accept that you have no choice is a choice.
It’s a conundrum. It’s not so removed in certain ways from a Buddhist way of thinking … One can accept that this is one’s role in life. To choose to do something or to not choose to do something, yes, as you say, is a choice. It is in that sense a choice. But one can argue that there is also not a choice, in that one cannot but do but what one is shaped to do.

The most helpful description I read of life, and I think it was in an Alan Watts book, was to think of all of life as a continuous river, and your life is something like a surge of water, rising up and then falling back in, but always connected.
Well, I look forward to seeing what you’ll come up with here.