In Storytelling, making the audience feel it’s being exposed to the truths about America is only incidental to Todd Solondz’s plan. His primary purpose is to seal his film off from any criticism that could be leveled at it for the way it does this exposing. Peel away the self-reflexive irony and you’re left with a brutal and cynical farce, without the minor redemption of the wit that some found in Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness.
Storytelling comes in two parts. In "Fiction," a female college student, Vi (Selma Blair), has sex with her writing professor (Robert Wisdom) and writes a story about it. It’s supposed to shock because the student is white, the teacher is black, and the student wants so desperately to avoid perceiving herself as racist that she submits to his racist exploitation of her.
In "Nonfiction," the longer and the worse of the two episodes, Toby (Paul Giamatti), a moronic filmmaker, chooses Scooby (Mark Webber), an apathetic high-school student in Fairfield, New Jersey, as the subject of his documentary on post-Columbine teenage anomie. The main point of this episode is to make fun of Toby’s pretensions to hard-hitting realism while exposing the rot of Scooby’s suburban middle-class life.
The two main objections Solondz anticipates are as obvious as his strategies for fending them off. First, Storytelling can be attacked for its contrived plot, for its trite depiction of milieu, and for characters who are summed up by their T-shirts. Vi’s wardrobe sports a "Biko Lives" slogan and a Models designer label. Scooby wears a Misfits shirt and a shirt with a Soviet insignia. His mother sports a top from a museum gift shop inscribed in Hebrew. They might as well wear buttons that say "privileged white intellectual," "alienated loser," and "suburban fundraising-committee Jew."
If we call him on his caricaturing, Solondz has an answer ready: "You thought the movie was just attacking how bad things are? Well, it’s really making fun of how films portray life." It doesn’t matter, then, that the characters are puppets, since they’re supposed to be comments on themselves, not actual people.
But Solondz will have it both ways if he can. In one of the most revealing scenes, Scooby points a loaded gun at his own head, then at his friend’s. The friend is terrified. Then he gives Scooby a blow job. The flatness and uncertainty of the direction, the alternate hinting at and denial of psychological depth, are prime Solondz.
A typical example of the Solondz neutral-whammy effect comes when Scooby’s younger brother asks his family’s middle-aged El Salvadoran maid whether she believes in God. On the floor on her hands and knees, she turns to look up at the camera and says no. In fact, it doesn’t make any difference, either to the characters or us, what her answer is. The only point of the scene is the provocation created by having a rich white boy pose such an intrusive question to a Latino worker, combined with the mild shock that her response is supposed to convey. And there’s a grating condescension in the way Solondz knows we’ll think she’ll answer yes (otherwise, why have her say no?).
The film can also be attacked for exploiting misery and sordidness. But here again, Solondz is way ahead of us. He knows that at any moment someone is going to blow the whistle on the way he’s built a career out of a facile approach to material calculated to shock. In Storytelling, he pre-emptively strikes with a bristly self-reflexiveness that says: "While I am in fact trying to make you squirm, I’ll also acknowledge that we both know that that’s what I’m trying to do."
Thus, in "Fiction," one of Vi’s writing-classmates accuses her of using taboo language to shock the reader into accepting the hollowness of her characters, and in "Nonfiction," Toby’s editor criticizes his work-in-progress for its glibness and its contempt for its subjects. These gibes are placed in the film to forestall us from using them against Solondz himself — a gambit similar to what’s known in logic as the liar’s paradox. And since he’s thus written his own review, all that remains is to point out that just because he says it doesn’t mean it’s not true.
