Welcome to the Dollhouse

Welcome to the Dollhouse, written and directed by Todd Solondz, is a brutal case study of the trauma of adolescent development. In Solondz's startling uncompromising vision, the life of an average seventh-grader in the New Jersey suburbs becomes a minefield of trauma and dysfunctionality; junior high school, the nuclear family, and the suburban neighborhood turn into vicious obstacle courses that Dawn Wiener, the gawky heroine, negotiates only at the high price of her own self-esteem. The film stands above the vast field of other adolescence-nightmare movies in its clinically unsparing eye, its refusal to dilute or sentimentalize the catalogue of humiliations that define Dawn's experience; this clear-eyed quality gives it a tone closer to case study than to a standard “Hollywood”treatment, in which the heroine would possess secret redeeming features or triumph in the end or find some way to make everyone like her or enact some thrilling revenge on her tormentors. The film refuses to indulge in this kind of storytelling platitude. Dawn remains stubbornly ordinary, neither especially attractive nor especially likeable, neither particularly smart nor especially cunning; Solondz makes no compromises at all in the direction of pity. When Dawn asks her brother Mark whether either eighth grade or high school will get any better, he gives her no consolation: in high school, he says, people don't call you names so much to your face.

Solondz conceives adolescent experience as a field of power, in which every institution from school to family exerts power over the powerless preteen. Dawn's remote and clueless father operates like a prisoner of war trying to get through the day. When his overbearing wife wants to tear down Dawn's backyard clubhouse for an anniversary party, he hurriedly whispers to Dawn that she should make it easier on herself by just giving in. Dawn's mother blatantly favors Dawns's hilariously prissy younger sister Missy, a pirouetting princess who manipulate