you know, we are on a bit of a kick of American independent cinema on the podcast, particularly

American independent cinema of the 90s. We talked about dogma. We talked about Metropolitan.

And from another O'Tour, we have Todd Salons. This is a long-awaited superdelegate episode.

Off requested. And apologies, we are, as usual, we're a bit late with the Super Delegate

episode, but we always get to them, folks. We are men of our word. We're talking about

Todd Salonza's 1998, Success do Scandal, Happiness. I'll tell you my history with this movie.

I had seen this, I think, at least three times before across my life.

The first time was when I was in high school.

It's one of those movies that I associate very strongly with the feeling of renting it at

the video store.

You know, I'm a precocious 16-year-old, 15 maybe.

I'm watching it in my parents' basement, and I'm thinking, I hope to God,

my parents don't walk in as I'm watching this movie. I hope they don't see what I've rented

and look up what it's about. So a very powerful experience to me then. I've seen all of Todd

Salons's movies. I have waxed and waned

and waxed and waned in my enthusiasm for him. And watching this movie again, I really like this

movie. I really enjoy watching this movie, the roller coaster of emotions that this movie encompasses.

And I think what surprises me is it contains a lot of things

that I normally, out of principle, don't like in movies. Notably, it's heavy, almost leaden

irony at times, right down to the title of the film, Happiness, as well as, you know, this is not

a hard and fast principle, but there's a contempt in this movie. Me, that's the wrong word. You know how people used to have critical debates about like the Cohen brothers back in the 80s and 90s, and they used to say, oh, the Cohen brothers hate their characters, which is, you know, I think not true, but... Definitely not true. But you know the argument. That one's a good Roershack test for me. That is absolutely not true. But, you know, this is a movie where I think it really puts that question to the test. Like, does Todd Salon's hate these characters? In what way does he hate these characters? Who does he hate more than others? Well, I think the answer... What does it mean if he hates these characters? I will tentatively say I think the answer

is yes, but and fundamentally the question is what follows the butt. Now, I have a fair bit to say here,

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