Who loves the little miss sunshine?

Backlash is usually a pretty reliable indicator of artistic merit. Thoughtless consumers of mediocre pop culture don't attribute intrinsic worth to nonconformity, so they're unlikely to produce a backlash to critical acclaim or popular success. No, backlash is the work of snobs, and snobs, thanks to experience and training, usually do have good artistic instincts, even if their elitism is often self destructive or counterproductive in relation to those instincts.

So, Little Miss Sunshine was a humble, unassuming film with restrained but serious ambition. And, in the beginning, it got credit for that. In the year since its initial critical success, however, the Ministry of Information has declared that it was overrated. Since these days doublethink has become second nature in the western world (and in the U.S., pretty much our only, and so by default our first, nature) we've quickly forgotten that we once really liked this film.

So it goes. In any case, lovely as the movie is, I've got very mixed feelings about it, as well as about the "Losers Are Winners, Too" genre of which it is a prime example. In most cases, this movement is innocuous, since it works primarily on the plane of acknowledged fantasy. In Wes Anderson's films, for example, as well as in Napoleon Dynamite, the loser fantasizes an alternate universe in which we are Free To Be You and Me. It is a perfectly innocuous exercise in wish fulfillment--or would be, if audiences were bright enough (or the Wes Andersons of the world cautious enough) to ensure that we are not duped by our fantasies. In Anderson's case, most were duped--which is why (as I've explained in an old posting) there was such a strong backlash against the Life Aquatic, which went out of its way to slap its audience back into reality. This is perhaps the most admirable aspect of Napoleon Dynamite: its resolute refusal to come to the ground, to inhabit any time or place, which would turn its charming Nerds Win fantasy to delusion.

There are marvellous moments of the bitter slap of reality invading the Losers Are Winners, Too fantasies of Little Miss Sunshine, but although the movie puts up a brave fight against delusion, in the end it so thoroughly succumbs that it's embarrassing. But those marvellous moments are truly marvellous. This is a comedy that has, as its first lines of substantial dialogue this pricelessly blunt-razored bit of post-suicide-attempt humor:

I'm so glad you're still here.
That makes one of us.



It's also a comedy that chooses this for its title shot:



There are many lovely little no-holds-barred moments like this throughout the film. For example, the Nietzsche-inspired, angry teenager who has taken a vow of silence and who requires a second shot after writing "I hate everyone" in order to show him underlining the word "everyone." Or the motivational speaker ending his "You can be a winner" speech to faint applause from an audience consisting primarily of empty chairs. Or, in response to a little girl's question about whether or not there is a heaven (translation: whether the winners are also the good guys), a father's refusal to say anything, and the uncle's refusal to say more than, "I don't think anyone knows for sure." Or the suicidal Proust scholar's shame when he runs into the boyfriend of his ex-boyfriend, the nation's number one Proust scholar. It isn't enough to run into his ex's young, stylish, and evidently wealthy new beau at the gas station, in the process of buying porn. He also has to get caught (Proust scholars, remember) buying a blueberry Slushie. Which he forgets to take. And is called back by the cashier to retrieve, mournfully. That's a finishing touch worthy of Thomas Hardy.


These are all moments that pin the film down to reality, restraining the fantasy that literally drives the film: the father and daughter's (the metaphorically eponymous and literally aspiring Little Miss Sunshine) belief that if they manage to drive across country and enter Olive into a beauty pageant she will win. Not only will she win, but the family will win. This is of course why the relatively trivial theme of the pageant is the driving force of the film, rather than the big themes of suicide (the uncle and potentially the son), mortality (the death of the grandfather), divorce (always threatening), and poverty (the father's floundering career).


Fundamentally it is a film about the "Be a Winner" ideology that the father attempts, without success, to make a living at selling. If Olive wins the pageant, it will, for the father, serve as proof that his motivational message is right--and, consequently, it would serve as a promise that he, and his whole family (and, if we get the message, the audience too) stand to win their own respective beauty pageants in life.


The film's opening announces that this ideology has its basis in delusion, by showing us that the principle exponent of this ideology is clearly not a winner. And it doesn't make this commitment tentatively: it carries it through to the end. The father's motivational speaking career definitively ends halfway through the film, and nothing, not a hint, of alternate possibility, raises its head by the end. It is not even indirectly withdrawn through the symbolism of the beauty pageant: Olive is a loser. That's never directly denied--only the meaning or significance of that fact is questioned.

So, clearly this is not a film that wallows in its delusions, but the stakes of my critique are to suggest that, brave attempt aside, it fails to free itself. Perhaps the most admirable and intriguing part of its struggle to remain conscious of its own status as fantasy, is not the dark cruel moments that frequently repin it to reality, but its vaguer, greyer tones. Black comedy is old hat, even a venerable tradition. But Little Miss Sunshine is quite striking for what can only be called its beige comedy. Not great sorrow, tragedy, or darkness--its real rejection of comedic denial or fictional delusion is in its open-eyed recognition of boredom.



Someone (probably Godard) once said that Bresson's version of Joan of Arc was the first one in which you really felt she burned. This is the first film I've seen in which you feel the characters really do get bored.


But to get back on track: there are no-holds-barred moments of delusion-crushing reality throughout the film, but they are ultimately undermined by the film's end. The ending is, quite simply, Napoleon Dynamite's dorky dance scene redux, but without the final applause (or at least, very little of it). The message is that Olive chose not to compete, not to play to win, but to "do what you love, and fuck the rest." as angsty vow-of-silence teenager puts it.


So, the family of losers don't get applause in the end, but don't need it, since they're not playing the game. The message is (and here the backlashers have some ground, but perhaps not as much as they think) less than elegantly presented--it's a bit cornily, and all too heavyhandedly, made clear that the family has chosen to Let Their Super-Freak Flag Fly.

This is the trap of bad faith that proponents of the Winners-Are-Losers-Too ideology always fall into. The message is supposed to be: it doesn't matter if you win or lose. You're here to do what you love, so losing the beauty pagent, or the number one Proust scholar award, or whatever, doesn't have any valuative weight. The bad faith is clear in the inability of proponents of this view to detach themselves from the language of "winning." They never do say, "it's okay that I lost." Instead they redefine "winning" as trying hard, or doing what you love, or whatever. They can't fully give up the reactive mode of evaluation that bases self-esteem in comparison to another (the winner's merit is inseparable from her superiority to the loser).

The bad faith involved is the having-your-caking-and-eating-it-too strategy of claiming to be indifferent to the stakes of the game while playing the game all the same. But when the game being played doesn't exist apart from the stakes, its clear that you are simultaneously rejecting the meaningfulness of losing and at the same time rejecting the status of having lost, which in turn reinforces the meaningfulness of winning or losing.


This is crystal clear in Olive's case. She goes ahead with the dance competition, but supposedly rejects the value of winning it. But you cannot "do what you love" in a contest while rejecting the meaningfulness of winning or losing it. I can't play the game without trying to win, or, rather, if I'm not trying to win, I have no desire to play the game. This is perhaps most painfully obvious in the ice cream scene--where the parents' dilemma is posed as one of rejecting a socially determined and imposed image of physical beauty and fitness while tryint to maintain the "private" dream of the child to be a beauty contest winner.

The same dilemma appears in the dance contest. Obviously, Olive can play for love of the game in some sense: she can love to dance, and not care whether she's better than others. But then why dance in the contest? To prove to herself she has the courage to do it, perhaps. But she's proving this fact by seeking an audience. In other words, she's redefining the game as: can I be courageous enough to risk embarrassment in order to live as I please? But she appeals to the audience for proof of her success. Which means she's no longer just doing what she loves (dancing), but doing it to win (to prove to the audience her defiance of the game).

The (almost lovely) symmetry of the film is that the end does not, as it seeks to do, defy or reject the father's Be A Winner ideology, but instead mirrors it and reveals its true essence. The father is a loser, paid by losers, to tell them to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that they are really winners, waiting for their chance to fully realize their fundamentally winning nature. It is the lesson of both son and daughter: losers, declare yourself winners! That may work for Olive, but what about the son? Shall he declare himself an Air Force Pilot? Vow, weightlift, and willpower his way to non-color-blindedness? What about our Proust scholar? Shall he henceforth write about Proust for his "own pleasure," and not for an audience? What does it mean to do what you love and "fuck the rest" when what you love is an essentially socially engaged activity directed to "the rest" we've told to fuck off?


Beyond bad faith and practical impossibility, the most significant problem here is that it props up the institution and value system it claims to reject. The Losers Are Winners, Too ideology is, in practical terms, a marvellous way of convincing losers to be content with their lot--and of protecting the winners from the resentment of the rest. It has the same backhanded helpfulness that Christ's messages of "turn the other cheek" and "render unto Caesar" had for the poor and oppressed of the Roman empire ("Always look on the bright side of life," as Monty Python's Christ would say.) Rather than inspiring anger towards an "meritocratic" economic and cultural system in which "life is one fucking beauty pageant after another," the film promotes a Stoic change of attitude, in which we declare everyone winners of the game, rather than dumping the game. Keep that little miss sunnyside, up, up, up!