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Far Out Magazine, 2024
As I’ve grown older and slightly wiser, I’ve come to realise that much of the conflict we experience with others stems from the tension between the lies we tell ourselves about who we are and the reality of who we actually are. We often struggle to see ourselves clearly, spinning stories and white lies to bury the memories and experiences we’d rather forget. We rewrite our flaws and vulnerabilities, shielding ourselves from truths that feel too painful to confront. Over time, entire parts of our lives get absorbed into this distorted narrative as we gradually forget the raw reality of our experiences and replace it with a polished, more palatable version of the truth. Did you really enjoy high school, or have you just conveniently forgotten the worst parts? Was that person truly in the wrong, or was it just easier to shift the blame?
But it becomes especially difficult to discern between fact and fiction when reflecting on experiences that happened a long time ago, with the younger versions of ourselves becoming lost in the restoration of our own memories, with our fantasies becoming a replacement for reality. And when looking at films like The Florida Project and Welcome to the Dollhouse, they both explore the strange surrealism of living in the rewritten version of our life as it happens.
Welcome to the Dollhouse follows a lonely 13-year-old girl called Dawn who unknowingly struggles to cope with her family, popular younger sister and school bullies. The director, Todd Solondz, is known for making black comedies that poke fun at the mundanity of suburban life, often exaggerating the darkness of each situation until it becomes taboo, with the characters discussing truly awful things in a deadpan way. Solondz uses this in a new way in Welcome to the Dollhouse, as instead of adults dismissively joking about things they have the ability to understand, the film centres around the perspective of a child who can’t understand the weight of what is happening to her.
Sean Baker chooses to do something similar in The Florida Project, which follows a six-year-old girl called Moonee who lives with her mother in a motel close to Disney Land, living in the blissful haze of childhood while the adults around her struggle with complex problems.
In Welcome to the Dollhouse, Dawn chooses to create an active fantasy to cope with the trauma of being bullied, unable to understand the impact and reality of her experiences and instead telling herself stories about what’s happening in order to deal with it. She tells herself she is the only member of the ‘special people club’, something that makes her feel less excluded and lonely despite being the target of relentless torture from her peers. She convinces herself that she’s in a relationship with the boy who torments her, despite his continually degrading comments and harassment that verges on abuse, with Dawn viewing it through rose-tinted glasses and not being aware of how explicit and insidious his threats are.
In contrast to Dawn, Moonee is much younger and doesn’t consciously construct a fantasy world; instead, Baker suggests that childhood itself is the fantasy. Moonee lives in a protective bubble of youth, shielded from the struggles and suffering of the adults around her. She plays with her friends, oblivious to the danger posed by a strange man loitering nearby—while the audience is acutely aware of his predatory intentions. The children see abandoned buildings as magical playgrounds created for their enjoyment, unaware that these spaces are the remnants of gentrification and poverty, where families were forced out of their homes. The signs of their true nature—a shelter for the homeless and a drug den—are stark reminders of the harsh realities surrounding their innocence.
Both films explore the idea of passive and active fantasies, with the directors pointing towards the fact that people of all ages use dream worlds to cope with various aspects of our lives, starting when we’re children. They pose the theory that dreams are inevitable to life itself, and the only way we know how to cope with our suffering, and the only variable is how far we go with these fantasies; some lead us to become completely detached from the truth, and some are more harmless. Some of us have sleep scenarios to help us get to sleep, dreaming of the perfect partner or house, and some of us have elaborate stories that help us cope with dark truths that we cannot acknowledge, convincing ourselves to be good people or free of guilt in order to live with ourselves.
Baker and Solondz highlight the inevitability of dream-worlds as a coping mechanism, and while their characters are both children, it connects us with the lies we tell ourselves, and the reality that everyone is entrenched in their own version of a fantasy, unable to see a glaring truth that hides inside all of us.