Todd Solondz’ 1998 film "Happiness" is a look at white-picket-fence America and its rotting foundation. The collision of suburban subterfuge and the dark underbelly it covers is most evident in the story of small-town therapist — and pedophile — Dr. Bill Maplewood. The “sandwich scene” emphasizes the tension between these two worlds through classical cutting and distinguishes them with contrasts in lighting and sound.
The scene finds Bill making his family and son’s baseball buddy hot fudge sundaes, thus fulfilling his image as an all-American, “Ward Cleaver type” of father. Little do they know, Bill is a pedophile, and has spiked the fudge in an effort to rape his son’s friend. When little Johnny Grasso doesn’t want the chocolate treat, Bill panics, urging him to try something else and finally seducing him into eating a tuna salad sandwich. The sequence ultimately evokes the voyeuristic thrill of watching a predator at work from a safe distance — safe in the sense that the viewer is physically detached from the situation, but in actuality, the scene is unsettlingly intimate.
Just as Bill intended to make it, the scene initially seems innocent — a mood reflected by the comfortably distant establishing shot of his family room. The scene grows uncomfortable as the camera quickly cuts between close-ups of Bill and even tighter ones of his sexual target Johnny. In pulling these characters close together, director Solondz visually bridges the gap between the worlds they respectively symbolize — the wicked and the innocent. The formerly mentioned world overtakes the latter, enveloping the otherwise bright, chipper setting in shadow (shadows which are significantly darker around Bill than the other characters — his wife and two sons).
The editing and lighting work together in a moment wherein the camera lingers on an otherwise friendly (albeit in an artificial, posed way) family portrait -- including the dog -- bathed in darkness. The shadows hover stealthily like demons over Bill and his sons--boys the age of Bill's prey. The camera lingers just long enough to underscore the fact that Bill's seemingly pleasant domestic life is a veil. The shot is relatively brief, reflecting Bill's hesitance to dwell on his demons.
As is the case with most classical cutting, the editing here highlights details like this for dramatic effect. Another example of this is evident in the frequent cutting to, and close focus on, Johnny’s drug-laced tuna sandwich — an object made even more dominant by the intrinsic interest it holds for the audience, and the weight it carries as Johnny’s ticket to doom.
Solondz also stresses the scene’s diegetic sound to make for a jarring contrast to its subject matter. As Bill fixates on Johnny, we hear the loud, constant beeping of his son’s video game — a simultaneous reminder of Johnny’s innocence and aural representation of Bill’s piercing obsession with him. When Bill is not in the room with Johnny (as when he practically tip-toes through the house’s bedrooms to make sure his family is asleep), the film is almost dead quiet, making the beeping that much more unnerving when it is present.
The most striking aural contrast to this situation is the "Leave it to Beaver"-esque musical cue that creeps in toward the end of the scene. It swells as Bill gazes upon Johnny, ready to pounce upon his prey. The fleeting music also serves as a stark reminder to the viewers that they are watching the furthest possible thing from a pleasant family sitcom. Just as Bill Maplewood slips a mickey in fudge, Solondz coats the subject matter with “sugar” (an aesthetically pleasant setting) to make the medicine or harsh realities go down unexpectedly — in other words, to subvert the ideal image of America and show that the white-picket-fence American Dream is deteriorating and being replaced by far more morally questionable desires.
Within the perversion of wholesome imagery and sound lies the scarily exhilarating thrill of this scene. The juxtaposition of Bill’s hideous sexual desire and his home’s Mayberry aesthetic adds tension and twisted irony to the situation. It also serves as an unsettling reminder of the all-too-real coexistence and commingling of mayhem and mundanity.
The “sandwich scene” is one of the film’s few night sequences, which is fitting because, thematically speaking, it is easily the darkest chapter in the film — darkness literalized and underscored by the ever-lingering shadows. The quick cutting, shadowy suburban setting, and persistent video game beeping work together to give the scene a seductively otherworldly quality. As Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman wrote in his review of the film, “Solondz has a gift for tweaking our curiosity, so that, like children waiting for a monster to leap from the shadows, we’re left giddy with anticipation at whatever seamy private horror is coming next."
Like the rest of the film, watching the “sandwich scene” feels like being a fly on the walls of the ordinary and looking through a funhouse mirror of them. It has an otherworldly, dreamlike quality as it presents a disturbingly conceivable situation, creating the kind of distance people want when confronted with such real-world horror (in this case, child rape.)
Solondz keeps viewers on edge as he seamlessly straddles this line between escapism and reality. He has accomplished what few filmmakers have, turning everyday life into both a disturbing, depressing concept and scarily exhilarating entertainment — the kind of popcorn, albeit slightly perverse, entertainment evoked by its classical style. A scene involving a man trying to rape a child probably wouldn’t be tolerable if executed in any other fashion. By the end of the film, any notions of what is normal seem anything but. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review, the film is ultimately about “the horrifying suggestion that its characters may not be grotesque exceptions, but may in fact be part of the mainstream of humanity." Solondz’ conveys their infiltration into the seemingly normal world with hypnotic artistry.