T.Yerxaa
I recently rewatched an old movie and had a very deep feeling about it.
Twenty years ago, it was considered a phenomenal independent film. Such a movie would probably not be made today. Its stance bears a clear imprint of the "pre-political correctness era", but this movie is extremely suitable for today's Chinese society.
That was 2006, a year when the success ideology in the United States was at its highest and cracks began to appear.
At that time, Tony Robbins' motivational lectures filled stadiums, and Trump's catchphrase "You're fired" in every episode of "The Apprentice" turned the elimination logic of business competition into an entertainment spectacle. At the official level, the George W. Bush administration proposed the education policy of "No Child Left Behind" to embed the logic of competition into children's childhood lives.
There is a single sense of order flowing deep throughout American culture, where people are either rising or sinking, winners or losers.
The winner deserves everything, the loser has only themselves to blame.
"Little Miss Sunshine" exploded in this cultural atmosphere. Screenwriter Michael Arndt later talked about the creative motivation and said that he read Arnold Schwarzenegger saying to high school students, "I hate losers the most in my life. I despise them." There was an impulse in his heart to refute this sentence.
"Little Miss Sunshine"
The film thus sets its critical target from the very source—Richard Hoover. This is a failed motivational speaker who made a career out of promoting the Nine Steps to Success. Richard was the most faithful product of the spiritual climate of that era and the human embodiment of the ideology of success.
Placing such a character in the center of the all-round dysfunctional family in the film, and then letting the road trip peel away the foundation of his beliefs little by little, is the film's most subversive design of the success system.
The film uses a carefully designed structural counterpoint to achieve subversive and satirical goals. We see Richard's nine-step method and his real situation completely forming a cold contrast.
His lectures had only a handful of audiences, and his own children openly disdained everything he said. But the cleverness of the film is that it is not eager to let Richard suffer punishment at the plot level, but allows the life experience of everyone around him to quietly deconstruct his worldview.
Uncle Frank was the top Proust researcher in the United States and held the highest academic honors. He finally bid farewell to the competition by attempting suicide.
In order to become a fighter pilot, young Dwayne kept silent for nine months and armed himself with Nietzsche. The moment he discovered that he was color blind, all the silence turned into a roar.
Grandfather Edwin was expelled from the nursing home for heroin abuse and spent his later years using pornographic magazines and swearing, but he was the only person in the play who truly loved Olive unconditionally.
This family is an exhibition hall of failures created by American winner culture, but the narrative temperature of the film is never a sympathetic look down upon.
The section of Proust that Frank told Dwayne at the dock is unforgettable, not because it has any literary value, but because it logically directly dismantles the core presuppositions of success science.
The basis of success science is that pain is an obstacle that needs to be overcome, happiness is a state that should be optimized, and human value is externalized from achievement to visible victory.
Frank said that when Proust looked back at the end of his life, he concluded that those years of suffering were the best years, they shaped who he was; those happy years? Learned nothing.
This passage is like a key, allowing Dwayne, who is in the darkest moment of his life, to understand that failure itself can be a source of meaning. Its subversiveness lies not in opposing success, but in liberating failure from moral judgment and reducing it to a part of human experience itself.
However, one of the film's most critical narrative strategies is hidden in the place where it seems least politically correct.
Child beauty pageants are a long-standing, but never rigorously scrutinized, idiosyncratic part of American popular culture.
The participating girls wore close-fitting clothing, put on adult makeup, and performed simulated sexy catwalk movements. Parents watched with relish, and the organizers solemnly judged the performance.
The underlying logic of this ritual is that a seven-year-old girl's worth is determined by how well she simulates adult standards of beauty.
This is definitely a practice of sexual objectification of children, but because it is packaged in the form of a competition and circulated in the name of cultivating talents, it is culturally legitimate.
In the scene where Olive dances to the psychopathic Superman on stage, the film does something extremely dangerous in form, it puts a little girl on stage doing what from an outsider's perspective looks like a striptease. The adults in the audience were stunned, the host tried to drag her off the stage, and the organizing committee officials were furious.
But what the film makes clear is that Olive has no awareness of the sexual connotations of the routine – choreographed by her grandfather based on his sixty years of experience in strip clubs, and that Olive dances with total joy and no trace of provocation.
There is an ethical reversal here. Olive's performance is the closest to sexualization in form, but the purest in intention. Instead, the performances of all the other contestants surrounding her are the most harmless in social form, but the most complete in institutional sexual objectification of children.
The film uses this reversal to reveal the essential hypocrisy of beauty pageant culture. It does not really worry about the sexualization of children. It only uses so-called norms of decency to control the disciplinary process of female bodies starting from childhood.
Was Olive banished from the stage because her performance was morally inferior? Not so. The reason is actually that her performance cannot be incorporated into that order.
The reason why this strategy of the film has a strong contemporary attribute is that it can only be effective in the independent film context of the post-ironic era around 2006.
It uses a performance that is even more incorrect on the surface to reveal the real faults of the original system. It requires the audience to be willing to ask for meaning in the discomfort of the form, and it requires a viewing initiative that does not put morality before experience.
This is precisely the audience that American independent films cultivated during that historical period.
Directors Deighton and Faris started out shooting music videos and are very sophisticated at how to create visual pleasure while also embedding critical content.
The grandfather's heroin scene is another application of the same logic.
According to normal plot rules, an old man who takes drugs in the narrative will either be punished in the plot or be morally sympathetic as a tragic figure, but this film categorically rejects both paths.
Edwin's death is understated and provides no moral warning at all; he simply dies quietly in a motel bed.
The family's reaction was grief, but grief was followed by immediate action, stuffing his body into the trunk of the van and going on the road, because it was more important for Olive to compete than to come to terms with the ethics of death.
Therefore, Edwin’s heroin story and his unreserved love for Olive, instead of canceling each other out on the film’s ethical scale, reinforce each other.
It is precisely because he never measures anyone by the standards of decency that he can be the one who tells Olive to try bravely.
Likewise, Frank's homosexuality is mentioned almost passingly in the film. It was introduced by Olive’s questioning during a dinner scene and then sat there without becoming a plot-driven issue or even receiving any kind of special treatment.
In the United States in 2006, the battle to legalize gay marriage was at its most intense stage. Against this background, having a character's gay identity appear in such a homely way was a political stance in itself, but its power did not come from confrontation, but from normalization itself. Treating identity characteristics that should be controversial as trivial is the most radical destigmatization strategy possible.
At the end of the film, the broken yellow van drives onto the highway with its horn blaring continuously. The trumpet is a perfect metaphor for the anxious noise created by the logic of success, which once started cannot stop itself.
But there's no shame in the family sitting in this failing machine that keeps alarming, pushing it, jumping in, and moving on.
This is the most fundamental subversion of the film. It attempts to overturn the definition of success in the American mind, but it also does not want to provide an alternative.
It just shows that under the roar of winner's culture, people can choose not to participate in the game of judgment, and this choice itself is a kind of dignity.
