Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay on the unique pre-adolescent despair of Welcome to the Dollhouse.
Because there are an infinite amount of ways to grow up, there are an infinite amount of ways to approach a coming-of-age film. Horror is a visceral conduit of the bloodier, body-horror realities of puberty, a gruesome match made in hell expertly realized by the likes of Ginger Snaps, Raw, and Carrie. Historical dramas like American Graffiti, The Outsiders, and Stand By Me, remind us that growing up is a tough business no matter the time period. And fantastical offerings from Spirited Away to Star Wars: A New Hope allow teenage growing pains the imaginative space to fail and flourish.
But if we zoom out even further, I think there are fundamentally two kinds of coming-of-age films. There are coming of age flicks made for young folks in the process of growing up, intended to commiserate with and advise those in the throes of adolescence. And then there are the films made for adults who survived the ordeal and lived to cringe, wince, and laugh at all their pre-teen angst. Todd Solondz‘s gangly, bitingly desperate 1995 coming-of-age-sterpiece Welcome to the Dollhouse is firmly in the latter category. The film concerns Dawn Weiner (Heather Matarazzo) a middle-schooler struggling to survive her suburban life, inattentive parents, and bullying peers. As the video essay below relays, the film’s subversive gait and a pitch-black sense of humor paint pre-adolescence as a pitifully bleak affair that, in retrospect, is kind of funny. Between the cataclysmic need to be liked to the uncomfortable newfound sense of self-awareness, Dawn is us and we are Dawn. Or were, thankfully.
Watch “Welcome to the Dollhouse & Middle Grade Despair“:
Who made this video?
This video essay on Welcome to the Dollhouse is by Yhara Zayd. They provide insightful deep dives on young adult content from Skins to My Best Friend’s Wedding. You can check out more of their content and subscribe to their channel on YouTube here. If you like their stuff and you want to support them, you can check out their Patreon here.
