Harmony Korine and Todd Solondz’s Dissection of the “Lost America”
During my first semesters of film studies, I became enamored with the works of Harmony Korine. Initially, my curiosity was inexplicable. His films introduced me to a new definition of what could be considered a “good” film — provocative, icky, and uncomfortable. These are not adjectives you’d typically associate with praise, yet they are the very qualities that kept me glued to the screen, creating an experience I couldn’t easily explain.
Korine’s films feel like watching a building burn — uncontrollable and mesmerizing. His characters strip away the pretense of humanity and social constructs, revealing a raw, animalistic nature. After receiving the Pardo d’onore at the Locarno Film Festival, Korine described his work as spotlighting a “Lost America.” This “Lost America” isn’t just a symbol or a concept — it’s a feeling, a wildness that resists articulation, tapping into something feral and untamed.
Take Gummo, now embedded in the American indie zeitgeist. The film’s protagonist, a seemingly apathetic boy in the desolate town of Xenia, Ohio, navigates a life marked by poverty, isolation, and aimlessness. His days are filled with bizarre, disturbing acts — a perfect reflection of Korine’s “Lost America,” an existence beyond the radar of contemporary culture. Gummo’s actions force the audience to confront the unsettling idea that what we know about America is far from all there is.
Korine’s style is undeniably sensory. This “Lost America” he captures, stripped of pretense, is mirrored in the way his films discard the conventional “pleasuristic experience” of mainstream films. Take, for example, the bathtub scene in Gummo. The distorted sounds — the draining water, candy wrappers floating, the slurping of spaghetti — are grating, designed to make the viewer uncomfortable. The dirty brown water in the tub, the mixing of food and filth, all accentuate the grotesque.
This scene epitomizes Korine’s ability to connect style and form, using discomfort as a tool to strip away the familiar and leave us with something unsettling yet captivating. His films challenge us to confront this rawness, the “ick” that we often shy away from. And in doing so, Korine doesn’t just show us a “Lost America” — he makes us feel it.
This concept of the “Lost America” is Korine’s textual fingerprint, present in each of his films. His style dismantles the idealized version of America, presenting it as raw, grotesque, and unapologetically unrefined. But in this exploration of “Lost America,” Korine isn’t alone. Another filmmaker, whose career grew around the same time, shares this obsession with the strange and unspoken feeling of a fractured America: Todd Solondz.
Todd Solondz: An Antidote
When I think of Korine, I can’t help but draw comparisons to filmmakers like Todd Solondz. In many ways, Solondz feels like Korine’s antidote. While both explore a version of “Lost America,” their approaches couldn’t be more different. Solondz’s world is more controlled, clinical, and restrained, while Korine’s is wild, chaotic, and raw.
Take Welcome to the Dollhouse’s Dawn Wiener, for example. She, like Solomon in Gummo, is a social outcast, navigating a world that seems indifferent to her existence. Both characters reflect a kind of “Lost America,” though their environments are vastly different. Dawn’s struggles are confined within the suburban nightmare of middle school, a place where social rules are cruelly enforced. She feels out of place, awkward, and constantly humiliated — her world may be more polished and structured, but the despair she feels runs deep, echoing the same existential void that Solomon faces in Gummo.
However, while Dawn is a victim of societal cruelty, Solomon is more of a chaotic force, moving aimlessly through a lawless, decaying world. The contrast between their environments — Solomon’s feral, unstructured chaos and Dawn’s suffocating suburban malaise — highlights the unique ways Korine and Solondz explore the “Lost America.”
In Korine’s films, discomfort comes from sensory overload, from the unpredictability of his characters and their environments. His handheld camera work, disjointed storytelling, and dreamlike imagery create a disorienting experience, leaving viewers to wade through the grime and confusion of his “Lost America.” Solondz, on the other hand, presents us with carefully composed shots and tightly structured narratives, where discomfort arises from watching characters fail to live up to societal norms in painfully awkward ways.
Two Sides of Despair in Capitalist America
Korine and Solondz may exist in different cinematic realms, but their works share an undeniable symbiosis. They almost feel like they inhabit the same world — Korine’s on the outskirts of normalcy, Solondz’s amidst the norm. Their worlds exists in conversation with each other. Both expose the fragility of societal norms, but in two extreme and interconnected ways: one through the obliteration of structure, and the other through its suffocating overpresence.
What makes their films so deeply unsettling is not just their depiction of lost, marginalized characters but the environments in which they live — environments shaped by the decay of America’s capitalist ideals.
In Korine’s films, the rawness of his sensory overload mirrors the fallout of a society built on consumption and excess. His characters are adrift, detached from the consumerist promises of the American Dream. They exist in a post-capitalist wasteland where the pursuit of material wealth has eroded the very foundation of social order.
His films, in their chaotic presentation, strip away the romanticism of American ideals, its camera lingers on the decay — crumbling buildings, rusting cars, desolate landscapes — and in doing so, he forces us to confront the environmental and societal wreckage left in the wake of capitalism’s march.
In contrast, Solondz’s Lost America may appear more polished on the surface, but it’s no less affected by the rot of capitalist ideals. His suburban settings, with their meticulously composed shots and controlled environments, represent the very pinnacle of America’s consumer culture — neat, orderly, and suffocating. But beneath the surface of this carefully constructed world lies a deep undercurrent of dissatisfaction and despair.
Characters like Dawn Wiener, trapped in the glossy veneer of suburban life, become victims of a system that pressures them to conform to ideals of success, beauty, and social status. In both Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse, we see families trying to live up to the capitalist dream of the perfect suburban life, only to unravel under the weight of their disillusionment. The shiny, ordered world of Solondz’s America is a façade, hiding the rot of unmet expectations and the cruelty of societal norms.
Korine and Solondz’ films challenge us to look past the familiar, polished surfaces and confront the uncomfortable realities beneath — a world shaped by unfulfilled promises and the slow erosion of meaning. Through discomfort and disorientation, they evoke a sense of unease that lingers, making us question what we’ve come to accept as normal.
As I write this, I’m starting to understand what initially drew me to Korine and Solondz. Living outside of America, I had unknowingly bought into the glossy, idealized version of the American Dream — fed to me by Hollywood’s sanitized portrayals of success, suburban bliss, and endless possibility. But the provocative nature of their films dismantles this illusion completely. They peel back the layers of myth to reveal something more unsettling: that beneath the surface, life, no matter where it’s lived, is riddled with pretense and decay.
Their work forces me to confront the reality that this decay is a byproduct of the very systems we rely on, systems that promise fulfillment but often breed alienation. It’s not just America’s dream that’s fragile — it’s the human condition itself, shaped and warped by expectations we can never fully meet.
