Against Happiness: On Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, Gaspar Noé, and the Feel-Bad Film

THESE DAYS, feeling good is less of an individual aspiration than a cultural, social, and political obligation. As Slavoj Žižek has noted, Western subjects have little choice but to follow the cultural imperative to “Enjoy!” themselves. Pharrell Williams suggests contemporary experience leaves the individual feeling like “a hot air balloon that could go to space” since, he croons, “happiness is the truth.” In his recent book,The Happiness Industry, which examines the close links between capitalist culture and the world of psychology, William Davies describes the “limitless pursuit of self-optimization that counts for happiness in the age of neoliberalism.” In late capitalism, anything that stands in the way of positive thinking and its corollary, blissful consumption, is viewed with suspicion.