Heather Matarazzo\u2019s turn as Dawn Wiener framed my understanding of being queer<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I first stumbled upon Todd Solondz\u2019s 1995 film, Welcome To The Dollhouse<\/em>, when it arrived <\/em>at my suburban video store, and was absolutely flummoxed by its cover: a Pee-wee’s Playhouse<\/em>-style faux-retro housewife, slumped on the floor of a ketchup-red abyss, dead-eyed yet somehow coquettish, staring directly at me beneath a violent ransom note proclaiming its title.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Who was this girl? Had I seen her earlier that summer in the gently necrophilic live-action remake of Casper<\/em>, after which my deeply Catholic mother had taken me to Swiss Chalet for a conversation contextualizing the occult and explaining why I should never, ever touch a Ouija board? Or the year before in Monkey Trouble<\/em>, in which a troubled child forms a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style alliance with a capuchin monkey? No, those were different Hollywood outcasts. I’d never seen Heather Matarazzo, Dollhouse’s<\/em> befuddling cover girl, in anything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I recognized something about her. Something queer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019re not familiar with Dollhouse<\/em>, it charts a week or so in the life of 12-year-old Dawn Weiner (Matarazzo), known to most of her junior high as Weiner Dog. Some people are born under a bad sign; Dawn seems to have been born into the wrong story. She\u2019s ignored but somehow still a target, a black sheep middle child stuck between a rock (older brother Mark, an overachieving computer nerd) and a hard place (tutu-clad saccharine-sweet kid sister, Missy). Dawn lumbers under the weight of a New Jersey suburban ennui to which those around her seem immune. Her family laughs at the same jokes for the same reasons while she hides in her room, kneeling in front of a cardboard shrine, invoking hunky crush Steve Rodgers (Ugly Betty\u2019s<\/em> Eric Mabius) to rescue her from a split-level shag carpet nightmare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Dawn\u2019s wishes never come true, and her good intentions only seem to make things worse. She\u2019s labelled a cheater when others copy answers from her test, and nearly blinds a teacher when defending herself from her classmates\u2019 spitballs. In an excruciatingly familiar early scene, Dawn comes to the defence of another junior high untouchable who runs from her aid, preferring physical abuse to social suicide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I first watched the film, I sympathized with Dawn because, no matter how many times she gets knocked down\u2014often literally\u2014she gets back up. Dawn, I thought, was a victim, like me, and that made her good<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But to maintain this image of her I had to ignore all of the bad<\/em> things Dawn did, like hold a hammer over the head of her sleeping sister and wonder if it would split like a watermelon or crack like an egg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Being bullied is a slow-drip nightmare\u2014I once returned to my briefly unattended science textbook to find that a classmate had used a Sharpie to scrawl \u201cI hate your sweaters\u201d across its laminated cover\u2014but oppression does not make us pure. Dawn and I still had plenty of metaphorical dirt on our hands: we could be petty, manipulative, horny, hungry, lazy, jealous and casually violent. We leveraged the same social structures that punished us to punish others, because, for the bullied, the elusive rush of superiority can be extremely satisfying (when I found myself the third wheel of an eighth-grade friendship triangle, I tried\u2014and failed\u2014to start a rumour that the pair was gay). We were simultaneously infuriated with and fascinated by our bodies, which we fetishized, ignored and abused while they silently laboured to keep us alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neither Dawn nor I were unwaveringly good.<\/em> Sometimes we were monsters. And now, on the other side of a solid stretch of psychotherapy, I\u2019m inspired by her monstrous side. Because, beneath all of our moralizing, life is queer. And that\u2019s funny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Barely 10 minutes into my first viewing of Dollhouse<\/em>, I realized what it was about its box art that had caught my attention. Everything about that photo of Dawn, slumped on the floor like the world\u2019s most disillusioned cover girl, made sense to me, because we both lived in a senseless world. Our kindness was rewarded with contempt, our favourite things were liked by us and us alone and the thing we hungered for most from the depths of our elastic-waisted jeans was non-negotiably forbidden. Dollhouse<\/em> helped me understand that straight suburbia was a hell you found in the \u201c”comedy\u201d section. Dawn was a kindred spirit, and with every viewing\u2014I watched the film twice more that first weekend and continued to rent it on a regular basis\u2014I felt a little less alone, a little less condemned and a little more in on the joke of my queer existence. The sad fact that the wide receiver of the Catholic Central Saints would never take me to prom wasn\u2019t sad at all: it was delightfully absurd. Dollhouse<\/em> allowed me to see my life through the lens of another, more accommodating genre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I worked to understand who I was, Dollhouse<\/em> became a secret handshake, and inviting friends to a viewing was a sign of trust. Watching Dawn\u2019s blood boil as she was pushed deeper into her own private hell was undeniably cathartic, but sharing her suffering with others was an even greater release. Regardless of our sexualities\u2014my crew was mainly composed of straight Italian girls who liked boy bands and Brio\u2014we could all relate to Dawn Weiner. None of us were popular. A college writing teacher told me that laughter is recognition, and Dollhouse<\/em> was the funniest thing I\u2019d ever seen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But with every viewing, Dawn\u2019s world stayed the same, and mine did, too. The boys I lusted over became men, while I stayed short and smooth, a pudgy face framed by a slack bowl of styleless and disconcertingly shiny hair. Out for dinner, I\u2019d wait as servers took my family\u2019s order and, finally turning to me, would inevitably chirp, \u201cAnd what can I get for the little girl?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n I eventually realized that some of my growing pains weren\u2019t going to end\u2014but I had no idea that the girl behind Weiner Dog, actress Heather Matarazzo, could also relate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n