Spine 574: Life During Wartime

Your hosts of Lost in Criterion were juniors in high school on September 11, 2001, and that certainly colors our opinion of Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime (2010). And so do current events. Solondz is also 25 years older than us, and while I agree, as Solondz says in one of the bonus features on this release, that the suburbs of New Jersey (where he grew up) and the suburbs of Ohio (where we lived in 2001) are not so different, I think that difference in generations is perhaps insurmountable. The gulf may keep us from fulling "getting" Solondz. I guess my point is that we spend a lot of time this week talking about how we would approach the metaphorical use of child abuse differently in a post-9/11 story, as we were 16 year old children on 9/11. And as is often the case, getting bogged down in what we wanted to see may keep us from fully seeing what Solondz is up to.