Shiny Happy People

Happy-Go-Lucky is the story of a driving school instructor who sees the world for what it really is, a whithered cesspool of broken dreams, crushed spirits and relentless persecution. His antithesis, a relentlessly cheery primary school teacher whose life is unrealistically filled with childlike optimism and fun, sets out to lift this burden of truth from his shoulders and replace it with a sunny disposition and horseshit sun-will-come-out-tomorrow attitude. Poppy, a walking, talking smiley face represents a sort of one woman joy division where everything she touches turns to roses and lolly pops thus obscuring the fundamental truth that life is nothing more than something to be endured until we really can't face another day, blow our brains all over the bedroom wall and then shit ourselves in a final involuntary act of self-deprecation.

Director Morpheus Leigh has opted for a “happy” solution to our hero's acute awareness dilemma by making Poppy's fake world so fucking infectious as to draw our doomed realist into its pod-like clutches to be farmed for energy by unseen machines. He slowly loses any grip he held on reality, gives up and decides to smoke some distilled Poppy opiate and join the happy club. Fuck it, What's the point? seems to be Leigh's underlaying statement here.

A brave, but utterly hopeless ascent into the world of virtual madness that the ill-informed live in and a film that serves as a possible martial-arts-free alternate to the original Matrix had Neo chosen the blue instead of the red pill. In a final nod to the hopelessness of our modern existence, the one child in Poppy's primary school with any free spirit is emotionally bludgeoned by the Karma Police into believing his natural tenancies to physically dominate those around him is somehow destructive and wrong. Charles Darwin must be rolling in his grave.

This film has much to say if you're willing to listen. In Morpheus Leigh's own words "Remember, all I'm offering is a big fat lie. Nothing more."