Happy Together: The Transparent View of Dystopias Now Only a Hop, Skip, and a Jump Away

Time to get yellowpilled. Zahier Turner’s Happy Together is well summed up in that line. There is the ancestral debt to The Matrix, the ominous mandate disguised as friendly bracing, and finally, the well-known idea facelifted out of its resting bitch face into happy as a sunflower smile. You can thank corporate for that. 

The protagonist is company man Jordan (Andre Haskett), happy and obedient in his powder blue shirt and beige pants. His superior (Joshua Blayne) will call him the best employee every time he sees him, only to promptly forget about him. The boyish faces of both make this game even more oppressively empty.  

But it is the pill that is introduced before any of the characters. Staring into your soul with that polite half-smile, the bottle of pills dominates the foreground. Its mates in stock occupy the space just behind. The pill has spread its presence everywhere, from the most obvious, its taker, to the more surprising, the taker’s very environment. Happiness is a dull sunflower away from the sun, the same anodyne outfit on everyone. The rainbows are desaturated to sepia toned pastels. People behave in symmetry. 

It is all so very optimised for maximum efficiency that the remotest hints of vigour, the palest pops of colour cause a dissonance. What is that bright pink, that bold font, doing here?  But of course, that is only the nip in the air near the iceberg. The camera is about to forget the stabiliser at home (but it will bring back perspective). Jordan’s co-worker, neighbour, and friend, Cameron (Justin McCleskey) has stopped taking the pill, he announces in a whisper one morning. Trouble follows, swift, streamlined.  

This sinister ease of operations, its complete normalcy, is terrifying, a step-up—or perhaps it is only making good on the threat—from the creepy opening. Once things start to unravel, that is, once characters start to consider disobedience, this happy world begins falling apart. The threat is now visible. Everything is grayer without the shiny veneer effected by the pill. Even innocuous objects like flashlights bear the certainty of danger. Time to get yellowpilled, they say. 

It is nothing we have not already seen before, but every encounter with these echoes and reflections of the matrix is unsettling (and entertaining, and maybe there’s some of the tragedy).  The great and inherent advantage of Happy Together is that its runtime cuts off the possibility of epic scale. Whatever can happen has only a short, perilous window to make it, and isn’t that what we face again and again, every time anyone disobeys?  

Watch Happy Together Short Film Trailer