That Ray Bradbury was one happy son-of-a-bitch. Or at least he comes across that way in his stories. Part of it was having the luck to grow up in a simpler time when the country was growing, and growing in the right direction. His timing also couldn’t have been better for a 50 year window where it was possible to make a good living writing short genre fiction. A story called The Happiness Machine sounds right in his wheelhouse.
Also lucky, is the star of the episode who has made a fine living for decades despite being possibly the only actor worse than Bill Paxton ever to get steady work. Elliott Gould awakens one sunny morning to birds chirping, dogs frolicking, bees buzzing, birds soaring. He is so goddamn happy he decides he needs to pay it back (or forward as we say now).
He pulls various pieces of junk out of his garage to invent a Happiness Machine. He then walks around the neighborhood taking pictures of little boys climbing trees and little girls playing hopscotch. His luck continues by him not being arrested.
He spends hours in the garage soldering, welding, wiring, painting and finishing the Happiness Machine. Under deadline from his wife who has called the city to haul it away, he tests it out by putting her in it.
She dances by the Danube, sees the Sphinx, sees London, sees France, sees a little girl’s underpants. She is having the ride of her life until suddenly she is in tears. She emerges distraught from the Happiness Machine.
Turns out it, the Happiness Machine is great on the way up, all sweetness and light, hope, birds chirping . . . like experiencing Bradbury’s life.
But when you step out of the machine into shitty reality, it is soul-crushing. It leads only to sadness and depression . . . like experiencing Bradbury’s TV show.
Gould’s wife begs him to destroy it. He tries it out himself and briefly experiences the euphoria before a fire starts that destroys it. It pains me to say it, but there is an effective ending. He is saddened by the destruction of his Happiness Machine, but his wife tells him to look in the windows of his house. He sees his kids playing the piano, the violin, showing off a painting, modeling a new blouse. His home and family are the Happiness Machine.
I expected more from this episode.
Sure, the ending was nice, with the family all warm & fuzzy, however they did not seem to be in dire straits at the beginning. It may have made more sense to show them experiencing problems such as the Kramdens or Bundys. The machine would have thus made more sense.
Also, when the machine was operating, I waited for it to actually “Transport” the wife to some of the locales or relive “Happy” memories – didn’t happen.
Right…..your home is a “happiness machine” – unless it’s foreclosed on because you’ve missed your mortgage payments, since COVID-19 cost you your (non-essential) job, and your business went bankrupt.
A more interesting concept: the Happiness Machine does give its users a euphoric experience, but the lingering effect is a depression so unfathomable, its users commit suicide days later. No one in the town links it to the machine until about a dozen or so people die of unexplained causes.
Then the inventor, having figured things out, decides he needs to destroy his creation. He goes inside the machine to make some adjustments to facilitate a self-destruct mechanism, but the machine locks him in. He experiences a euphoric experience – which turns out to be his life flashing before his eyes, before the machine explodes, taking its inventor with it. Or maybe that would be more appropriate as an Outer Limits episode.
I like the way you think!