Trigger warning: I am about to discuss a Todd Solondz film.
Back in the 1990s, Solondz was one of a pack of up-and-coming American indie directors, along with the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater and Todd Haynes. After getting hyped wildly for his portraits of twisted "losers" in "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Happiness"— one of the decade's defining films — he slowly fell out of favor. In fact, you could probably trace the rise of the use of the word "comfortable" in American English — as in "I'm not comfortable with that" — over the arc of Solondz' fall.
The consensus view of his work started to shift with 2001's "Storytelling," which featured a notorious scene with Robert Wisdom and Selma Blair, playing a college professor and student, using both the N- and F-words in a sexual context that seemed designed to make people's heads explode. Where his portraits of soulless suburbia were once viewed as wickedly transgressive and slyly subversive, now that he trained his eye on issues of race and political correctness, Solondz was branded a misanthrope, a miserablist, a hater.