WHAT THIS FILM IS ABOUT

False Happiness is a documentary about the life, work and influence of Professor Nick Dungey. However, it is also a film about human values and the modern misunderstanding of happiness as it applies to our personal and political lives. In his lectures Nick clearly illustrates the modern American tendency to equate joy and fulfillment with material wealth and consumerism rather than the development of a more nuanced understanding of pleasure as ephemeral and contingent upon our personal outlook and ability to artistically shape or give meaning to our lives.

Drawing from the work of thinkers like Boethius, Niccolo Machiavelli, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and others Nick makes a case that without an appreciation for the foundations and evolution of our core values as a society we cannot fully grasp a vision of a healthy, heroic future. 

Under the influence of Nick's teaching, guidance and encouragement, his students go on to study law, champion social and political causes, and make art of their lives. This documentary is one such example. While there is no doubt that Nick is a remarkable person with an exceptional power of mind, he is also a manifestation of circumstance, timing, and chance -- factors we would be remiss to overlook. Therefore False Happiness is as much an attempt to share the work and influence of an outstanding educator as it is a means to celebrate a man whose ability to act as a human catalyst and champion for forward thought is incontrovertible. 

NICK DUNGEY:  On Realizing The Role of Fortune

"Our beauty, our strength, our intelligence, our genius, our property, our wealth.  All of those things that we have come to associate as ours, as aspects of our identity as aspects of our character as aspects of the uniqueness of our subjectivity and identity.  According to Boethius, those things are not in fact ours.  They belong to who? Fortune.  And when she spins her wheel and she decides they go, what happens? They go. They go. "

BOETHIUS

"I would like to continue our discussion a while by using Fortune's own arguments, and I would like you to consider whether her demands are just.  'Why do you burden me each day, mortal man,' she asks, 'with your querulous accusations? What harm have I done you? What possessions of yours have I stolen?  Choose any judge you like and sue me for possession of wealth and rank, and if you can show that any part of these belongs by right to any mortal man, I will willingly concede that what you are seeking to regain really did belong to you."

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SIGHTS & SOUNDS THAT HAVE INSPIRED THIS PROJECT

MACHIAVELLI

"You must know there are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man. This has been figuratively taught to princes by ancient writers, who describe how Achilles and many other princes of old were given to the Centaur Chiron to nurse, who brought them up in his discipline; which means solely that, as they had for a teacher one who was half beast and half man, so it is necessary for a prince to know how to make use of both natures, and that one without the other is not durable."

NICK DUNGEY: ON BECOMING THE LION

"Not only do you have to be ferocious, you have to be what? You have to be guiltless.  You have to hunt, kill, destroy... and then you have to go home and have a cigar.  You have to pour yourself a martini, light up a good Cuban, and just pace around in your study.  Or take a nap.  You can't have any guilt, you can't have any pains in your soul, pains in your consciousness, you can't feel bad.  The lion hunts.  The lion fells a zebra.  The lion fells a giraffe.  It rips it apart.  That giraffe isn't going anywhere again.  The lion feasts, nourishes off this dead thing, and does the lion feel any guilt?  No. Absolutely not.  You can't feel guilt."

SIGHTS & SOUNDS THAT HAVE INSPIRED THIS PROJECT

NICK DUNGEY: On creating beauty in a world without meaning

"Nietzsche wants you to become heroic. To do so you must embrace four observations. First, you must find the courage and clarity to recognize that the world possess no inherent meaning and purpose. Second, you must embrace the fact that all meaning, value, and purposes are human inventions. All meaning and values are the heroic and aesthetic process of giving the world and one's life meaning, value, and beauty.  Third, you must find the strength to realize that all human meaning, value, and purposes are highly fragile moments of significance thrown over a meaningless and hostile world. These moments of meaning and values will, from time to time, be destroyed. And fourth, you must find the extraordinary emotional and creative strength to re-invent your self and the meaningfulness of the world, over and over again. The heroic individual makes beauty out of a world that's unintelligible and can't be mastered."

NIETZSCHE

"By my honor, friend," answered Zarathustra, "all that of which you speak does not exist: there is no devil and no hell. Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further."  The man looked up suspiciously. "If you speak the truth," he said, "I lose nothing when I lose my life. I am not much more than a beast that has been taught to dance by blows and a few meager morsels.  "By no means," said Zarathustra. "You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you with my own hands.

In the following clips, taken from Professor Dungey's lecture on Nietzsche's critique of Platonic Philosophy and New Testament Christian Theology, Professor Dungey explains the way a Platonic or Christian metaphysics leads to resentment and how an aesthetic interpretation of life and purpose can redeem life.

SIGHTS & SOUNDS THAT HAVE INSPIRED THIS PROJECT

FOUCAULT

"You see that's why I really work like a dog, and I worked like a dog all my life. I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation...  This transformation of one's self by one's knowledge, one's practice is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?"

NICK DUNGEY: ON THE FABRICATION OF IDENTITY

"Your consciousness itself is a type of control of space and time. How you understand yourself and how you move through time and space, how you think about thinking is the product of an examination. And as you conceive of yourself and you discipline yourself, and you control your energy, and your desires, and your passions, you are already exemplifying a radically, and deeply, and inescapably internalized notion of surveillance."