Wonder and Kent discuss the documentary Agent of Happiness, which is about an agent of the (Buddhist) Bhutanese government tasked with going door to door to take the measure of people’s happiness. Themes that arise are the worth of reflecting on what makes us happy, questions around whether one would be happier in a lowly task based job where you have to give up your ego in order to serve or in a well respected career position where your ego, arguably, is prized because not everyone can do your job. Also covered: the contradiction between a government legislating for happiness yet not paying the people responsible for enacting their policies enough money to achieve it, leaving the work for people who are not considered citizens. Astrologically this relates to the 6th, 9th, 10th, and 12th houses and the awkward and often invisible relationship between them.
Distribution: Video on Demand, more info
Directors: Arun Bhattarai & Dorottya Zurbó
Run Time: 94 minutes
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.482] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast, where we're taking a look at the Sundance selection from 2024 and the documentary films. This is the fourth out of six looking at the theme of Faith and Ritual. And today we're going to be diving into a film called Agent of Happiness, which is a world cinema documentary competition piece by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó,. So, Wonder, would you be willing to share the synopsis for this film?
[00:00:41.708] Wonder Bright: I would love to. Agent of Happiness. Amber is one of the many agents working for the Bhutanese government to measure people's happiness levels among the remote Himalayan mountains. But will he find his own along the way? Agent of Happiness, directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó,, offers a unique take on the notoriously exoticized Bhutan and its unusual happiness policy. We follow Amber as he investigates various expressions of contentment across different households and lifestyles while navigating his own struggle as a Nepali minority. The holistic philosophy at the heart of the survey he conducts challenges the conventional metrics of fulfillment and success, often provoking some deeper soul searching. The filmmakers elegantly capture many tender moments between Amber and his interlocutors, as well as some very revealing conversations filled with unflinching honesty and quiet wisdom. Through its carefully crafted narrative, the film resonates as a heartfelt exploration of happiness in the face of adversity. As Amber grapples with the societal disparities and personal roadblocks while searching for love, the story becomes a beautifully realized reminder to count our blessings. And that wonderfully crafted synopsis was by another Sundance programmer, Ania Trzebiatowska.
[00:02:01.451] Kent Bye: Yeah, so Agent of Happiness, this is quite a journey of unpacking this exoticized Bhutan gross national happiness where they promote that they have, like, the 96% everybody in their country is happy based on these surveys, trying to objectify all the different dimensions of happiness. In the Q&A, they said they were working on another film in Bhutan and that somehow the -
[00:02:28.929] Wonder Bright: They were in the home of one of their subjects, and two survey questioners, two agents of happiness, in other words, arrived and started to question one of their subjects. And the conversation went on for four hours, and Arun and Dorottya were just obviously completely taken by this. And in fact, one of the people leading the survey was Amber, who then becomes the protagonist of this film, which we just watched.
[00:02:56.733] Kent Bye: Yeah, so it's quite a, in some ways, a 9th House long distance journey all throughout different corners of Bhutan. Probably you wouldn't normally get access to some of these different citizens of Bhutan and just the fact that they're talking to all these different citizens. And it's quite a long survey. So like you said, three to four hours. And so over the course of 90 minute film, they're only able to share little snippets, but they're creating a composite from the questions that they're asking different people. And some of the people are coming back with very high happiness scores. And then there's other people who are not rating so high. And then you end up tracing some of these characters who maybe are not at the higher end of the happiness scale. And you're able to dig into a little bit of the stories of these people that you're meeting along the way. And so yeah, but at the heart of the piece is Amber, who is this surveyor, this agent of happiness, who's asking these questions and really digging into his own personal situation where he doesn't have full citizenship. So he's a bit of like a second class citizen who's not got all the rights. So you trace some of the ways that that is a blocker for him, the way that he wants to live the life that he wants to live or to even have the relationships he wants to have because it's such a difference for those who are citizens and those who are not citizens. So yeah, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on this piece.
[00:04:27.702] Wonder Bright: I really enjoyed the film and I was so excited when I read the synopsis and going into watching it and I have to say that I actually watched a different film than the one that I was expecting to watch mostly because the filmmakers follow Amber on his journey. And then they do follow some of the respondents to the survey, but they only elected to follow the respondents to the survey who reported unhappy levels of happiness. And so after I finished watching the film, my main takeaway was obviously the survey is a crock. And, like, these people are not as happy because obviously the stories that we've just been told are all about how unhappy people are. And, like, this is hard. And Amber's life is hard as a Nepali minority. Amber doesn't actually have citizenship because apparently the Bhutanese government deprived all Nepali minorities in the 90s, I think it was, of citizenship. So even though he was born in Bhutan and he is essentially a Bhutanese person, he doesn't have citizenship. So he can't leave the country. And part of his story is that he's really searching for love. He's in his early mid 40s and he's taking care of his mom at home and his siblings are nowhere to be found.
[00:05:53.041] Kent Bye: They're all married already. So he's the only one that hasn't had a chance to get married yet.
[00:05:58.542] Wonder Bright: Yeah, and his mom keeps talking to him about how, like, “you need to get married. So you're not the one taking care of me”. Ho ho. What do you know? I have opinions on as a westerner over here. But yeah, so Amber is, like, really lonely and really searching for love. And yet the love story that we watch him pursue is with this young woman who is looking for someone who will go to Australia with her and he can't leave the country because he doesn't have a citizenship. So we're being confronted with how the Bhutanese government is promoting this policy of “we want our people to be happy and we want to understand why they're not”. But what we're actually unpacking through the filmmakers eyes is all the reasons why people might not be happy, which are many and varied. But I definitely came away with the impression that, you know, there was something fishy in Denmark and that these people are not as happy as we're being told that they are. So I was surprised in the Q&A afterwards when an audience member asked about the Bhutanese policy. And Arun responded by saying that there's actually a lot of social surveys trying to measure contentment and happiness. And he goes on to say that one of the well-known ones is the Happy Planet Index. And Bhutan always has a good position in these measurements. And then he goes on at length to sort of talk about how the government is trying to use the data for creating policies and to really make developments in the country that are going to improve people's lives. And they're actually using this survey in Bhutan, not the Happy Planet Index, but the survey that we watch Amber conduct. to make these improvements, which none of that information is in this film. And I was honestly really surprised to hear it and really glad that we had access to the Q&A because this felt to me like it really contradicted what the film itself was about. And I don't know if that was intentional on the part of the filmmakers or how they arrived at their decisions. But it's really interesting because it’s, like, with a space where I'm not entirely sure how to talk about the film because my takeaway was clearly not like a completely accurate one-to-one connection with the filmmaker's intention. Or actually, it made me feel that I was unclear what the filmmaker's intention was in a way that I find confusing, honestly. Yeah. I don't know where you fall on that.
[00:08:29.710] Kent Bye: There's a documentary theorist, his name is John Grierson, who says that documentary is the creative treatment of actuality. And so there's an ethical responsibility to align with, that it's still representing that actuality without distorting that actuality. In your reflections on this film is that on the one hand, Bhutan is saying that they have over 90% happiness, and then the film with over half of the people they're featuring, they're not happy. And so either one of two things is true. Either the filmmakers are not representing that full spectrum of the 90% and they're distorting the figures, or this whole survey is a little bit of a ruse and it shouldn't necessarily be trusted as to reflecting what's happening on the ground within the context of Bhutan because maybe the film is more of accurate representation of what that distribution of happiness might be in Bhutan. So I could see either one of those being true. I'd like to say that I want to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt in the sense that they're just reporting, like, a representative of what they said, they could have, let's say, recorded 100 people and picked the five people that had not so great outcomes and ignored the other 90% or 90 of those stories that didn't have that hook. So, you know, it's hard for me to say, but I like to give the filmmakers a little bit of the benefit of the doubt that they're showing us what they're seeing. We can only know also that for the main protagonist, Amber, he really is in this bind where when I think about the significations, it really feels like this 12th House expression where he's like the stranger in the strange land. And I'm just going to read this section from Demetra George's Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice, a Manual of Traditional Techniques, Volume 2, because she's talking about the signification of the 12th House, which the 12th House has its joy of Saturn. So “the rejoicing of Saturn in this place contributes the significations of melancholy, loneliness, isolation, and alienation to the 12th House corpus of meanings. A person with Saturn in the 12th may experience life as a stranger in a strange land, encountering denial and rejection in their attempts to connect meaningfully with others”. I feel like that passage from Demetra George really summarizes a lot of what Amber's experience is, is this stranger in a strange land of at one point having citizenship, but not having that citizenship, it creates this exile experience where he's a migrant and someone who's maybe undocumented, or I don't know what the situation is if he's still there working on behalf of the government, but yet at the same time, not enjoying the full benefits of what a citizen would receive. And when it comes to his other main feature of this film is his 11th House aspirations for a 7th House partner. And so he's in the 5th House experience of dating and withholding information about his citizenship until it's the right time. But he depicts that every time he shares this piece of information that he's not a full citizen, it destroys all possibilities for his aspirations for a future partner. And so there's this paradoxical situation where he's going around listening to what makes other people happy. And then whenever other people talk about their relationship, their family, it's like this dagger in his heart, because this is the very thing that he knows would make him happy, but he can't have. And so he's surveying on the behalf of the government to show how everybody's really happy, but yet he's sitting with this sense of being in exile and not being able to actually achieve his deepest aspirations of a relationship.
[00:12:05.032] Wonder Bright: Yeah, 100%. And I'm thinking as I'm listening to you describe this about the relationship between the 9th House of law and the 12th House of isolation and exile and a stranger in a strange land, essentially. and how the 12th House has a difficult aspect with the 9th House. So here the Bhutanese government is sort of, like, creating these policies for happiness and how, you know, they want their citizens to be happy. So tell me, are you happy? And yet the very people that they're hiring for this are people who can't get a full time job, which has a salary, which is what Amber really wants. He's only in this job because he can't get a different kind of job. So this job is essentially a 6th House work position. It's 6th House service work that you give to people who can't get other kinds of work. And I imagine that, as a result, it's probably not as well paid as it could be, even though it's obviously really quite an arduous task and really time consuming and really requires some real effort to get the truth. So it kind of reminds me of like other 6th House positions, like, you know, nanny work, like a lot of like service work is very underpaid, like hard labor. Like, I always think about the nanny because like a nanny is doing this incredibly important job, but it's very low paid. And how much do you really value the care that somebody is providing for your family if you're not paying the person who's doing that care very well? You know, it's like, There's a hypocrisy at the heart of that that speaks to why Arun and Dorottya might have wanted to shine a light on the underbelly of this survey, right? And certainly, Amber's journey throughout the film reflects that it's difficult for him. And you just have to wonder, if this policy really matters that much to them, then why are they hiring people that they won't even give a citizenship to? You know, like, there's a fundamental strangeness there that is described between the way that the 9th House, 12th House and 6th House operate. Because for reasons I'm not going to go into, the 12th House and the 6th House are considered difficult. They govern difficult topics of life. But the 9th and the 3rd are the good places. They're good Houses. They govern topics of life that we consider commonly good. And yet, the connection between the 12th, 6th House, and then the 9th, 3rd House is really strong, because oftentimes, if you really want to pursue true religion, true faith, and a law that is meaningful, you have to be able to give up your ego in order to do that. And giving up your ego is a 12th House, 6th House expression. But it's not an easy task, and usually, it's underpaid.
[00:15:03.567] Kent Bye: And another 9th House signature in this piece is the fact that Buddhism is the national religion of Bhutan. And so this emphasis of happiness is really coming from these Buddhist principles to try to embody like what's it mean to focus on something that's beyond just say, like, the gross national product, something that's very financially driven for the metrics of success for a lot of these industrialized nations, but yet For Bhutan, they're really trying to say, you know what, we're trying to emphasize this other quality of being, which they really want to have this Jupiterian aspect of happiness. But yet a lot of what they're showing in the course of this film is a lot of the constraints and limitations, the more Saturnian aspects of the reality of a lot of the dynamics of people's lives with Amber not being a full citizen. But yet there's other minorities that are being followed in terms of not being accepted because of their being a racial minority, a teenager who's got this technology to connect to the world through TikTok. And that's a theme that comes out throughout the course of the film as well, this 3rd House modes of communication with our cell phones and how both this teenage girl and for Amber, himself, is looking on these dating applications and really pining after some of these potential suitors that he's finding on these dating websites and... looking at their photos and dreaming of a world where he's actually partnered. But then some of the other stories I feel like are getting into other dynamics of one of the main characters who's this transgender karaoke singer that they follow her relationship with her mother, which is really quite sweet, which was kind of like acceptance from the parents of a 4th House acceptance, but a general unhappiness in terms of how they're received by the wider culture. And then, what was the third story, do you remember?
[00:16:56.151] Wonder Bright: Well, we did see that horrible man and his three wives, and he's saying, oh, I'm 10 out of 10 out of 10 out of 10 on the happiness scale. And one of his three wives is quietly crying behind him. Ugh!
[00:17:12.726] Kent Bye: Yeah, that was this man who was married to three women and he's basically mansplaining everything. And then when they try to ask these women some questions, he basically answers on their behalf. And so you get this sense of, like, wait a minute, is this survey being skewed by these types of people?
[00:17:32.483] Wonder Bright: (laughs) I didn't have that question. I was like, no, this survey is definitely being skewed. No country has 93% happiness. Like, that would mean that you were happy all the time.
[00:17:41.144] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there's so many different situations that could lead to not being happy.
[00:17:45.746] Wonder Bright: So yeah, I mean, it’s, like, that's being human, right? Like, yeah, I love the idea of these surveys. I love the idea of that, like reflection, that I think the Buddhist faith offers in a way that is really powerful and very different. Well, I don't know if it's that different. It's different from, I mean, I'm not a member of any religion, I think any faith practitioner who is truly faithful, all religions offer that point of reflection. And for whatever reason, it's Buddhist writers that have been able to speak to me the most clearly, maybe because I haven't generally had to believe in a God in order to engage with the way of thinking. So I like the idea of this reflection. But in this film, it is not borne out by the lived experience of these people, that they're all very happy. But it also doesn't seem like they're all lying, like, they're not. So who's lying? How do we account for the 93%?
[00:18:53.854] Kent Bye: Well, I think one of the things about this film is that it is like this 9th House expression of higher education and science. They're really trying to quantify and measure the condition of the populace. And so they're doing this scientific research, but in a way that obviously has a lot of subjective interpretation where they're asking these questions and they’re, like, “tell me about such and such”. And then they have to translate that qualitative experience in someone's life into a number on the scale from one to 10. And then they have to rank them and then they have to calculate what the final number of someone's happiness score is. And so I think part of the other dimension of this film is to kind of deconstruct the impossibility of this task of someone just answering with their qualitative responses about what's happening in their lives. If we think about the quality of the water element and emotion and feeling, how do you translate a feeling into something that's much more of a quantified air element of a number, a specific quantified aspect of a number? So there's this translation from the water element to the air element and trying to take the qualitative into the quantitative and trying to then, at the end of the day, present to the world this number that proves the overall emotional valence of an entire country, which I feel, like, is...
[00:20:11.457] Wonder Bright: (laughing) Laughable? Kent Bye: Yeah. Wonder Bright: But also, like, good try. Let's do more of that somehow.
[00:20:23.371] Kent Bye: Well, one of the things they, they are really focusing on the journey of Amber and there's other dimensions that I think are left unanswered. Like how are these surveys feeding into like actual pragmatic policies? You know, that's something that they are saying is happening, but we really don't get a lot of insight into the mechanics of how that actually plays out and practicality. So I think that's something to be left for another film or another storyteller to come along and to really connect the dots. Maybe someone's already done that in terms of showing how some of these answers are actually driving public policy. They're in a, I guess, more of a 10th House government of Bhutan actually implementing specific 9th House policies and laws within the country that are being driven by this data.
[00:21:08.581] Wonder Bright: Yeah. Something that I really appreciate about the film is that it just purely tells the story through Amber's actions and day. And it doesn't necessarily provide a lot of context, but that's actually the thing that sort of frustrated me about the film simultaneously. Because I think with documentary, it's very easy to think, oh, we're watching reality, but you know, we're watching a carefully sculpted impression of reality. And I think I would have preferred some more facts, as a deeper context for me personally, about what was actually happening. Because in the end, I was left with more questions than answers. Although, you know, arguably, that's the point.
[00:21:54.020] Kent Bye: Maybe the whole point was to say whatever objectification facts you give is still going to be a disconnect from the lived experience of what's happening on the ground. Go back to, well, you had put this as to one of the five stories that are in this Faith and Rituals, and I'd love for you to maybe unpack that a little bit for how that plays out. I mean, we talked about a little bit how Bhutan has a national religion of Buddhism that may be driving some of these different practices, but maybe unpack a little bit more how you see the themes of Faith and Ritual playing out within the context of Agent of Happiness.
[00:22:30.891] Wonder Bright: Well, I think that the main thing that comes across is when there's a disconnect between like the intention and its impact, so that we may have an intention in religion or law, but how deeply are we pursuing the inaction of those policies? Like, do we really mean it, basically? And I think this film, perhaps because of my essential confusion or ambivalence around it, really does underscore that just because you intend one thing doesn't mean that's actually what's happening. And yet, we want to honor the intention as well. That there is something really moving about the fact that these agents of happiness, they can't possibly be their real name, is it? I love it if it is. These agents of happiness are going throughout Bhutan and they're spending four hours with their subjects to try and provoke a conversation about things that really might matter to us as human beings. And I think we should all be contemplating that. We should all be taking the time to ask these questions and seek the answers.
[00:23:58.959] Kent Bye: Yeah, indeed. And I guess as we start to think about the things that you're bearing witness to, what would you like to bear witness to in Agent of Happiness?
[00:24:07.723] Wonder Bright: I want to bear witness to two of the subjects that Amber was asking questions of who reported not being happy. I want to bear witness to the young girl who was taking care of her younger sister and her mother who was an alcoholic. The impact that that was having on her life and the really frank and earnest way that she responded to these questions and how she was looking into her life for the answers. And the young transgender woman, she's probably in her late 20s, who found such solace with her mother and also for her mother who had cancer. This was another moment, another film, where we’re, like, we see someone who’s - the conversations between the mother and her daughter were very much around the mother being very concerned about what would happen to her daughter when she was gone and trying to encourage her daughter to take some more action in her life, and her daughter's despair at feeling that she was safe enough to do so or that she was going to be OK once her mother was gone. And I think their story is going to stick with me more than anything else in the film, because they were trying to answer these unanswerable questions from this questionnaire. But they're really asking unanswerable questions of themselves. And I'm sending them a lot of love. And I hope that they are able to find some peace.
[00:25:46.176] Kent Bye: Yeah. Well, I wanted to bear witness to the main protagonist, Amber, who, we see him on his journey. And at the end of the film, during the Q and A, one of the first questions out of the gate was, okay, give us an update as to what's happening with Amber. And I think the answer was something along the lines of like, well, Amber is Amber. You know, still doing the thing, and still dating. And, you know, there's this 12th House experience of being a stranger in a strange land, you know, of not having access to all the equivalent amount of respect and legitimacy and just how that feeling of being an outcast is such the 12th House experience that can be really universal, all the different ways that we find that. We are either outcasts in our physical life of how we are living, or there may be parts of ourself that we are terrified of sharing because we are afraid of becoming an exile or being outcast or being rejected. And so there's multiple dimensions of that 12th House exile that can either be a very tangible exile, in Amber's case, or it could be something like a self-exile where people are choosing to be secretive or hide dimensions of their own self because it's either dangerous or not safe or they have just a fear of not being accepted and being rejected by the larger culture. And I feel like having Jupiter in the 12th House, I certainly have a lot of experience of even having these conversations with you about astrology. I've kept so much about my interest in this topic as a secret. And even as we have been recording this, I always like to use these euphemistic things like archetypal dynamics when I'm really talking about the astrological signatures from the traditional Hellenistic / Medieval / Renaissance / modern astrology that is kind of infused within me and gives me so much inspiration. But I feel like that's something I have to hide or something that I can't speak about freely because it's, like, Richard Tarnas says, often considered the gold standard of pseudoscience, and even entertain the fact that there might be something behind astrology. Which I think puts me into this orientation of having to take this hyper-intellectual defensive stance of trying to dig into the metaphysical foundations and think about things like process philosophy and idealism and some of the different mechanics of how this could even be. Which is something that Jung really dove into trying to dig into the underlying metaphysical and philosophical foundations of divinatory practices like astrology. But there is this sense of even someone like Jung had to hide his interest in astrology to the point where people like Liz Greene had to go through a lot of his private papers and see a lot of the stuff that had never really been spoken about throughout the course of his lifetime because there was still this taboo that still exists today, but for him, it was a catalyst for his falling out with someone like Freud because of the more esoteric and occult things that he was getting into, things like astrology that Jung had taken an interest in. So, anyway, I'm just saying all that because there's a certain simpatico with this 12th House experience that I'm seeing in this story that I really resonate with as a character that is embodying the worst manifestations of that exile of being rejected and not having this equal social status. Yeah, I guess if I were to assign some sort of signature for remediation, it would be, like, people who have some 12th House signature to watch this film, to watch how these dynamics play out in Amber's life and how that might be playing out in your life.
[00:29:25.358] Wonder Bright: Yeah, specifically 12th House exile, I think. Yeah. Yeah, I really feel that. And, the ways in which, for me, I would also add on to that, the ways in which being othered in that way can come at the cost of putting us into servitude, into jobs that we wouldn't otherwise take because we're desperate in that exile. We certainly see that with Amber in this film.
[00:30:00.037] Kent Bye: Awesome. Any other signatures you'd like to call out?
[00:30:03.321] Wonder Bright: For me, it really is like this dichotomy and tension that lies between the 9th House of law and policy and these 12th House, 6th House experiences, which square the 9th House. So it's really like a question of whether or not we can live into the intention that those policies might say that we're up to. And, in reality, the people who live on the fringe, the people who are subject to 12th House and 6th House topics of life are going to be the ones who show up in terms of whether or not those policies are actually working.
[00:30:44.830] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of really good points there. So, yeah, that's all that we have for today. And thanks again for joining us here on the story all the way down podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast and please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider signing up for our newsletter on Story All The Way Down to keep track of what we're doing our next season, send us feedback. We'd love to hear any insights or any, I don't think we've heard from any of our listeners yet, except for people that we know personally. So we're just sending these out into the ether.
[00:31:15.756] Wonder Bright: So, uh, yeah, we didn't make it easy for people to get in touch with us last season.
[00:31:19.800] Kent Bye: No, that's true. So we finally have a working email, so send us a line and give some feedback and yeah, just anything you'd like to see in the future. So, yeah. Thanks for joining us. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
