I was a reader of Huxley as a 5th grader because I was an avid reader of Science Fiction. I also read Brave New World Revisited in 7th grade while working in the school library. About the same time I read 1984. So this is not a new notion that compulsion will be used to force you to be happy. I am not very interested in compulsory happiness. I am as I am. Sometimes merry and bright, other times snarling like a junk yard dog and from time to time simply miserable. And naturally many places in between. Lucky I do not drive these days. Driving always made me snarl. I ditched my car after returning from Europe in 2002 recognizing that I could no longer afford the payments and that I had no need of Das Auto given that my gig of picking up people at SFO for the Alumni travel agency I once worked at was dead and my side hustle of home loans did not require me to own a car. I never liked traffic. I detested other drivers in this urban area. My car side window had been broken into on a brutally rainy day, the day of my mother’s funeral, and I had to drive 102 miles with cardboard to protect the interior and pay about $80 dollars that was hard to come by to replace the window. I cannot imagine being forced to be happy be taking a pill.
In the comment section I have a link to a fine old film from Russia -Happiness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LGx3n3I_LE
Alexander Medvedkin served with the Red Cavalry beginning in 1917, and was eventually promoted to the rank of general and placed in charge of propaganda for the entire Soviet Army. Medvedkin gave up his rank to produce movies for soldiers, including the hygiene film Watch Your Health. Stalin's five-year plan began in 1928, and by the early 30s, Medvedkin was placed into service. He designed the Cine-Train - a film laboratory, an editing room, an animation stand and a projection room built into a passenger train. The goal was to travel the Soviet Union to instruct or assist in the kulkak's maintenance of the kolkhoz (collective farms) and industrial facilities. Medvedkin and a crew stopped the train in towns all over the Soviet Union, shot film, immediately processed the footage and screened the results to the towns people. Films like Journal Number 4, How Do You Live Comrade Miner?, and The Conveyor Belt presented cinematic propaganda as quickly as possible given the available means. The films presented best practices in harvesting or steel production to provide those in lagging collective forms and industries with side-by-side examples of how things were not supposed to operate. The animators created captions ("Comrades this can't go on") and the Cine-Train mascot: a disapproving animated camel that was paraded across the screen for the benefit of workers that failed to meet their goals. The aforementioned films all appear on Disc One of the Icarus DVD set.
Once the Cine-Train came to a halt, Medvedkin made the 1934 tragic-comedy Happiness. In his travels throughout the Ukraine, Medvedkin came across a kulkak whose expectations did not conform with life in the collective farm. This peasant's plight inspired the film's story of Khmyr, a man whose life is squeezed from all sides by the monarchy, the state and the church. Khmyr has simple dreams of happiness but like his ancestors, basic comforts elude him. Khmyr attempts to commit suicide but the aristocrats, the army (all of whom wear the same ghoulish grinning mask), and the church descend on him. "Who gave you the right to an improvised death?" they ask. Khmyr is eventually shown the way to happiness by his wife, who embraces the life of the farm by mastering the machines and techniques necessary to make the system work. The film's knowing portrayal of peasant life, its brutal representation of the Tsarists and the Russian Orthodox Church, and the flashes of eroticism can be found in works like Alexander Dohvenko's Earth and what exists of Eisenstein's Behzin Meadow. The surreal mix of gallows humor and Buster Keaton-style physical comedy, however, seems unique amongst works of this era.