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Film
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Tarnation
A darker companion piece to Thom Fitzgerald’s 1997 debut The Hanging Garden, transplanted New Yorker Jonathan Caouette’s remembrances are like nothing you’ve ever seen.
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
By Todd Gilchrist
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Each year, there are several films likely to deeply disturb the audience and raze their collective sense of emotional security; Boys Don’t Cry did the job in 1999, while In the Bedroom and Monster’s Ball duked it out tear for salty tear in 2001.
This year, the honor belongs to Jonathan Caouette, not simply because his debut film Tarnation is a disturbing look inside the history of one deeply troubled family, but because it’s all true. Compiled from hundreds of hours of footage, including short films, answering machine messages, and home movies, Caouette’s accomplishment is taking his own life and laying it bare for the world to see. Miraculously, he comes out the other side whole; but the journey is so dark and difficult to watch, not every audience member will be so lucky. Still, for those who manage to stay with it, Tarnation becomes not only the filmmaker’s redemption, but our own as well.
The story is told exclusively with images and title cards, all dexterously assembled on an iMac computer for $218.32 - less than the cost of a day’s craft services on even a modestly-budgeted Hollywood blockbuster. It begins with Caouette’s grandparents, Adolph and Rosemary, well-intentioned but inexperienced parents, subjecting his beauty-queen mother Renee to a destructive sequence of shock-therapy and treatment in the late fifties and sixties. As a result, her mental well-being quickly deteriorated, and she was largely unable to function alone as an adult.
Her difficulties are compounded in 1972 with the birth of her son, Jonathan. Before long, the boy is being raised by his grandparents while Renée bounces in and out of institutions, much to the detriment of Jonathan’s own mental health.
Caouette’s childhood is plagued by insecurity and the evolution of a mental condition diagnosed as ‘depersonalization,’ in which his thoughts and feelings are detached from his existence. Documented via semi-autobiographical shorts and underground fiction films, Jonathan’s adolescence plunges headlong into the emerging gay culture of his native Texas, and finds some success as a performer and partygoer amongst the regulars of that social circle.
At the same time, his life is reduced to little more than disembodied snapshots of his emotional stability; shooting movies in which he dramatizes his mother’s fragile emotional state, much less his own, Jonathan hardly exists but as a frame for the projected fictions of his imagination. He continually escapes a troubled reality and his fractured relationship with his mother by immersing himself in the world of film and the search for a secure and happy relationship.
There are people who seem to film every part of their lives, and the lives of their family and friends, and then there’s Caouette. One can hardly imagine how much of the young man’s life was spent in front of the camera, but watching Tarnation, it’s easy to understand why. As a boy who couldn’t enjoy the relationship with his mother, or at the very least endured a particularly fragmented one, Caouette delves into the so-called imaginary world in front of that lens, and creates a cathartic outlet for his fears, hopes, and desires.
Watching him at ten or fifteen imitating his mother, or mimicking ‘imaginary’ battered and abused women, is to witness a powerful portrait of dysfunction, one made that much more remarkable by his ultimate victory over those demons and his success at finding a real and satisfying life as an adult.
Tarnation has received widespread acclaim at film festivals, including at this year’s Sundance, Cannes and Los Angeles editions, and is riding the crest of the wave created last year with the success of so many impressive documentaries. What it adds to this budding force is the feverish creativity of a mind addled as much with film imagery as human experience; Caouette’s decades of amateur filmmaking have engineered the mind of a born storyteller, even if the stories that he tells are more of a mind set of David Lynch and his mentor, John Cameron Mitchell.
The images are hypnotic and unnerving, as a sort of purging of a man’s consciousness necessarily should be, and they elevate what might have been a masturbatory exercise in ‘look how screwed up my family is’ into something transcendent and genuinely moving; sometimes they are so striking that we are repulsed by Caouette’s directorial decisions, such as when he video tapes his mother for several minutes playing and laughing as a grown woman, but behaving like a little girl.
Tarnation’s one flaw is that despite the undeniable effect it has on audiences, the film is frequently so difficult to watch that one feels hard-pressed to recommend it. It’s the same problem I had with the other three films I mentioned at the outset, in whose company Tarnation comfortably deserves to be counted. They’re downers, unapologetically so, and reveal the human condition in all of its flawed and agonizing glory.
But then again, one supposes that’s the point. Movies like this are hard to watch, and if they weren’t, we’d never learn from them; that kind of cinematic exorcism was something necessary for Caouette to survive, because it allowed him to reconnect with his humanity- both for good and bad.
Watching Tarnation, the best feeling we come away with is the fleeting satisfaction that Caouette’s realizations come at an incalculably lower price to us than they did to him.
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