November 4-10, 2004

movies

Hell and Back

VIEW ASKEW: Jonathan Caouette, Tarnation's director, star and subject, tries a new perspective.

How "real" is the harrowing Tarnation? And does it matter?

Tarnation

by Sam Adams

"Even the dull and ignorant, too, have their story to tell," says a distant female voice near the beginning of Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation, which does for the diary film what Fahrenheit 9/11 did for the political documentary. That's not a flip comparison. Like Fahrenheit, Caouette's film is a shot in the arm to a marginal subgenre, one which both reinvigorates and narrows the form's potential. It's also a movie whose glowing press coverage is prefaced on assumptions about its maker's authenticity, assumptions which no human being could honestly fulfill. Just as Michael Moore's plainspoken persona and sloppy appearance cast him as a "regular guy" rather than (for better or for worse) a multimillionaire and media manipulator, so Caouette's genuinely harrowing backstory is the measure of Tarnation's worth.

The 32-year-old Caouette's past is an unquestionably sad one: His mother, Renée LeBlanc, was a childhood model until she took a fall from her parents' roof, temporarily paralyzing her legs. Unable to find a physical cause for her ailment, her parents followed the advice of doctors who prescribed dozens of electric shock treatments, which ultimately left her prone to debilitating mental illness. LeBlanc tried to care for her son, whose father abandoned them without knowing she was pregnant, but she was too unstable even to care for herself: When Caouette was 4, she was raped while her son watched by a man she picked up on the street. Caouette himself was raped and beaten in foster care before settling with his grandparents, and then had the joy of growing up as a gay teenager in Houston. From there, no surprise, he moved to New York, trying to make it as an actor and model while working the usual menial jobs. His mother, meanwhile, continued to deteriorate, and Caouette has had to deal with his own mental illness: depersonalization disorder, which he believes was brought on by the two PCP- and embalming fluid-laced joints he was given by his mother's boyfriend at age 12.

His depersonalization disorder, Caouette says—or rather types, since Tarnation's narration is provided by superimposed third-person captions—left him "unable to concentrate" and feeling like he "was living in a dream." Tarnation often feels like a tug-of-war between the two states of mind. Assembled from three decades' worth of home movies, tape recordings, family photos, video diaries and found footage layered over each other to near opacity, the movie is alternately oneiric and impatient. Sometimes it's like being inside Caouette's head; sometimes it's like watching TV when someone else has the remote.

One sequence involves a dense montage of film footage (both documentary and re-enacted), baby pictures, unidentified home recordings treated with an echo effect that sometimes makes them unintelligible, onscreen text detailing Caouette's abuse and rape, and to top things off, Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman," which grows in volume until it swallows everything else. In another sequence, Caouette splits the 1:33 screen four ways and channel-flips through a succession of clips from movies, television and his own life, including a younger version of himself lip-synching to "Frank Mills" from the Hair soundtrack, which plays over the whole montage.

It's impossible to know precisely what to make of these sequences, but then precision is probably not the point. Caouette wants to re-create his own state of mind, as well as the extent to which movies and performance offered him avenues of escape and understanding. In Tarnation's most arresting sequence, a 10-year-old Caouette, lit from below in smeary video footage, delivers an astonishing monologue in the persona of an abused and, eventually, vengeful housewife that's like a cross between Warholian camp and riveting psychodrama. If there were Best Actor Oscars for documentary films, Caouette would be a lock.

The clip is revealing for several reasons, not least for its emphasis on performance. Tarnation is many things, but a naive outpouring of emotional pain it certainly is not. Critics who focus on the movie's "reality" and audiences who react as if they've seen some kind of primitively powerful outsider art ignore the signs that not everything in Tarnation is as it seems. Do people honestly think that upon receiving the news that his mother has traumatically overdosed on lithium, Caouette would carefully set up a tripod before vomiting into his toilet? Or that the foster parents who abused him would provide footage of his childhood? It shouldn't be necessary even to point such things out, but considering that one critic pointed to the fact that Caouette recently returned to Houston to look after his mother as proof of how "real" the movie is, it seems a distinction worth drawing.

Our overall prosperity as a nation notwithstanding, Americans have become obsessed with personal suffering, whether packaged as a traumatic memoir or reality-TV spectacle. Tarnation has the feel of a public purgation, of Caouette's attempt to reckon with the ghosts he cannot escape. But it's hardly the watershed some have claimed. It's not the first personal documentary, or the first movie to bring underground and experimental film techniques into the mainstream, or even the first to have been initially assembled on a home computer. (The film's oft-quoted $218 budget is, of course, deeply misleading, since several hundreds of thousands more have been spent since the film's acquisition at Sundance.) What differentiates Tarnation from its predecessors is Caouette's personal history, not his strengths as a filmmaker. The latter are considerable, although he's stronger with sensation than self-examination. (His childhood obsessions with The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby are extensively documented; the fact that both movies involve mothers trying to protect their children from evil forces is never addressed.) But too much reflection would ruin the movie's reputation. Caouette's relationship with his mother is the movie's splayed-open heart, but Tarnation is almost half over before the first synch-sound footage of her appears, and it's much longer until she and her son interact significantly on camera. Considering that the movie's emotional climax is Caouette's admission that he fears turning out like his mother, it's not surprising the film alternately embraces her and pushes her away. But it does leave you with the sense that Tarnation is still a work in progress.

Tarnation Directed by Jonathan Caouette A Wellspring release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse recommended