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Less a film than a
full-fledged personal exorcism, Tarnation calls
to mind the trend toward video self-revelation that also drove last year’s horrific
and riveting Capturing the Friedmans. Depicting a damaged and broken family caught in a
firestorm of rage and accusations of child molestation, that film’s director Andrew
Jarecki kept his distance from the family, letting their own raw video testimony anchor a
puzzling, troubling documentary. Tarnation also mixes its subject’s own
obsession with video documentation into its very structure, but director Jonathan Caouette
is clearly determined to use the format to eviscerate the demons himself, and the sense of
catharsis—so effectively withheld from Friedmans—is
gushingly overwhelming.
Abandoned by his father before his birth, Caouette lived with his
mother, a onetime child model, who had been temporarily paralyzed in a fall from a roof
when she was a teenager. After her recovery,
she was subjected to shock treatment off and on for years, which eventually lead to bouts
of clinical depersonalization (defined as a persistent, dissociative feeling of being
detached from one’s own body, as if observing it from outside). At the age of four, Jonathan accompanied his mother
to Chicago, where the man who had taken them in raped her before his eyes. Upon their return to Texas, Jonathan was taken out
of her care and dumped in a series of horrifically abusive foster homes. Around the age of ten, he was reunited with his
maternal grandparents, who afforded this troubled youth some much-needed space for growth
and some semblance of stability for the first time in his life.
What makes Jonathan’s story so moving is its tangible need for
expression, a demand to which the filmmaker, now in his early thirties, has been
responding all his life. A video camera
becomes a near constant accessory from about the age of eleven, and the film includes many
goofy set-up skits he directed with his grandparents as well as some haunting moments of
macabre make-believe, as when adolescent Jonathan dresses up in lipstick and women’s
clothing and performs the role of abused Southern-belle mother for the camera.
Jonathan’s
lifelong need for dramatic expression combines with his own difficult personal history to
make a harrowing filmed experience. Experimenting
with hard drugs at around the same time he started frequenting gay clubs and making campy
Super 8 films (age 13), Caouette has compiled an unsettling archive of his own life on
film, a portrait of the troubled queer artist as a teenager that he essentially etches
onto film. Moving from Texas to New York, he
continues to deal with his mother's illness as she develops brain damage from a lithium
overdose. Jonathan begins to see creeping signs of depersonalization in his own life.
Famously made for $218 with iMovie software, Caouette showed the film
to Gus Van Sant and Jonathan Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), whose decisions to
executive produce allowed him to add a suitable soundtrack.
The film is a swirl of fragmentary, schizophrenic imagery (strung together by
third-person title card narration) which Caouette combines with a hissing, jagged
soundtrack to create a terrifying document of human endurance. One of the most powerful examples of film as
self-healing, Tarnation astonishes both as art
and as testament.
- Jesse Paddock
