Film - Think

I am a bit late coming to this one. It finally hit the UK this fall and for its entire run I was determined not to see it. There was just something about it that bugged me. The buzz about it was intriguing, and it did sound like something that brings together some of my current hobby-horses (DV, non professional, expressionist, etc…). And behind all the hype seemed to be a film born out of an unsettling, bombastic sort of self-focus that has engendered great works of art in the past, like This Side of Paradise or Warhol’s self-portraits. More often than not, however, this kind of grumblecore self-awareness begets less than memorable culture - embodied in our current obsession with Myspace self-narration.

Jonathan Caouette certainly is interesting. Anybody that has managed to capture most of their life on personal home video is interesting even if they haven’t really done anything. The mere tenacity of that sort at least merits a short film. Tarnation is the ordered summary of 160 hours of film Caouette took of himself and his family over the course of his 30 year life. Though often referred to as an “autobiographical documentary”, it seems to be as much about his mother as it is about himself. Perhaps in this sense the film is a narrative of self-discovery rather than just self-description, as if as an adult Caouette could only really understand himself if he could understand his mother. Submitted to shock therapy for literally no reason when she was very young, the film maps her struggle with mental illness alongside the stages in Caouette’s distinct coming-of-age. His grandparents, shown by the film to be just as loving as misguided, are straight out of a Flannery O’Connor novel and touched by the irony that fiction can seldom achieve. Or they may be out of an early Ian Banks novel, but that is beside the point. Allowed to raise himself in their care, Caouette turns the camera onto the stage of this awkward living space as he chronicles his adolescence in the absence of his mother. What emerges from this visual essay is a hauntingly natural stream of home videos punctuated by notable moments of personal shock and self-discovery. His mother’s rape, his abuse in a number of foster homes, a drug overdose, his grandmother’s death, his mother’s fateful Lithium overdose, and other such moments are cast in textures of bold expression. At times they are bold to the point of awful. The young Jonathan himself takes us through the discovery of his own strange talents, the discovery of his own sexuality. And as he grows, so does the film, becoming more aware of itself as a history, but more importantly, as a collection of emotional milestones carved from mountains of imagery.

As a narrative, the film pulses with something usually foreign to autobiographical storytelling. Caouette often comes close to the edge of pure cinema, beyond which lie various forms of expression flung in orbits around communicable feelings. We usually refer to such things as “experimental” or “avant garde,” often hiding them in art galleries like the creepy uncle of more watchable and accessible films. Cauoette doesn’t simply edit together the frames of these odd old videos, he colors them, bends them, slides them, reduplicates panels of them, scratches them, and spills them across the film with a frantic pathos. Somehow he manages to convey the dislocation and rage that defined these stages of his life, eventually closing on the staged third person footage of him peacefully asleep next to his rescued mother, a reverse Pieta. The film is steeped in an emotional vocabulary that renders its presentation necessary. “The medium is the message,” and in the film Jonathan tries to ascribe this dictum to his discovery of an alternative lifestyle in the gay, punk, and gothic scenes of early 90’s Texas. It is a guttural shout, sometimes a whimper, at all times a visible attempt to connect and be heard.

As a child he enjoyed filming himself, often close-ups of his face, as he acted out different roles and tried on varying emotional masks. He has taken some of this psychologically revealing footage and manipulated it into a charged frenzy. Easy comparison could be made to the self-portraiture of Francis Bacon, both in tenor and personality. In one notable sequence the 11 year-old Jonathan delivers a monologue posing as a drug-addicted and abused white trash mother. Somehow he nails the part. He was 11. Eventually all of these theatrics begin to evoke an interesting disjunct. This ability to act at such a high level comes so naturally for him that it begins to transfer slowly into his decade-long embodiment of a script that reads like an ecstatic version of his actual life. This script riffs off of the one involving his mother and his unusual adolescent struggles, but it is a theatrical construct that creates a therapeutic amount of distance between himself and reality. Even if he would disagree with this armchair analysis, consider the film itself. He is posing, defining, and eventually describing himself to us as a character in the third act of this harrowing, abstract play. Tarnation itself is the script, stage, and performance all in one space, an ingenious shorthand to his self-identity.

This is meant to be a very restrained criticism, as we do this every day. We identify with this character in this film or that book and borrow their script for a while. Like Jean Paul Belmondo in Breathless standing with a cigarette next to the Humphrey Bogart poster, we pose our way through the day on the back of other people’s storylines. This isn’t always a bad thing; some scripts are great ones to claim as our own. And Caouette seems to be aware of this. At first glimpse, his pretty common journey through confusion and addiction isn't that interesting. Likewise, his love of all things camp, including Dolly Parton, isn’t that interesting. Camp is the new black (everyone knows that). His incredible giftedness isn’t that interesting, there are lots of talented people out there. He, like his mother in her youth, is a strikingly beautiful person, which of course isn’t that interesting. It isn’t even very interesting that the film was made for only $218. The version on DVD cost a few hundred thousand dollars more than that after song rights and the like were purchased (his frequent use of Low is worth the extra cash). And while his visual approach is very engaging, technically acrobatic, and even innovative, the film is too narrative for us to critique it simply on a formal basis. All in all, there are a lot of things not very interesting about the film. But I think the film is more than the sum of its parts. He becomes interesting at the end, even in the midst of these underwhelmingly staged scenes (which while supposedly dramatic fall flat in their failure to match the improvisational honesty of preceding material). He sits next to his mother sleeping on the couch and nods off contentedly, having provided the home for his mother that she was never able to provide for him. This profoundly ethical act rescues the film from narcissism. It is this act that makes him extremely interesting, and his method of filmmaking enables us to participate in this process with him. In the end what makes the film absolutely worthwhile is that he tells this story to its conclusion.