Tarnation
Some families have shelves of recorded footage of themselves that collects dust in the basement. Some send it to a television show so millions of people can laugh at them. Jonathan Caouette has used his to make a masterpiece.
Less a cheesy home video than a kaleidoscopic epic of the self, "Tarnation" is the 87-minute crystallization of the 20 years Caouette spent filming every corner of his life, principally his attempts to cope with his mother Renee's mental illness, which as a 30-year-old, he's afraid might be lying inside waiting to take over his life.
The movie opens with Caouette making a call to find out about Renee's recent lithium overdose. She was once a model and actress, and after an accident late in her adolescence left her convinced that she was paralyzed, her parents, Adolph and Rosemary, signed her up for shock therapy. That seems a lot like having brain surgery to cure a hangover, but it was the 1960s; that happened to a lot of girls. Renee was never quite the same.
Jonathan, who never really knew his father, grew up in Houston with his grandparents. They apparently never squelched in him the same penchant for flamboyance that Renee has. This is explained in a storybook manner; the screen fills with simple declarative sentences that narrate Caouette's life and his family's history. As the years pass, you notice how vividly Renee reverberates in Jonathan, who has his mother's soft, open face and whom he appears to be channeling in her physical and mental absence. You also see her traffic-stopping beauty deteriorate and Adolph grow frail.
The fairy-tale tone becomes a point of irony, as it's sometimes accompanied by the ambient noise of a horror movie, which, in the most beguiling sense, is how "Tarnation" occasionally feels. Adolph talks into the camera, drenched in hellish red light; Rosemary, sickly and not far from death, is put in a black fright wig.
Decades of Super-8 camera footage is shuffled in with still photographs, personal confessionals, answering machine messages, and clips from whatever movies, television, and unnamable kitsch were lying around Caouette's brain. There is disorder, but it creates tremendous layers of atmosphere. Songs fade into each other and a few times a montage is being juggled in four parts of the screen, as unseen people talk in strange, continuous loops. The director is a DJ, boldly remixing his life.
The film is brazenly low-tech, sculpted on a Macintosh computer for $218.32. But Caouette has the subversive, perverse, keenly intelligent soul of an artist. And the clips from Caouette's high-school musical production of "Blue Velvet" (complete with Marianne Faithful songs) suggest he's always been this way. Formally, "Tarnation" is part time-capsule hot flash, part psychic collapse, part Faulknerian melodrama, part trash talk show, and all druggy fever dream conjured with a whole lot of love. This movie, in a packed theater on a Friday night with the right crowd (thrill-seeking dysfunctionals), should give off the electricity of a good rock show.
The picture's format is the sort of challenging experimental stuff guys such as the little-known Luther Price have been doing for years. But Caouette has a more urgent relationship to his Super-8. He seems to have been living for this moment; each day was another brick in his house of recovered memories. But "Tarnation" never feels like a stunt. It's too brave to be merely a concoction. Caouette doesn't live for the camera, he lives through it, using it to witness his brilliance, his family, and their lapses in sanity.
There is so much everything in this movie that you might wonder what more Caouette has left in him to say. But he shouldn't feel obliged to try again. How many heartbreaking works of staggering genius should we hold one fellow to? We should let the man get on with his life.
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