Candid Camera
Tarnation
Once upon a time, in a small town in Texas in the 1950s, a good man met a good woman. They fell in love and got married. It sounds like the beginning of a fairytale, but it’s anything but. Overdoses, electric shock treatment, child abuse �" welcome to the world of Jonathan Caouette. Tarnation is a collage of Super 8 and DV footage that Caouette has been shooting since the age of eight. The resulting film is personal, compelling and very disturbing.
Edited for just over two hundred dollars, it caused a sensation at Sundance 2004, and it’s not hard to see why. The film begins with the story of Jonathan’s mother, Renée. Her promising career as a child model was cut short when she fell off a roof and was paralysed for six months. The doctors prescribed electric shock therapy twice a week for two years. If she didn’t have psychiatric problems before, she certainly did afterwards.
During one of her psychotic episodes, she took Jonathan on an ill-fated trip to Chicago. With no money or shelter, she was taken in by a stranger who raped her in front of her son. On their return to Texas, Renée was sent to prison and Jonathan was put in a foster home. After two years of abuse at the hands of his foster parents, Jonathan was released to the custody of his grandparents while Renée underwent hundreds of different treatments in psychiatric hospital.
This was just the start of Jonathan’s own mental health problems. An incident with a PCP laced joint left him with Depersonalisation Disorder and a tendency for self-destruction. However, he managed to find an outlet for his problems in the world of underground filmmaking, producing short films with cheerful titles such as Ankle Slasher and Goddamn Whore. After finishing high school Jonathan escaped to New York, finding acceptance as an actor and happiness in a relationship.
This would seem the perfect place for a happy ending, but unfortunately life isn’t like that. Instead, the film ends on a sour note as we watch Jonathan come to terms with his mother’s lithium overdose and subsequent brain damage. This is a lot to take in over the course of 90 minutes but thanks to the editing (home movies intercut with still photos, clips from his own short films and snippets of 80s pop culture) the film proves relentlessly engaging.
The use of such personal footage makes the audience feel that they spying and there are occasions where this becomes downright awkward. After several minutes of watching Renée rambling incoherently about pumpkins, I almost felt embarrassed to be intruding on such a private moment. However, Caouette uses this to his advantage. By presenting the audience with a completely honest and open picture of mental illness, we begin to understand what it is like to live inside his world.
Disturbing, moving, and in my opinion very much necessary.
2nd Jun 2005