The Splice Of Life

Tarnation’ is a word rarely exclaimed beyond the heightened world of Chuck Jones or snake-handling cults, but it’s an appropriately left-field handle for the dazzlingly brilliant docudrama from debuting outsider-auteur, Jonathan Caouette. Already acclaimed by the faithful as the of the DIY digital generation, Tarnation is a fast, cheap and out of control one-man revolution; a shockingly intimate journal of psychological dysfunction assembled from some twenty years worth of video diaries, home movies, answering machine messages, photo albums, pop culture flotsam and, erm, a Nancy Sinatra lip-synch opera based on Blue Velvet.

“I still don’t know how to pitch it,” laughs the 33-year old director, star and subject. “Some people say it’s a horror movie or a musical or an art film or a documentary. I guess it’s a memoir. It’s just something I had to do.”
Made as a small-scale iMac project using the software that came free with his boyfriend’s laptop, Tarnation began life as an audition tape for Shortbus, the sexually explicit new work from Hedwig And The Angry Inch director James Cameron Mitchell. Taken aback by the passion of the footage, which included rather intimate moments between Jonathan and his long-term boyfriend David, Mitchell encouraged Jonathan to put together something in time for New York’s Experimental Mix festival.
Over three weeks, Jonathan, who has obsessively chronicled his own life since a neighbour gave him at video camera at age 11, went on a “coffee and cigarette binge” to whittle over one hundred and eighty hours of home movies into a two-and-a-half hour cut of Tarnation. Impressively, even for a sector given to Monty Python-style braying about impoverished budgets, the self film-schooled novice completed his opus for the princely sum of $218 and 32 cent.
“The exact budget figure derives from the cost of digitizing the tapes that came from VHS. I already had done everything else,” explains Jonathan, who at this point, aspired to “…getting the film screened on a wall somewhere – maybe a night at the anthology film archives in New York or at a coffee shop with a video projector. I was hoping to find a small audience, hoping that it would get under the skins of a few people."
Though this initial cut differed slightly from the 88 minute version about to hit cinemas (a fake ending, a subplot involving Jonathan’s Death-In-Venice-pretty ten year old son from a youthful heterosexual dalliance and details about his homophobic deadbeat dad were excised) it was instantly hailed as a watershed film, prompting one veteran film publicist to declare “This movie fucks you ‘til you bleed and then it flips you over and kisses you so deep.”
Gus Van Sant was similarly impressed. Tarnation may be charged with the shock of the new, but this elder statesman of odd claimed to have been waiting for the film, having long itched to find a kid who would utilise digital video’s democratisation of film technology for something rather more revolutionary than an inventive, cine-literate horror. More importantly, having speculated that the advent of cheap recording technology would eventually produce an artist who lived their entire life on film and through film – a sort of psychosomatic Videodrome savant – Van Sant recognised Tarnation as nothing less than messianic and immediately signed on as an executive producer.
Just as well, really. Tarnation's revolutionary form – a dreamscape collision of autobiography and avant-garde pop-mix which perfectly mimics the thought processes of the culturally bombarded, fractured modern psyche – proved rather more costly than Jonathan’s original budget. It took just under $400,000 to clear all the rights for the kaleidoscope of images in the film – free falling fragments of Mabel King, Paul Morrissey’s Factory films and most TV shows ever made – in time for the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Inevitably, Jonathan didn’t get to use everything he wanted.
“I love so many movies and videos and filmmakers,” he tells me. “I collect work from Cassavetes, Lars Von Trier, John Boorman, the Maysles brothers, Paul Morrissey and Alejandro Jodorowsky – I actually met him and he’s a spiritual guru now! – so it was difficult getting everything in. We couldn’t clear rights for everything either. I couldn’t use Sybil – which I just love – alongside The Three Faces Of Eve, Sybil is my favourite mental illness movie. I adore Joanne Woodward. Whatever happened to her?” (The answer, I suspect, is testing spaghetti sauce at home).
“I also wanted to use some tracks from Nick Drake, but his sister wouldn’t let me. She later allowed one of the same tracks to be used for a Volkswagon commercial. That was a little depressing. ”
Happily, the gorgeously gloomy soundtrack – including work from Nick Cave, The Cocteau Twins, Hopewell, Glen Campbell, Magnetic Fields, Red House Painters and a cover version from the musical, Hair – doesn’t seem particularly diminished by this omission. “Like with everything else, I got lucky,” Jonathan explains. “When we couldn’t use Nick Drake we set about finding tracks that could replicate that mood.”
Predictably, the assaulting, exhilarating Tarnation caused a sensation at Sundance and Cannes last year, where it received a ten minute standing ovation, but while hailed on the festival circuit as le cri dernier in hipster cinema, the film has proved capable of mesmerising audiences beyond a predictably bohemian hard-core.
“I couldn’t have imagined anything like what’s happened. I still wake up at night with butterflies in my stomach because I just can’t really believe that something I was playing around at night on my computer with is out there as a film. I certainly never predicted how many people would get it. It was only after it was screened at Roger Ebert’s festival (the critic Roger Ebert has been one of Tarnation’s most vocal champions), that I started to realise. The audience there were all in their '70s and '80s and after the movie, they all started coming up and sharing their own stories – amazing stories about mental illness – full of praise for what they’d just seen. I was just blown away.”
One can well understand why the aged patrons of the Ebert festival were moved to react in such a manner. Beginning with a lithium overdose and ending with someone sobbing in a bathroom, Tarnation is a remarkable descent into mental illness reflected through a life so grimly fascinating, it could be co-authored by Charles Dickens and JT Leroy. Born in Houston, Texas in 1972, Jonathan Caouette (pronounced kow-et, by the way) spent many of his formative years in and out of frequently abusive foster homes, where he came to depend on the unkindness of strangers. As a girl, his mother, Renee, (a former child model) had been institutionalised following a head injury and the years of bizarre psychiatric misdiagnoses and shock therapy which followed left her ill-equipped to keep custody or take care of her son.
“The main reason I made this movie was as a means of talking about my mother as a victim of the archaic Texas mental health system during the '70s. I’m still looking for medical records to ascertain the number of times she was shocked. The treatment she received was awful. It just made things worse, made her worse. It makes me really angry to think that she could be living a perfectly normal life.”
Misfortunes continued to visit the family throughout Jonathan’s childhood. During one mother-and-son reunion, Renee was raped in front of Jonathan at knife point. Later, when Jonathan was twelve, Renee’s then boyfriend gave him two joints laced with PCP and formaldehyde. The effects of this cocktail were profound, leaving Jonathan with Depersonalisation Disorder, a disease often called Alice In Wonderland Syndrome, as for the afflicted, the world becomes permanently distorted. Interestingly, depersonalisation has an impressive artistic pedigree – Sartre referred to it as The Filth, William James as ‘the sick soul’ and other notable depictions include Borges’ The Aleph, Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground, Camus’ The Outsider and pretty much every Ingmar Bergman film ever made. In Tarnation, Jonathan’s editing style – all jagged Warholian edges and cubist overlap – was conceived as a means of communicating the distancing effects of this condition.
“It was that and my poor concentration span," he says. "I’m not sure if the disorder has subsided or whether I’ve adjusted to it, but do have a much better handle on things than I used to. For years I was just numb, like I was swimming in Novocaine. Now it’s really only a attention-deficit thing.”
Eventually adopted by his maternal grandparents – the eccentric Rosemary and the likeable, though spookily Gummo grotesque, Adolph – Jonathan’s adolescence proved even less conventional. As an openly gay teen punk – never the easiest lifestyle choice in the oil state – he cruised Houston’s gay bars by dragging-up as a “petite girl goth” to disguise his not-yet-legal-in-any-sense status. For a time during these lost years, and with some justification, Jonathan did not expect to see his 18th birthday.
He was, by his own account, saved, by taking refuge in musical theatre, Z grade horror flicks and experimental film. “I really am a video geek. I’m just part of that generation that went searching everywhere for the strange and beautiful on VHS.” (Impressively, Jonathan can rattle off statistics pertaining to his Betamax video collection.)
This extraordinary and tragic upbringing would alone justify the filmmaker opening up the vaults to the cinema going public, but Tarnation is far from being an onslaught of woes. For all the pained personal circumstance being played out on screen, this is a sweet, hopeful film about the unwavering love between Jonathan and his mentally ill mother, Renee. Tellingly, during our interview, you can invariably hear a lump in his throat whenever Jonathan speaks of her. It’s an unconditional bond, but not an easy one.
As an adult, Jonathan settled in New York with David, his partner of eight years, only to find himself compelled back to Texas to tend to Renee following an overdose. Tarnation’s present sense – in so far as the film has one – deals with Jonathan’s largely successful attempts to rebuild their relationship and understand her affliction. Though generally playful and quick-witted, Renee’s symptoms are unquestionably pronounced. During the film’s most alarmingly candid and controversial sequence, Renee, in the throes of a Bipolar high, is seen serenading a pumpkin and laughing maniacally for several minutes.
“I’ve thought about this a lot. And I have questioned whether I’m exploiting my family. But I’ve always known that my mother and I have a really poignant story to tell. With the pumpkin, that’s not my mother suffering from brain damage. I would never turn the camera on her if it was. For a time after the lithium overdose, she was completely aphasic as though she had had a massive stroke and that period was much more intense than what you see in the film. I just would never show that. During the pumpkin scene though, she was just in a manic state and it was a means of conveying what was going on at that time. That is her illness. Filmmakers tend to sugar-coat mental illness. But to be honest, I wasn’t thinking of it as cinema verite when I was shooting. It was really just me and her having a good time together.”
Renee, incidentally, is thrilled with the film and has never flinched while watching the aforementioned scene. If anything, Tarnation has been an enormously cathartic experience for the entire family.
Jonathan reports that his mother is doing well after another spell in hospital, and he currently lives between the family home in Texas, David’s apartment in New York (“I’m bi-coastal now”) and various film festivals around the globe. David Lynch’s production team have already snapped up his sophomore project. But what in Tarnation can he possibly do by way of an encore?
“I’m taking three movies from the 1970s starring a high profile Texan actress and splicing them together to make an entirely new movie. I’ve decided to point my camera at something other than my family.” He suddenly laughs and goes all conspiratorial – “Just for the moment, anyway.”b

Tarnation is screening as part of the Belfast Film Festival and opens at the IFI on April 29th