When we think of life its often in very different and complex terms. Some people think of their hopes and dreams, others of their day to day routine. But I really doubt you think about a gay teenager living in Texas with a mom who was hospitalized due to shock therapy gone wrong, two abusive grandparents, and a case of depersonalization disorder due to smoking joints laced with PCP as a kid. Yet this is the life that Jonthan Calouette lived. So it is no wonder that his avant-garde documentary film Tarnation is very different from any traditional documentary film making style. His life was very different from the normal status quo of society.
The film’s plot is the life and history of Caouette’s personal and family history. Yet to say this film has a traditional “plot” is not entirely correct. Only a handful of slides with sentences move the story forward as seemingly random images are compiled together to give the viewer a truly unique experience. Instead of seeing Caouette’s family tragedy in the context of a story you experience it through images and sounds that he uses to immerse you into the madness that was his childhood.
Real videos of his childhood are intermixed with seemingly random color filters and images of people doing drugs, images of his mother, and strange videos of his grandmother saying she is “charlie from the chocolate factory”. Caouette even shows a disturbing video of himself when he was 13 years old dressed up as a woman as he acts out a monologue pretending to be an abused single mother who killed her ex-husband. It’s definitely something you don’t see everyday.
Yet despite the strangeness of it all there is a genuinely good film here and I believe the experimental nature of the film serves its purpose extremely well. Caouette’s personal life was such a living hell that it seems reasonable to believe a traditional documentary wouldn’t adequately show the real emotion and trauma he went through. In a strange way that makes the decision to make the film experimental ultimately a good choice as the focus then shifts from narrative to connection.
Connection in the sense that we all want to be able to connect with Jonathan because….well goddamn who wouldn’t feel sympathy for someone who’s been surrounded by a broken family, drugs, and a hysterical mother for his entire childhood? Not to mention the fact that he is also homosexual and that Texas isn’t exactly known for its open-mindedness towards gay people.
So all in all this hell in a hand basket approach to showing dysfunction can only be shown in one way, a dysfunctional narrative.
And in the end Tarnation succeeds in its goal. Though we never get the full details on Jonathan’s chaotic upbringing ( and that might be for the best) we do see the emotional trauma he went through and how it came to shape him as a person. In the end that’s all that matters and in that regard the narrative served its purpose tremendously.