This is the thread where we discuss the film Tarnation

I wanna see this real bad

I want to see it and yet I fear it...

something about the trailer put me off it in a big way. I have a feeling I'd hate it.

omg now i know whats wroing with the word tarnation. its an anagram!

Haha! Somehow I don't think this film will be anything like Q's films, though.

I saw it the other night. I found it mildly disappointing, if only because I thought the premise was great. What could have been an interesting insight into a child's view of his mother's decline into mental illness, it was really just naracesstic. I don't care so much about you kid, I'm sorry those things happened to you, but really, your mother was the more interesting story. You're just a drama kid that never grew up.

And the ending was just too much. please.

Jeff-PTTL said n two minutes and two sentences what I spent hours belaboring to convey.

Despite what Dr. Phil may say, everyone knows that Suffering is secretly good for you. It “builds character,” spices up a nondescript sob story, legitimizes that “art” stuff you’ve been tinkering on. Sometimes it can even help you meet people, or launch your career. How ? It depends in how you share it.
Jonathan Caouette’s documentary (and cinematic debut), TARNATION, the most buzz-laden indie of the year, shares quite a bit of suffering in quite a bit of ways: the formalistic trickery includes innumerable split-sceens, color saturated fade-outs, ancient answering machine messages, grainy reenactments, and clips from older films. Tarnation’s justifiable hype arises from its $218 budget – Caouette made it on Macintosh’s iMovie - and it’s being marketed as an unflinching look at his mother Renee LeBlanc’s mental illness decades after enduring repeated electro-shock therapy.
Which is a little misleading, since Tarnation is ultimately All About Caouette: the way he dealt with this maternal chaos, his adolescent outlet of performance, and the challenges he faced growing up queer in the suburban Texas of the ‘80’s. The film is primarily an extended montage of home videos he started taking of himself at age 11, heavily interspersed with expository interstitials over quickly-edited still photographs. The fact that Caouette constantly refers to himself in the third person in these texts does little to dispel charges of narcisscism. As so much of it is obviously meant to be deeply personal, Tarnation would have benefited from a first-person tone in the textual narration; the use of third-person only heightens the self-importance.
And it’s that “look-at-me” perspective that’s fundamentally bothersome about Tarnation, since the dynamics of Caouette’s family history are indeed horrifying and worthy of closer examination: not only the decision of his grandparents to lobotomize Renee, but also the paternal absence and successive foster parenting he survived. He spends a decent amount of time establishing all this in Tarnation’s impassioned intro. But instead of following through and mining that troubled history for any newfound depth or insight into the family, or ask profound questions on objectivity as Jarecki did in last year’s Capturing the Freidmans, Tarnation is all subjectivity, all Caouette, and alarmingly close to self-indulgence. He fills it with Too Much Information from his video diaries that just appears mundane, compared to the build-up of the introduction: Jonathan discovered new wave, Jonathan moved to New York City, Jonathan participated in a musical. Tarnation’s tone of exhibitionism, rather than intimate confession, actually makes it sound like Caouette wants to convince you that all these Fascinating Things only happen to Fascinating People like Jonathan, and detracts from the emotional tension of his mother’s story. I think it was around the time of the “Jonathan starred in 17 commercials!” interstitial that the couple sitting in front of me got up and left. They missed the home movie of Jonathan playing in the snow with his boyfriend.
It might be enough to say that Tarnation is thematically incoherent, but I don’t believe I’m entitled to make such a statement: perhaps the narrative break of focusing away from his family and onto himself was a conscious decision Caouette made to convey how he handled the lingering trauma throughout his youth. Music, acting, and “acting out,” were his channels, as one interstitial declared. Another stated that Jonathan himself was suffering from the mental disorder of “depersonalization.” If all this is true, and the film was meant to be an individual’s personal exorcism using snippets of visual and auditory memory, I suppose Tarnation is a measured success as Video-Diary that evokes a disturbing, expressionistic subjectivism. But as a documentary on familial dysfunction? Judged on those grounds, Tarnation’s triumph is as shaky as its jump-cut footage: so much of the interaction between himself and his family members near the end seems exploitive and contrived, and even the probing remains solipsistic. A startling example was when he follows his exasperated mother trying to escape the filming area with the plea, “I need to know more about myself!”
Perhaps such a self-portrait was necessary for catharsis, but the world of Caouette’s Tarnation, then, frustratingly begins and ends only with Caouette. The prelude features a somewhat theatrical opening from 2003, when he learns his mother had a lithium overdose and responds by setting up the camera in his bathroom to lunge at the sink. (Did he decide to make the film before or after he got this news?) The coda also takes place in the same bathroom, where he melodramatically tells the camera that he “just can’t do this to myself anymore,” after talking about his mother living under his skin. Okay, fine, so the staginess is to be expected from such a theatre queen, but it was the two decades’ worth of constant mugging in between these framings that made me feel exhaustion while viewing Tarnation, more often than pathos. The heartbreak and lacerating emotion were present, but the histrionics and self-centeredness kept them at a distance. Fortunately, Caouette’s visual imagination augurs well for his future as a filmmaker, but to become a substantial documentarian let’s hope he first gets over his favorite subject: himself. In the meantime, maybe he can parlay this film’s success into an off-Broadway musical, which would be the inverse trajectory of one of his two executive producers, Hedwig’s John Cameron Mitchell (the other was Mr. Gus Van Sant, whose My Own Private Idaho Caouette has claimed as inspiration).
Despite my ambivalence towards Tarnation due to all its solipsistic contrivances, I applaud it for addressing the still-stigmatized subject of mental illness… and yet fear that might not be its true legacy. If the much-anticipated “digital revolution” of the ‘90s really is coming to fruition, with everyone having access to a digicam and basic editing technology empowered enough to call themselves “filmmakers,” what will happen when the Live Journal Generation matures ? These kids who grew up watching hammy Real World confessionals, and who have already distinguished themselves by documenting an infitine amount of daily banalities in cyberspace (example: “current mood: bored… current music: Ashlee Simpson”) …when they come of age, will we be witnessing a deluge of Tarnation-wannabes, made by delusional upstarts who believe their Suffering, (which I’m waging will be much more mundane than Caouette’s), is significant enough for mass consumption and widespread distribution? The thought alone makes me want to lunge angstfully in my bathroom (but not record the lunging).

I'm actually excited to see more films like this -- iMovie films, autobiographical films -- with the hope, of course, that they're much better than Tarnation.

There are a couple of truly remarkable scenes in Tarnation -- most strikingly, the 11-year-old Jonathan dressing like a woman and acting out a confessional monologue, but also the song about the pumpkin that Renee sings (it's probably the clearest sign of how far she's fallen, mentally).

But ultimately I agree with Jeff and Vic that the mother is the more compelling character, and the peculiarities of Jonathan's life aren't always interesting. Or if they are, he doesn't explore them enough or give them any depth. I wondered also if there maybe just wasn't enough footage to justify a more focused film. He seems to have used every bit of film from his childhood, even when it didn't serve any larger purpose in the film's narrative trajectory.

I really didn't enjoy this. Not that i was meant to, of course, but I found the whole aesthetic unappealing. All those shock-tactic noises, split screens and jumpy bits. It seemed hackneyed in its attempts to be hyper-modern. And the music was horrible. Even when the Cocteau Twins came on I didn't feel uplifted, just cynical.

Aside from that, Vic's review was OTM.

I actually disagree wth many of the comments above. I expected to hate this film and Caoutte through force of narcissism. But I think the film was pretty fantastic in parts and I have some sympathy for him and his family. I really "enjoyed" it.

Jeff PTTL, accoring to my netflix you and I watch VERY similar movies, but yet we don't agree on many of them! DISCONNECT

Adam, I really don't understand you sometimes.

Then I have succeeded.

I also apprecaie this film as part of "the new psychedelia".

I enjoyed it as well.

Exactly what jaymc said up there. There wasn't enough footage to make a compelling film. The iMovie filter parts and long drawn on text on screen parts were just boring to me. Explain it to me in pictures, not words. The film felt like a long drawn out power point presentation with some flashy parts.

adam.rl. pffffffffffffbt

also see Capturing the Friedmans as an example of how much archival footage you need to make a compelling film. Tarnation had maybe a couple of hours to work with, maybe?

sorry to be a random googler but does anyone know where i can track down a list of all the songs on the soundtrack?

I just finally watched this and liked it a lot. I understand the criticisms, but I guess those things didn't bother me. Narcissistic? Yeah, he likes to ponder himself. But I mean, I think the narcissism is a product of everything else, it's his way of kind of trying to puzzle out his life, from the outside. I guess it depends on how interesting you think he is as a character; I thought there was an awful lot of fascinating stuff in it. There's a lot missing from the story -- it's pretty selective about what it deals with and what it doesn't -- but maybe no more than any other memoir. He's also pretty technically gifted. Be interesting to see what he does next.

There's no need for him to make another film now that he's Made It. The ultimate exploitation movie -- makes Noah Baumbach compassionate by comparison.

Well, it's not the most compassionate movie, true. There's an awful lot of anger there. But, I mean, duh. Of course there is.

(and despite everything he brought his mom to live with him in his New York apartment, that's something)

gyps, did you know Caouette restaged some of the scenes, like in his apartment with the boyfriend?

Where there isn't Anger, naked Ambition and Narcissism remain. Like when he shouts at his mentally diminished grandma during her closeup "Do your Bette Davis imitation!" The horror.

yeah some of it was obviously staged -- i mean, you know, most of it was staged, in that people were always very aware of the camera. but again, i didn't find it any more "artificial" than literary memoirs, which are just as selective, subjective and self-involved. and i like good literary memoirs too.

The horror.

maybe. maybe he was also trying to communicate with her. maybe she really liked doing her bette davis imitation -- she obviously liked clowning for the camera. i guess i'm not willing to read the worst possible intentions into the whole thing, because i thought the movie -- and he -- was more complicated than that.