Tarnation

His dreams of an entire nation covered in tar on the brink of ruin, Johnathon took hostages and threatened to make another shaky, hand-held Super-8 docu-drama unless his demands were met.

By Simone Ubaldi

The extraordinarily personal pop magnitude of Tarnation is difficult to digest, and because of this Jonathan Caouette’s film has already divided audiences and critics in extremes of exaltation and snide condemnation. For my money, it is the best film in cinemas since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Shot on digital video and super-8 and edited on his home computer, it is a work of genius, teetering on the verge of collapse.

In part, Jonathan’s film is about his mother’s mental illness, a suitably horrifying tale of misguided medical practice that led to years of electro-shock therapy and decades of depression and schizophrenia. It is also, in part, about his grandparents and the mistakes they made in raising him. Some of it is about his absent father. But mostly, it is about Jonathan. His own traumatic life, his own melodrama, his own redemption, his own fantasy: he is the freak in the freakshow. He is also a uniquely gifted individual, capable of turning a very ordinary nightmare into a very beautiful kind of art.

What he has done, this boy wonder, trash vacuum, victim and accomplished visual artist, is assemble his life in video footage and still photographs and re-imagine it as narcissistic fantasy, docu-drama and experimental cinema. From the evidence of divine precociousness in his early childhood to the cultural savvy of his teenage years, Jonathan was clearly destined to do something brilliant. That his youth and childhood, obsessively documented and artfully exposed, are actually an integral part of that brilliant thing is sort of incredible. It’s a project 30 years in the making.

Tarnation is at times delicate, bluntly funny, sometimes manipulative and occaisionally cruel, but always vast, dense, reflective and poetic. It is a whole life, made surreal with $218 and an I-Mac. The ambition, vanity and beauty of his project are mind-blowing - and the honesty, found as much in his naked desire to escape the mundane horror of his experiences as it is found more obviously in the prosaic narrative subtitles, is absolutely heartbreaking.