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'Tarnation' a powerful story
BY L. KENT WOLGAMOTT / Lincoln Journal Star
Thursday, Jan 20, 2005 - 06:33:13 pm CST

At the age of 11, Jonathan Caouette borrowed a neighbor's video camera and began documenting his daily life, interviewing family members and creating little movies to help him escape from his traumas. For nearly two decades, Caouette kept shooting, and he kept the material along with still photos, archived answering machine messages and audiocassette diaries.

In early 2003, encouraged by "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" creator John Cameron Mitchell and inspired by his schizophrenic mother's lithium overdose, Caouette took those videos, stills and other material and edited them into a stunning autobiographical documentary using the iMovies program that came on his boyfriend's Apple computer.

"Tarnation" was initially completed for just $218.32. Then, with the help of director Gus Van Sant, Mitchell and others, the homemade picture went theatrical and became a film festival sensation.

Owing plenty to the experimental underground films Caouette was exposed to as a teen, "Tarnation" is a visually arresting picture. But it is the powerful story at its center that makes it transfixing.

Like "Capturing the Friedmans," which used home movies to document the life of a man convicted of abusing children, "Tarnation" does the same thing.

Only the human drama here is of mental illness — both of the mother, Renee LaBlanc, a beauty queen who was given repeated electroshock treatments in the 1960s and '70s, and of her son, Caouette, who after smoking some PCP-laced pot as a kid has been diagnosed with "depersonalized disorder," a syndrome characterized by seeing oneself as from the outside or in a dream.

That distance pervades "Tarnation," which uses titles rather than narration, describing what has happened in the family in a few words, then letting the old video footage play. Or, more precisely, mixing sound and footage and iMovies tricks into a whirling mixture that can be painful to watch and hear but is never less than compelling.

With his mother in and out of institutions and his father never in his life, Caouette was raised by his grandparents in Houston and was in and out of foster homes, where he was abused. At age 6, his mother took him to Chicago, where he saw her being raped.

To escape from his trauma, Caouette made up little plays in which he talked out his troubles. Discovering he was gay very young, he snuck into clubs and was befriended by Houston's gay subculture — a community that not only accepted him but introduced him to the world of underground film that would impact his future.

Eventually, Caouette was able to escape to New York and found David Sanin Paz, a supportive boyfriend. So supportive that the duo even takes in the ever-more-troubled Renee rather than leave her in a deteriorating world in Houston.

"Tarnation" isn't always easy to watch. But it is always nakedly honest. And Caouette has the skills to make the picture more than some reality TV style confessional. Instead, he's made a stunning, searingly personal, unforgettable film.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.