Outsiders Come In

UNARGUABLY THE YEAR'S MOST bourgeois film, Tarnation suggests that if you can afford a video camera and have a copy of iMovie, anyone can call himself a filmmaker. And in this period of esthetic confusion and techno-intimidation, movie shills will likely salute your craziest conceit. (Besides, there hasn't been an art hoax this blatant since The Blair Witch Project, as Harmony Korine sits constipated on the b.s. throne.)

The star and director of Tarnation Jonathan Caouette pushes self-indulgence to its most privileged extremes. The entire film is an act of exhibitionism that has less to do with therapy or confession than sheer arrogance. Caouette has taken the old cliché of subjecting friends to one's home movies and tricked it up by sentimentalizing his own family dysfunction. Trumping Capturing the Friedmans, Caouette doesn't pretend to investigate a specific social problem. Tarnation is also a Cinderella story in which a family's damaged child emerges a postmodern martyr.

Caouette received a Super-8 camcorder at age 11 and has since kept a video record of himself. His my-story-so-far assemblage is a long, rapid-fire montage of kitschy film clips showing Caouette's youthful immersion in pop-culture detritus. He's not just the victim of a broken home, he's a product of our cultural disarray. Tarnation plays back Caouette's delirium and resentment in a non-stop hebephrenic barrage.

This is the first documentary I've seen that truly deserves to be called a rollercoaster ride. But that's not a compliment. The story of Caouette's family and its ongoing psychological disasters, social catastrophes and the natural debilitations of age, comes at you in nauseating waves. (To quote a review of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist: "Your heart doesn't bleed for him, your stomach turns for him.") It might indeed be a delayed reaction to The Exorcist, which Caouette cites as one of his favorite movies, that accounts for Caouette making himself the head-spinning, bile-spewing star of this debauch. (He decorates a wall in his New York apartment with a 1973 newspaper article predicting "Exorcist Will Be Best Money Maker in Movie History." Wrong again.)

Tarnation begins as if it will sympathetically explore the tortures suffered by Caouette's mother, Renee, a pretty teenage model in Texas, whose careless parents had her undergo dozens of rounds of shock treatment until she ended up a childlike schizophrenic mess. Between images of doomed hope and gaudy disaster (trenchantly scored to Glenn Campbell's "Witchita Lineman"), Cauoette tells how his mother met his father. Every step of the family history becomes an encounter with sadness. When marriage fails, the fragile young mother takes her child to Chicago, where she is raped in little Cauoette's presence. Back home in Texas, a stranger sells preteen Cauoette two joints laced with PCP and formaldehyde, and smoking them leads to his own psychotic calamity. Diagnosed with Depersonalization Disorder leaves him, he says, "feeling as if one lives in a dream."

Tarnation is all about Caouette sanctioning his own dream state. He emulates his mother's tantrums, combining warped empathy with a penchant for East Village drag. No doubt he reprocesses that violent primal rape amidst the pop junk of his youth (bizarre stimuli ranging from children's television to The Little Prince and The Wiz). Tarnation becomes less about the mother's misfortune and more about Caouette's internalized pop-culture trips. When his mother is reunited with his father (whom Caouette has never met), the filmmaker doesn't stop to orient himself to his father or his past. Putting this incident on screen as though experienced in a haze goes to the root of Caouette's failure. He's uninterested in understanding his family's life or even the source of his own behavior or (God forbid) his "talent."

If Caouette's intent is (to use the infernal word) "reinvent" himself, then Tarnation is worse than a family debacle. Caouette's freakshow seems simply a means to justify a form of self-hatred that is buried beneath shallow technique. The same thing occurs on a larger scale in the football movie Friday Night Lights, also set in Texas, where neophyte actor-turned-director Peter Berg makes equally promiscuous use of flashy film grammar. This fact-based story explores how boys on a high school football team respond to their coach's (Billy Bob Thornton) and their fathers' proscriptions of manhood. But Berg goes so wild with rack-focus and zoom, quick-edits and high-contrasty photography, the father-son theme gets lost. His artsy framing falsifies the film's attempt at quotidian content. The Odessa, TX, location and good ol' boy characterizations seem derived from bad ol' Budweiser commercials.

In Tarnation, Caouette's retreat from his Texas roots resembles high-end MTV commercials. His montage style features words traveling across the images in yellow, red, fuschia and orange letters. It's as distancing as the drained-out, fake-realism in Friday Night Lights. Caouette also features lots of white bleeding in his blurry close-up images. At first this seems to express scary intimacy, as if he can't quite get inside himself. Yet the film is mostly composed of pictures (yearbook, tv, home-movie, Hollywood) that neither penetrate nor seek to understand Caouette's luckless relations.

His flamboyance is the flip side of Friday Night Lights' machismo. "I've always been gay," cute, dark-eyed Caouette says flirting into the camera. "I'm just lusty for stuff." And "stuff" is this film's embarrassing claim on innovation. Caouette's catalog of pop references is show-offy and meaningless: He edits himself into scenes from Rosemary's Baby. He performs in a school-musical version of Blue Velvet adding Marianne Faithfull songs. His dream of a bio-pic would star Joni Mitchell as mom, Nina Hagen and Klaus Nomi as his grandparents. And he recalls having a crush on a classmate "who looks just like Nick Drake." There seems to be no way out of his pop madhouse. Caouette's most dubious achievement is creating his own Truman Show.

Anyone who thinks Caouette has done something interesting has lost touch with the movie verities. The only reason Tarnation has hoodwinked the culture-vultures is because My Life on Ice by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau didn't have celebrity backers. Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell have hopped on the Tarnation bandwagon as executive producers, giving it cred, whereas My Life on Ice only had creativity and artistry to commend it. The film's direct-to-video release in the U.S. robbed Duscatel-Martineau of their due acclaim; their story of a teenager who uses a camcorder to connect to the world, even exposing his own selfishness, was the most convincing proof I've yet seen that the new video technology might be used as conscientiously and imaginatively as film. Nothing in Tarnation challenges the video medium to transcend its traditional private, narcissistic limit the way My Life on Ice did-especially when the teenager Laurent (Jonathan Zaccai) gets beyond voyeuristic fetishes and finally falls in love. That video moment, discreetly captured by Duscatel-Martineau, is still one of the most intimate revelations in recent, well, cinema.

Tarnation blasts cinema into video artifice. Cauoette mentions how a friend introduced him simultaneously to punk rock and underground movies, but despite aspiring toward those radical movements, Caouette's film is little more than derivative. Comparing it to Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures or Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising misrepresents the cultural revolution those artists forged. Tarnation is impertinent rather than transgressive. Caouette pimps his mother's tragedy in order to make his own narcissism more melodramatic. (The giveaway is a shoe-horned clip from The Wiz, isolating Diana Ross's middle-aged hysteria so that it is as campy as it is pathetic.) There's a shameless scene where Renee does a rambling monologue about pumpkins, plus a visit to Caouette's bedridden grandmother. He asks the toothless, shriveled, senile old lady, "Do your Bette Davis impersonation, Grandma." She already is. The reference here is the Maysles' highly questionable 1975 film Grey Gardens about the mother-daughter recluses Edith and Edie Bouvier Beale; but back in those days documentary makers still somewhat respected their subjects' autonomy. Cruel is not too strong a word for Caouette's exploitation.

As Caouette's enablers, Van Sant and Mitchell further their own transgressive pretenses, as if encouraging the liberation of society's exiles. (Everybody grab a digicam!) Tarnation imitates both Van Sant's outlaw fringe and Mitchell's self-pity, exceeding the virtues of private expression. It is truly the end of Outsider Art when it is so fashionably in. o