queer cinema
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B RU Y
RI H
QU R
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€ l
2013
Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of merica on
acid-free paper oo Designed by my Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Minion
Pro
by
Copperline
Book Services, Inc.
Library
of
Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rich, B. Ruby.
New queer cinema : the director s cut B. Ruby Rich.
pages em
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
978-o-8223·5411 6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-o-8123·5428-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
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JON TH N
C OUETTE
What in
Tarnation
n
2 3 buzz was circulating on the streets of Park City, the
kind of buzz
to
which people pay attention because it
emanates
from audiences, not just a paid publicist (as if there isn t always
a hidden push from that maligned profession). Word
was
that
a newcomer, Jonathan Caouette, had made a powerful debut film about
his
painful life and
his
mother's near-destruction in the Texas
mental
health sys
tem,
produced for no money flat, to spectacular effect
Tarnation is
an
adrenaline-fueled mix of documentary and performance
relating a tragic autobiography through home movies, purloined television
footage, and a mix-master fuU ofsampled tunes.
Even
the
most
ignorant press
and industry folks safely pronounced the
film genius,
given that the names
:
,; .
' ,
. • :
• ' 't
:
.
•
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So are the texts that interpolate
and structure
the narrative, an
i n t e t l i g e ~ t
device for conveying the unrepresentable. For example, continuing the
fable:
"In 1965-99, Renee was treated in over
one hundred
psychiatric hospitals.
Records now indicate there was nothing initially wrong with her." h e ~ ~
originally sent to a hospital for help by Adolph and Rosemary, after a ll
from a
roof
left her paralyzed. Today she'd get therapy
and
a n t i d e p r e s s ~ i s ;
back then, she was given electroshock therapy twice a week for two y e ~ ~
And
then more.
k
.,
If
much
of Tarnation s
exposition is delivned in an electroshock
b l ~ s t
straight from the screen with graphic intensity, the texture of the lives i t ~ ~ -
plores is nothing less. His mother
and grandmother
vamp for the
c a m ~ ~
he delivers confessions alone in the night,
and
peril lurks between the
r e ~ l s .
Caouette's brilliant grasp of the visual clearly goes way hack: at m o m e ~ t s .
Tarnation
plays like a catalogue of consumer video clfccts of the past w e ~ ~
years, some cheesy, some poignant, some both.
The
screen splits along
wfth
Jonathan's and Renee's mental anguish
and
institutionalizations, images
mu-
tate and multiply, the wholeness
of
the screen becomes fractured, and s u b j ~ c
tive states swamp all objective stability. L
His mother is central to
Tarnation and
to Caouette's life, to the point 2_at
we
witness his driving back to Texas to rescue her
and
bring
her
home
to ive
with him and boyfriend David in Brooklyn. Renee is what Divine was to John
Waters, what the Factory stars were to Warhol: a larger-than-life p r e ~ e
who eats up the camera and rewards all att ention with uniq ue performances.
In Renees case, she claims links to Elizabeth Taylor and tells her own tales
of
tragedy. And indeed life has been cruel to her· the difference
is
that
she's
J ~ n ~ t h a n : s
mom, and he never stops loving
her
or, paying attention to
hetit
's
his ~ n t ~ x i c a t i o n that the audience picks up, a passion
made
manifest b y ~ e
SUbJeCtiVe eye through Which
We
are thrust into this story
of mother
and
son
.
. , Some pundits have forged links for
Tarnation through
scandal,
claimlng
Its what Andrew ki'
c · b en
. . arec
s apturmg the Friedmans (2003)
would have .e
If directed by the sons themselves, not first-timer Jarecki
and
editor Richard
Hankin. For others
of
· 1 · · d:
us, an entire
y
different
documentary
comes to min
t h ~ .Maysles brothers' Grey
Gardens
(1975),
an
indelible portrait attacked by
cntics
of
its time
1 · ·
d
·d
by. .
as
exp
OltatiVe
but vociferously
and
publicly defen e
Its subJects Big Ed' d L' ·•
tty
' te an title Edie, who came across then as just as nu
as
Caouette's grand h . ·
h
. mot er, grandfather,
and mother
do today and Just
as
t nlled to be documented. . '
Except when th • . s
eyre
not.
To
his credit, Caouette includes several
s c e ~ e
8
BULLETINS FROM THE
RONT
f
1
·
in which his
mother
or grandparents tell him to turn off the camera; notably,
all
occur toward the latter
part of
he film, when h e clearly knew he was on to
something and
had
begun working on "my movie." (In one scene, Grandpa
Adolph even tries to call the police to stop his grandson's filming him.)
If
those moments d isturb the loving harmony that otherwise prevails, they're
a necessary reminder
of the
power relations that lurk behind the surface of
most documentaries and, however disguised, contribute to their shape and
direction.
The
difference is that, here, Jonathan
is
son, grandson, director,
c i n e ~ a t ~ g r a p h e r and
coeditor (helped by Stephen Winter, producer, and the
director of the MIX festival in New York, where a three-hour Tarnation first
premiered).
By
n ~ w Caouette has seen
Grey Gardens
and,
of
course, loved it. But he
doesn't consider his own film a documentary: "I prefer to call it a my: he
confesses. Asked to
name
film influences, he bypasses any reference to docu
mentaries in favor of an excited litany: "David Lynch,
Mulholland
Drive,
Derek Jarman, Alejandro Jodorowsky,
El
Topo,
Sidney Lumet." Months
later he expands the list: "There's so many, it's so hard to choose. I was
as
inspired by acid-trip animated madness like Dirty
Duck
as by My Beautiful
Launderette, Love Streams, Do the Right
Thing
or
Rashomon.
I'm very equal
opportunity when it comes to movies and there's still so much I haven't seen
that I can't wait to get a chance to "
3
As
a.Texas kid, Caouette
had
joined a Big Brothers program that paired
fath,erless boys with role models; he was matched with Jeff Millar, a film critic
for
a Houston paper,
who took him
to screenings and obviously changed his
life.
The clips from childhood and adolescence that cycle through
Tarnation
favor
horror and splatter genres; they alternatewith the hyperreal encounters
With
his family and his poignant narrative
of
his own travails, from child
hood trauma to hi s-and -her drug overdoses and mental health interventions.
T h ~ o u g h o u t he maintains his particular brand of creativity. One
of
the rare
scenes videotaped outside the home is a record
of
his high school
play,
cowrit
ten
With
an old boyfriend; it's a musical, based
on
David
Lynch's
Blue
Velvet
with songs by Marianne Faithfull.
Queering Documentary Style
In
cinematic terms,
Tarnation
is poised at a complex intersection
of
trends
and lineages. In spirit, it harkens back to the euphoric days of the New Queer
C
. h h t 1· r wunderkind Sadie Ben-
IDema, suggesting noth ing so muc as t a ear
1e
•
t
G ·
Jonathan Caouette es
;
i
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ning,
and her
Pixel vision mast erpieces. Like her,
Caouctll
is a master of the
late-at-night-in-my-room-with-cheap-technnlog}' ode, a
hard
of queer
ado
lescence coming
into
being
on
videotape, but with Texan sensibility
and
a
touch of
Tennessee Williams decay shifting
the
balanCl'. I.ong after the
mar
ketplace
has
taken over the NQC label and filmmakers h<
-c
opted for
deals
over discoveries, Caouette brings
it
all full circle
with
his raw and ab s
olutely
new
style perfectly matched
to the
pains
and
passions
of
his life.
His
queerness marked
him
from
an
early age
and
informs
Tarnation
throughout,
even as
he
has gone in
other directions
within this one piece. His
club-kid
immersion
in a counterculture
mythos inlkcts the
w0rk as
well
, so
it
was
no
surprise
to
find that his years in
f
[ouston
and
New York were
indeed
club-centered.
He
was a natural at thirtee n,
smuggling him
s
elf
into Houston
clubs as a petite
Goth
girl. At
one
point,
he tried
to support himself as
an
actor and ended up doing
stints in
Hair and
a
European tour oi Rocky Horror
Picture Show.• Throughout
he always was a film bug ,
but
the cut-throat part,
the
finance, was all so daunting. Props to
the
gay
and
lesbian film circuit:
it
the introduction to
MIX
through a friend that led Caouette to the film
world, recognition, and
the important
assistance of
MIX
's Stephen Winter.
Tarnation
isn't being released into
the
world of
the
early 1990s when the
NQC
was
the
rage
of
the moment. ins tead its
documentary
credentials
en
s
ure
that it fl ies in
the
face of two
dominant trends of the mom
ent: on the one
hand, the move
in
the United States toward big theatrical -release documen·
taries in
the
wake
of
box-office successes like Capturing the Friedmans and
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit
9 11
(2004);
on the
other, the cultural obsession
with reality television shows, as even
the Osbornes lurk
in semiparallel in the
background. Caouette may well be
pointing
the
way to a
new
approa
ch to
both documentary and
autobiography precisely by refusing categories
and
insisting instead
on
a hybrid approach that accurately encapsulates the to
ne of
his life. Puri ty isn't his game. But he's generous
and
inclusive, posing a casual
model
of
what life looks like today in America for a
damn
talented queer
boy
who has just
turned
thirty-two, for whom the
contents
of his life and the stuff
of film have merged:
It's w ~ i r for
me
to
think
back
on
it because
although
I never, ever,
in
my Wildest dreams, thought the stuff I was shooting would ever get into
Cannes or even be shown outside my bedroom, I always did kind of
know that all the craziness
that
I was going
through and
all
the
footage I
was shooting would · h
Jd even
come m
andy
somehow, somewhere. I wou
8 BULLETINS FROM THE FRONT
sometimes invent weird scenarios, like: I'd die alone in my apartment and
my footage wou ld be discovered by someone, Blair-Witch style and
t ~ e n
they
would build something out of it, which
then
made me mad, wh•ch
is
funny.
I
was like,
I'm
not
waiting till
I'm de
ad
for
this film to get
madefS
Not a chance, Tonathan Caouette.
Tarnation is
out
, and there's a wonder·
fully
mad
idea
in the
wings: a new story stitched together from a
r i s
of cult
films from
the
1970s, all starring
the
same actress, redeployed mto a com
pletely differen t
and
original Caouette narrative.
6
I like always to be doing ten
things at
the
same time:· ad mitt ed Caouette. It's just how I'm hard-wired.
7
Notes
This chapter originally appeared as Tell
It
to the Camera; Sight
atrd
Sound
5·4
(2005). 32-34·
1. Thanks to Alexis Fish for insisting that I
see
Tarnation and arranging for
me
to
do
so.
.
k f
m an
2. This quotation and all others, unless indicated otherwise, are
ta en
ro
. S F c·
sco in
2004
, when
he
was
interview
conducted in person with Caouette
l l an ran
1
on
a press tour
for
Tarnation s impending theatrical release. .
. · b
h.
producer Stephen
WIDter
,
3.
Quotation emailed to me after the
mterv1ew Y
15
as dictated by Caouette.
4. He
returned
to
acting again in
Short Bus;see below.
5· Al
so
via
Winter's email. . n
Mitchell's Short Bus (
2
oo6),
6. Caouette had a cameo
as
an actor
m
John Camero . .,.
d h
t
film ll
Flowers rn
•
rme,
pl
a
ying
the Blondie-Grabber:'
He
has since ma e as or ' h. mother
. d
£
up
documentary
on IS '
starring the sublime Chloe Sevtgny, an a o ow·
Walk
Away Renee,
in
2011.
7 Also via Winter's email.
jonathan Caouette 87
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