Life after ‘Tarnation’
When the documentary “Tarnation,” Houston filmmaker Jonathan Caouette’s scattershot blast of memoir, melancholy and rage, rolled into the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, it hit like a Texas thunderstorm.
Scavenged from old Super-8 footage, homemade interviews, photos, answering-machine messages and other detritus from his young, turbulent life, the haunting collage of a film was initially made for a reported miserly $218 with an Apple computer’s iMovie software. Yet it still managed to earn a 10-minute ovation at the French festival. Roger Ebert declared it a “remarkable film, immediate, urgent, angry, poetic and stubbornly hopeful,” and it would go on to win best nonfiction-film honors from the National Society of Film Critics and a best-documentary nomination at the Independent Spirit Awards.
With American-network reality TV still in its gangly adolescence and YouTube not yet a reality, Caouette’s confessions in the film struck many as a bold, new approach to the documentary form. He talked about growing up in west Houston in the ’80s as the son of a single mom with acute bipolar and schizoaffective disorder who was also a rape survivor and dealing with foster-home abuse, his sexuality and the eccentric grandparents
who became his caretakers. “Tarnation” was Ken Burns if Ken Burns had come of age dancing the sweaty nights away to early-’90s rock at such Houston nightspots as Visions and Numbers, dreaming of escape.
Now, 15 years later, Caouette is being feted at this year’s QFest — Houston’s main LBGTQ film festival — with a “Tarnation” screening/Q&A on July 28 and a showing of some of his other works, under the umbrella of “Cinema Poverté: A Collection of Rarely Seen Music Videos, Shorts, and Works in Progress Made with Little to No Money by Jonathan Caouette,” on July 27.
But anyone expecting the angry young man of yesterday might be in for a disappointment. The kid from Parker Elementary and Westbury High who, at age 11, made a video of himself in drag as an abused, fictional housewife, Hilary Chapman Laura-Lou Gourina, delivering a tear-stained monologue that is alternately alarming and hilarious, is not the 45-year-old Caouette of today. The young man, who dismissed Houston as “a small town” in “Tarnation” and who fled to New York City in the ’90s to escape what he perceived to be the smothering provincialism of Texas culture, has made peace with home.
Though Caouette still maintains a place in New York, he and his longtime husband, David, along with his 23-year-old son, have been spending more time in Houston over the past five years at the midcenturymodern Westbury house where he grew up, now decorated with the memories of pop-culture obsession. Posters of James Dean, Muhammad Ali and “I Shot Andy Warhol” surround a ’50s-era Philco cabinet TV, a Smith-Corona typewriter, vinyl albums (“Laverne & Shirley Sing”) and a beloved children’s book (“Are You My Mother?”).
Houston is not the hellscape he once imagined.
“It’s changed a lot since I left,” Caouette says, seated at his kitchen table. “Initially, I wanted to kind of dial my stuff down from New York. We don’t own the place there, and I was afraid that if our landlord decided he wanted to charge $5,000 a month, suddenly I would have to figure out a place to put all my stuff. And so I was thinking it might be a good idea to reclaim the house. I was renting it out … but I was like, ‘Maybe I could just move everything down here.’
“It’s become this sort of cabin in the woods to write, create and edit,” he continues. “It’s kind of perfect. … It’s where I was raised, and it’s where the good, the ugly, the tumultuous and the beautiful all happened. The sense memory of being here is just incredible.”
‘Car crash of a life’
Certainly, not all those memories are pleasant ones.
“We’re in the future. It’s a different world we live in now,” he says. “But growing up as a gay, maybe Jewish, kid from a very dysfunctional family and trying to make sense of the outside world, coming from that kind of atmosphere, I often compare it to growing up in a religious cult and having this one worldview that’s superimposed on you. There wasn’t anything vindictive about it. It’s just it was what it was. And having to come out of that and go into the working world and make sense of the world outside this house, somewhere along the way, I figured it out, somehow. But it was a very different Houston.”
That inner turmoil is what fueled “Tarnation.” Caouette’s passion for filmmaking began at age 11, when his granddad bought him his first Super-8 cameras and was encouraged by then-Houston Chronicle film critic Jeff Millar, who was his mentor through Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. When he was 30, he used this passion to make a video diary to document and come to terms with his “car crash of a life,” as The Guardian described it.
“It’s a kind of film that somebody would make at the end of their career, as opposed to inadvertently (becoming an introduction) to the film community, when it really had really started off as just this art project, kind of a private, cathartic art project that I started to get increasingly excited about,” Cauoette recalls. “When I initially made it, it was definitely on the border of a traditional documentary that was emulating a narrative. It was a cross between that and a mixed-media installation piece. … It became this documentary that was genre-defining. I didn’t mean to do that.
“It’s been a ride. It’s been a 15-year ride, and it was like opening Pandora’s box, but at the same time it was completely elating, and it started a conversation that hasn’t stopped yet.”
He did have some help along the way. After seeing an early version, director Gus Van Sant (“Milk,” “To Die For”) and actor/ director John Cameron Mitchell (“How to Talk to Girls at Parties”) came on board as executive producers. Money was raised to add music and other elements. (The beautifully mournful soundtrack includes tracks from such masters of downcast pop from Caouette’s youth as Red House Painters’ Mark Kozelek, Iron & Wine, Magnetic Fields, Marianne Faithfull, Lisa Germano, Low and — wait for it — Glen Campbell singing his plaintive classic, “Wichita Lineman.”)
When the film hit the festival circuit, and the adulation swelled, Caouette wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. “The premiere was at Sundance, and Cannes was the second big festival, and it just reinforced the surreal nature of all it. It was still very out-of-body. It was incredible, and I’m grateful that the film resonated the way that it had,” he says. “I don’t know how I would have handled it otherwise.”
Some observers said they had a visceral reaction to it. “I was struck by its intensity,” says Elizabeth A. Festa, associate director and lecturer in the program for writing and communication at Rice University, who first saw it in 2011 and has subsequently used it in her classes. “I viewed it on my laptop and felt compelled to stop every four or five minutes to process what I had seen and to prepare myself to engage with the next segment.”
She says “Tarnation” is important because it “differs from other documentaries, perhaps, in the nature and degree of its experimentation” and that “it isn’t self-indulgent or solipsistic …(It’s) a film that grapples with the ways in which our identities take shape through our engagement with media and how, in turn, we might reshape media in radical ways to construct and convey a sense of self, even amid marginalization and trauma.
That message is as relevant today as it was in 2004, maybe even more so, with the proliferation of platforms for personal narratives.”
There were others, though, who said he was exploiting his family. A review in the Salt Lake Tribune said it “approaches the line between unflinching honesty and cruel exploitation … Caouette’s undying love for his mother keeps ‘Tarnation’ from crossing that line, but the movie takes us closer than is comfortable.”
“I think exploitation is when someone from the outside ofa scenario comes into something, befriends someone or some people to capitalize off of something,” Caouette says in a followup email. “I am as deeply embedded into my family fold as we all were while I was growing up. The relationship I have with my mother is, for better or for worse, more symbiotic than ever. I am her caretaker and sole advocate forever. I just happened to want to be a filmmaker. This was a need and kind of the ultimate format of communication that I urgently used to exorcise all of this out in a healthy way. I am not sure I would still be alive had it not been for cinema and my love of cinema.”
No more docs
If a straight line can be drawn from “Tarnation” to YouTube — part of a social-media landscape in which documenting one’s daily life, no matter how tedious, has become commonplace — Caouette says he had no inkling at the time of how technology would turn everyone into documentarians and has no interest in what he may have helped wrought. (“Tarnation” can also be seen as a predecessor to Bing Liu’s moving “Minding the Gap,” last year’s Oscar-nominated documentary in which another young filmmaker chronicles a rough adolescence of abuse and hard knocks.)
“I had no clue what was ahead. I just had this urgency, and I didn’t know where it had come from, and I knew it had to make (the movie) when I made it. It encompassed a certain time and space. And I don’t know that if I made the film now or five years ago — first off, I wouldn’t have made it (later). I certainly would not have made it after the onset of YouTube and how that is now,” he says. “People do things now that feel like stuff that I had been doing. Even with the endorsement of Gus Van
Zant and John Cameron Mitchell coming on to really champion the film, I don’t even know if people would notice it now. There’s so much noise now.”
After “Tarnation,” Caouette says, many projects were offered to him, but nothing sparked the same level of enthusiasm. Even a “Tarnation” follow-up of sorts, “Walk Away Renee,” a 2011 documentary about a road trip he took with his mother, failed to catch fire.
“If one day I could ever predicate my career on David Lynch’s, if I ever get to that level, ‘Walk Away Renee’ would be my ‘Dune,’ ” he says with a laugh, referring to Lynch’s 1984 film that’s widely viewed as a disaster. “I learned a lot of lessons from making that film, and I almost gave up filmmaking from making that, actually. But then after a long sabbatical of really thinking about it and realizing what I wanted to do — which is to make fictional films — it seemed OK. Most of what was in that film was really meant to be for a would-be, 20-year anniversary of ‘Tarnation,’ Easter-egg footage, and it kind of segued
into this other thing.”
He also co-directed “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” the 2009 documentary about the London music festival of the same name. But these days, Caouette is working on a fictional project, which he thinks could end up as something for a streaming service.
He has no interest in turning a lens on himself or his family ever again. “Everybody else is doing it,” he says. “They take pictures of their spaghetti bolognese at Olive Garden just so they can be validated that they exist. … It’s not special anymore.”
He’s even considering coming full circle by bringing his mother, the source of much familial friction in his youth who now lives in a group home in upstate New York, to live with him at the family home in Houston. It would echo the end of “Tarnation” when, after all the trauma and tears, he is lying peacefully next to his sleeping mother and the last words of the voiceover ring with an up-from-struggle optimism. “Keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”
“I’m looking to maybe bring her back down here for a little while because I’m going to be spending more months down here than in New York,” he says now. “And wherever I go, she wants to be.”