Home Movies, Trauma, and the Marginalized: Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation (2003)
By Aden Jordan
In her introduction to Mining the Home Movie, Patricia R. Zimmerman writes about how the authors in the anthology believe that "the home movie can function as a recorder, an interrogator, a deferral, a condensation, and a mediator of historical traumas that extend beyond the self, such as labor, war, race, gender, religion, illness, diaspora, and displacement" [1](5). At multiple points in her essay, Zimmerman brings up the value of home movies in exploring and documenting historical and social traumas while simultaneously giving a voice to minority and marginalized groups affected by these traumas.
Jonathan Caouette's documentary Tarnation (2003) is a relevant work for considering some of the ideas on home movies, trauma, and minority groups that Zimmerman discusses in her introduction. The trauma in Tarnation is not historical in the sense that Zimmerman uses the term, but is instead deeply personal. Caouette made Tarnation using hundreds of hours of home movie footage that he had created and kept since the age of 11. The film is an organized collage of Caouette's home movies that he edited using iMovie software to tell the story of his dysfunctional family. Using his home movies along with still photographs, voice messages, and text, Caouette presents the troubled life of his mother Renee. At a young age, Renee fell off the roof of her house and was unable to walk. A family friend suggested to Renee's parents, Adolph and Rosemary, that her paralysis might just be in her head. The parents consulted a doctor who suggested that Renee receive shock treatments, which she did on the unbelievable routine of twice a week for two years. Renee was not the same after her lengthy period of shock therapy, and exhibited severe symptoms of schizophrenia for the rest of her life. After getting married and then giving birth to Jonathan, Renee was abandoned by her husband and was thrown into and out of mental hospitals. Jonathan was put into a foster home where he was beaten and molested, and by the age of 11 was put in the care of his grandparents.
It was at the age of 11 that Caouette began to regularly make home movies on Super 8 and VHS. Taken by themselves, Caouette's home movies easily fall under Zimmerman's definition of 'auto-ethnographies': home movies that "position history as memory generated from the point of view of participants" (20). Many of them have an element of the subject performing for the camera. Two of the earliest home movies Caouette made are of him at eleven years old, dressed in women's clothing and giving improvised monologues from the perspective of an abused woman. Many of his home movies are clearly confessional and meant as pieces of video diary. In audio taken from a home movie or a tape recorder, Caouette, still a child, speaks of the abuse he experienced while in foster care and the molestation he experienced that he thinks has made him homosexual. For Caouette, his camera functions as both a diary and a mirror. In his home movies, he frequently adjusts his clothes and styles his hair while looking into the camera, and more than once literally exposes himself by displaying his private parts.
At the U.S. government's 1993 hearings on film preservation, amateur film archivists testified that, "amateur film and home movies were often the only cinematic materials documenting and tracing regional history and minority voices" (Zimmerman, 11). Tarnation is very much the product of two minority voices. As a homosexual man with his own history of mental illness, Coauette used home movies throughout his life to document his struggle with understanding his homosexuality and dealing with his mental problems (Coauette was also hospitalized multiple times in his youth for psychotic episodes). His mother, Renee, is also a marginalized figure: a woman whose severe mental illness was exacerbated (if not created) by the shock treatments her parents forced her to have, abandoned by her husband, raped in front of her young son while hitchhiking, and has spent most of her life involuntarily put in state mental institutions. Through Coauette's home movies, both mother and son have had a chance to record and speak of their traumatic experiences.
At the start of her essay, Zimmerman writes, "In the popular imaginary, home movies are often defined by negation: noncommercial, nonprofessional, unnecessary" (1). Coauette's home movies, both by themselves and taken as an organized whole in Tarnation, challenge the shallowness of this perspective. There is significant artistic depth to Coauette's home movies. One of the home movies shows a middle-aged Renee pretending to be a movie star while framed in a close-up. Renee speaks to the camera and in a warm Southern accent says she is Elizabeth Taylor's daughter. In the camcorder's tight close-up, she looks conventionally attractive and elegantly accessorized with earrings. When Renee finishes pretending to be Taylor's daughter, the camera zooms back and reveals her to be overweight and wearing an oversized sweatshirt with a cartoon animal on the front. Whether it was intentional or not, this home movie creates an artistic and revealing transition. In the close-up, Renee is pretty and her playing pretend seems fun and funny. When the camera pulls backward, she becomes shabby and her act of make believe seems more delusional and less harmless.
In addition to supporting the perspective that amateur films can provide a voice to minority and marginalized individuals and also explore multiple kinds of trauma, Tarnation ultimately shows that home movies can have commercial value. Caouette sent one of his home movies to the director John Cameron Mitchell as part of his audition tape for one of Mitchell's films. Mitchell was very impressed by the home movie, and upon seeing the completed Tarnation he and another established filmmaker, Gus van Sant, became executive producers on the film to help Coauette secure the rights to the songs he used throughout the picture. Edited and formed into Tarnation, Coauette's home movies did have commercial value. The film was a critical success (positively reviewed by influential critics including A.O. Scott, Roger Ebert, and Kenneth Turan) and enough of a commercial success (making over a million dollars in domestic and international box office)[2] to warrant a sequel: Walk Away Renee, which was released in 2011.
[1] Zimmerman, Patricia R. "The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts, Minings." In Mining The Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Ed. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. P. 1-28.
[2] "Tarnation: Theatrical Performance." The Numbers. Nash Information Services, n.d. Web. http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2004/TARNT.php