By Addie Tsai
You send your partner a text: Tell me if this piece isn’t good enough. I need this to be as perfect as it can be.
Your partner knows the significance of this piece because shortly after the two of you met, you fangirled out over its subject and maker, Jonathan Caouette’s indefinable, hybrid, crossgenre, tour-de-force film Tarnation—a capsule of a young queer artist’s relationship to himself, his childhood (and adulthood) in Houston (and New York), his sexuality, but most of all, his complex journey of living with his loving, dysfunctional family and caring for his mentally ill mother created almost solely on iMovie and by collaging film and television clips, Hi8 footage, answering machine messages, photographs, special effects, and VHS. You were struck by how you were both awestruck over this cult film. It tells you something about a person if they know it. It tells you more if their eyeballs twitch when they talk about it. Tarnation lived in both of your skins.
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Act One:
Summer 2005. You’re in West Palm Beach, in a house that feels like home, in a complicated relationship you’ve only just begun. It’s been a year since you graduated with your MFA in poetry, so you’re still only writing poems (although this will change more than you can imagine by the time you write this), and you’ve recently just bought your first film camera, a Canon AE-1 you got off Craigslist and picked up from an Asian artist outside Café Brasil.
This will become the year you learn you’re queer and always have been. This will be the year you buy your first SLR camera to make double exposures and, more importantly, to begin a journey (one of the few creative threads that hasn’t fallen way) taking self portraits.
But, most importantly, this is the year you discover Tarnation, and now, as you transport your mind back to that time, you have a realization just what a catalyst watching Tarnation was for all that that year will become for you.
The person you initially watch Tarnation with in Florida in the middle of the afternoon will cease to be important to this story. But, like any moment where a piece of art makes you discover a part of yourself you never knew existed, it’s important enough to mention.
You remember settling in on the nondescript beige plush cushions in front of the television as the film began, the pool to your right, the palm trees out the window. And then, everything in the world of that moment ceases to exist.
You and Jonathan didn’t have the same life, not in the slightest. But it was the first piece of art you ever witnessed that felt like it could hold hands with the life you had led. By the time you watch Tarnation the first time, your father, who was once violent, who once threatened to disown you, who once accused you of wanting to suck his blood for making poor grades in school, will have sent you an email which reads: I’m so disgusted with the way you live your life. And less than a year after returning home to Houston from this Florida vacation, your mother will expose her own psychological messiness to you, and then she will leave you, again. By the time you write this piece, your claustrophobically close twin sister will have already stolen your domain names, told people in your community you were a pathological liar, and claimed you were crazy. By the time you write this piece, you will have been healed from 15 years of therapy, but you know better than to say healing is ever a finished process.
All you can say about your experience of the film is there’s who you were before you watched Tarnation, and who you are after. You had grown used to telling people you never sought out art by those who were like you, because you never expected to find yourself or your complicated, chaotic, dysfunctional life in any work of art. You’d made peace with that fact—how could anyone understand what it meant to be born of two pathologically narcissistic parents, a violent but dynamic engineer-slash-performer father, a beautiful but wounding/-ed mother, a tormented twin sister you still couldn’t help but love, and a messy brother that got you? It couldn’t be done, you kept telling yourself.
Until you found Tarnation.
Tarnation is the ars poetica, the raison d’être, the magnum opus for the weirdos and the freaks, the disenfranchised and the misunderstood.
When the credits roll and you come back down to Earth (a return which has, within itself, a certain sense of loss and disorientation), you race to the computer on the other end of the kitchen and, without thinking and in a rush of adrenaline, you find Jonathan on MySpace and you write him a message in which you try to express, without sounding too obsessed or overzealous, just how Tarnation rolled over you like a Mack truck, and yet it was also like submerging yourself in a hypnotic pool of water, and here, here, here, would you please read my poetry manuscript, where you’ll find the space where our stories connect?! (Yes, you are that swoony 25-year-old whose body buzzes with electricity from being struck by such work; that is to say, magic.)
You don’t know what you expect in return—sometimes the reaction you have to such vulnerable truth (and that is not to say not without its fiction or drama) can’t be quantified.
But you don’t expect what you receive—a sweet, heartfelt message in response, not even two days later, with specific reactions to your poems, which he says he loves, and which he wishes he knew a publisher for. You try to find the messages when writing this piece. But, like all technology, it is always there, until it isn’t.
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Act Two
Summer 2012. You’re in New York City because you think you might move there. You’ve just discovered your mirror twin has stolen three domain names that mean something to you. Two of them are versions of your given name, and one is the title of a memoir that almost got published, until it didn’t.
You’re working in photography and video more than ever before, and you only find out your twin has stolen your domain names because you think you should build a website before you leave for New York. You will never forget where you are in that moment, or what you do afterwards. You lie on your belly on a mattress on the floor of your apartment in Montrose, on Vermont Street. You type your name into the domain name search, discover it is registered, and feel your belly weighted to your knees with the heart that now resides inside of it, like an anchor on a boat where you want wings.
You feel yourself disappear. Or, at least, you wish you could. If Tarnation tells you anything, it tells you that the binds that tie you to people bring pain and joy and confusion and a sense of living between worlds, which can be beautiful, which can be—as Jonathan will tell you in the house that is Tarnation, that is art, that is reality, that is not reality, that is the site of everything that made and unmade and remade him seven years later—a kind of purgatory, or like a Black Mirror episode.
In fact, now that you’re thinking about it, if you were to write a fictional screenplay of your life that you call The Day I Disappeared (one of the titles of a fictionalized screenplay that morphed, at some point, into what is now Tarnation), this would be the day.
In order to not fall apart, you take a video of yourself instead, in makeup and masks, while singing at yourself in the mirror, tears running black lines down your clown face, trying to imagine a world in which you could live without a twin who wanted to undo you, without the insight to understand that she wants to undo you because she, too, is in pain. It is hard to hold space for another’s pain. Perhaps this is the way you reckon with and recognize Tarnation most vividly.
You officially meet Jonathan in New York after the domain names incident, after you flee to New York hoping to finagle a different life than the one you lead in Houston, at the NYC premiere of what is called the “follow-up” to Tarnation, Walk Away Renee.
For you, Jonathan is one of those souls you feel you’ve always known in another life, perhaps even another dimension. He thinks you are someone else he knows. You think he thinks he mistakes you for yet another person. But, whatever the case, you sense some kind of kindred connection. He greets fans and friends after the film ends, and you take his photos with the Pentax on which you now shoot self portraits and double exposures—a camera you might not own with the same veracity if you had never seen Tarnation. You talk about moving to New York, he gives you his number, tells you to move to Queens. As though you’d always known him. That’s how it feels anyway.
You watch Walk Away Renee with someone you barely know, who doesn’t understand what Jonathan is to you, who has never seen Tarnation, and is just along for the ride. He waits patiently while you strike up the nerve (and the spoons to approach him in front of a large crowd due to your introverted nature). He laughs at you as you meet back up with him away from the people afterwards, hands shaking from nerves, adrenaline, and excitement. From seeing the maker whose made thing makes you feel seen.
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Act Three
Summer 2019. MySpace isn’t a thing anymore, but now there’s Facebook, and you’ve connected here and there over the last seven years. You wonder what it means that Jonathan resurfaces for you every seven years. Where he’s involved, it’s bound to mean something. After all, according to numerology, the number 7 is the seeker, the thinker, the searcher of Truth. The 7 doesn’t take anything at face value—it is always trying to understand the underlying, hidden truths. The 7 knows that nothing is exactly as it seems and that reality is often hidden behind illusions.
You’re finishing up a three-week novel-writing residency in California, and you discover upon returning home that QFest, Houston’s LGBTQ film festival, will feature a special tribute to Jonathan, including a 15th anniversary screening of Tarnation, and Cinema Poverté, a collection of Jonathan’s rarely seen music videos, shorts, and works in progress, made with little to no money. Kristian Salinas, the artistic director of QFest, will later tell you: “Tarnation remains a groundbreaking film 15 years later. The narrative molds itself around a singular perspective that injects the film with a one-of-a-kind psychological perspective that is at times terrifying, tragic, and deeply moving. There has yet to be any other film like it.”
Just before you leave for California, you write a review for a Stonewall dance performance at the CAMH, and you hope that you can somehow land an interview with Jonathan and/or a review of Tarnation. You have no idea if he’s too busy to interview, or if the magazine you’ve only written one piece for will have you, or if you need more specific movie-writing credentials than a PhD in dance (that did focus on screendance), but you throw out a line to see if it will catch.
It does.
As you approach Jonathan’s house with a mixture of excitement and waning self-confidence—Will you shed your nerves long enough to ask the right questions? Will you ask questions that induce eye rolls? Will you overwhelm him or make things awkward with your shy seriousness? Will you really, truly get the opportunity to talk to him about such a crucial necessary piece of art, not just for you, but for the world?—you feel it. You can’t put your finger on it, but it’s something. The closer you get, the stronger the feeling. It’s like an electric shock through the sun, or a magnetic field.
You’re driving to the house where it happened, where Jonathan and his mother and his grandmother and his grandfather and his childhood was made, filmed, rewound, lost, retrieved, assembled, reenacted, performed, bled, and stitched back together.
And then you proceed to have, without warning or inclination, a conversation about Tarnation over coffee and cherries, enveloped by the house that made the thing that you consumed (or, more accurately, consumed you) almost 15 years ago, that left an indelible imprint on your brain and everywhere else.
But, what’s most important is the story—as Jonathan puts it, the making of “this living, breathing, constantly morphing thing” that at some point was preserved into this film we now call Tarnation.
He shows you the place some might say it all began—the spot of wall next to a light switch where he filmed himself at 11 years old on a VHS camera he got from Bill Hinds, facilitated by the Houston Chronicle’s Jeff Millar, Hinds’s writing partner on the comic strip Tank McNamara and Jonathan’s mentor through Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. With a do-rag tied around his hair, he performed the character of a woman affected with a southern accent who had an abusive partner, inspired by a 1982 television adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enough featuring Alfre Woodard. “It was the first time I’d seen someone break the fourth wall and talk to the audience,” Jonathan says. The character was also influenced by an episode of The Bionic Woman. “Lindsay Wagner was melodramatic, but a really great actor, too. And I loved her. She reminded me of my mother for some reason.”
This is the stuff of legends now, but it was this clip that he included in an audition tape to John Cameron Mitchell for what would become Shortbus. “I thought to myself, ‘This is still kind of interesting,’” he explains when you ask him why he included the 11-year-old monologue on the tape. “But the deadline had passed for the audition, and so I wrote him this handwritten letter that said, ‘There’s a reason I need to audition for you.’ I wasn’t really an actor. Not really. But I knew there was a reason I could not articulate that I needed to participate in this audition.”
Jonathan made the callbacks, even though, as he tells it, both he and Mitchell sensed that wasn’t the real reason he was there. Mitchell inquires about the clip in the tape—What was that? And Jonathan says, without much thought, “I’m making a movie.” And Mitchell encourages him to finish it in time to meet the submission deadline for the upcoming Mix Film Festival, a gay and lesbian experimental film festival in New York, because his friend, Stephen Winter, is the festival’s programmer.
A week later, Jonathan meets David Torrey de Frescheville, his friend’s roommate who lives around the corner from his apartment he shares with his husband, who just happens to be an intern for the same film festival, in Astoria, Queens—“Supernatural,” he says about the wild timing.
“I didn’t know anything about submitting to film festivals,” Jonathan says. “I never made a film ever that was going to be in the public. At best it was going to show at a bar. But at the same time, I knew what I was doing, too. I knew I was making a film, but I couldn’t believe I was making a film. I didn’t convince myself of this, but I knew what I was making was giving me extreme heart palpitations.”
This wonder of a film was made on a clamshell iMac (RIP) using iMovie 1. A computer that constantly broke. A film he was constantly in the process of losing. This thing existed on multiple computers, and then the most mind-tripping thing ever is that the closest thing Jonathan had to a backup was his series of Hi8 tapes, on which he saved chunks of the film—because this is Jonathan and he began, eventually, to intuit when the computer would lose the film he’d built up to that point. “I had all of these married sequences saved on all of these Hi8 tapes, which were various incarnations of the film,” he says. “I had maybe as many as a hundred of these tapes. All of these married things, I created transitions to somehow get in and out of so it still flowed as one thing. And that was the original cut of Tarnation.”
Somehow, by a power beyond Jonathan or the world—but one that is easily felt when watching this amorphous, mercurial beast—the film ended up in the hands of Stephen Winter in time to make the deadline. “He remembers it vividly and I remember it vividly,” Jonathan recalls. “There was a kind of surge when I put it in his hands.”
Too much is said to tell it all. But you’ll tell one more moment from the long life of Tarnation (which includes taking a film made on iMovie from Hi8 tapes, transferred onto VHS, and that was somehow rebuilt onto 35 mm in order to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival, which Jonathan says caused a technical glitch he hopes to remedy very soon), another supernatural occurrence this film moved through before it ended up where you, and so many others across the world, watched it. In an earlier version, Jonathan shaves the head of his friend, who is waxing on and on about Grey Gardens. At this point, Jonathan had never seen the film. The day before the Mix Film Festival’s deadline, which would end up giving Tarnation a life Jonathan could not have possibly imagined, he gets into a cab in Astoria holding the original cut, on his way to a club in Williamsburg. He’d exchanged providing Tarnation as the visuals for a club to get free drink tickets.
“The cab driver starts talking to me,” Jonathan remembers. “He says, ‘Do you like movies?’ I say yes. Then he says, ‘Have you ever seen the movie Grey Gardens?’ At this point I had, so I said yes. ‘Well, I’m Jerry the Gardener.’ From fucking Grey Gardens! This is what happens on my way to the club in Brooklyn, God as my witness. That’s beyond serendipitous.”
The relationship you watched Jonathan and Renee navigate throughout Tarnation, and even, in some ways, Walk Away Renee, is similar to the haunting but loving mother-child relationship you briefly witness in his 2010 experimental short featuring Chloë Sevigny (and the house, and his grandfather), All Flowers in Time. You know more than most what it is to mine from the complex familial relationships you thrash around with, and what’s lived after the art’s ending is another part of the living, breathing thing that is making art out of one’s life.
Five hours later, you’re both so tired, excited, and buoyed by what’s happened, that can’t be defined, that you try to come up with a word for the thing itself—the living, breathing thing that is called Tarnation. But first, he shows you some music videos you’ve never seen before, some with footage of Jonathan and Renee, where her face is the face you recognize and then slowly, like shadows you look at of yourself over a watery reflection, it melts into an abstract form, like a Rorschach test, which seems fitting. Then Jonathan types in words Tarnation has been called into a neologism generator, but nothing delivers.
You go home, but home is different to you now (so is Houston, for that matter), and your brain is still living in the world of those five hours in that house, and that couch in Florida, and that time in NYC, and everything else that links up.
Is it a documentary? A music video? An experimental film? A home movie? A mosaic? What is the word for a thing that lives between the real and unreal, the fictitious and the archived, the audiovisual and the cinematic?
And then, it comes to you. An inkling, maybe, a word for a kind of new genre that might fit—at least, from where you’re sitting. Docubism—a cross between the documented and the fragmented, the collaged and the narrative, the multiple people and experiences and images and sequences that make up a self, a point of view. Perhaps there’s no word for Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation. And perhaps, like the living breathing thing that is both Jonathan and his blood-injected film, there doesn’t need to be.
Speaking of cubes, you tell Jonathan you think he’ll relate to the experience of trying to make sense of the chaos that was your childhood, how you look back at old photos to try to figure out what happened.
Jonathan answers as he takes a photo cube adorned with several old black-and-white photos of his mother and passes it to you. “You and me both,” he says. “This was my mother when she was young. She doesn’t look like somebody who is ‘mentally ill.’ I look at these photos and ask myself: What happened? When did it happen? Who was this person before it happened? It just breaks my heart. That’s the most Texas thing you’ll ever hear me say.”
As you look at the cube, turning it around in your hands, thinking about your mother and his mother and the story he tells you of Tarnation, which begins with him filming photographs he affixed to the wall again and again with putty, illuminated with a light bulb, while his mother talks to him in the background and all the photographs that became moving images in this thing you witnessed of his life, you say to him, “She’s so pretty.” You mean the look of her, but also the feel of her in that scene he refused to cut out and all the rest of it, and you mean him, too, and you also mean this life breathing in the thing that is living art.
“Thank you,” he says. “She’s just so beautiful to me, inside and out. For many years, our relationship was and still is pretty symbiotic and intense,” he continues. “My mother is in a really great, safe living scenario where she is surrounded by people who are taking very good care of her. The one thing that is lacking though is her connection to her family . . . me, her only family. At the moment, I have to put the oxygen mask on myself before I can put it on another person. I have to take care of myself, I have to make some newer, painstaking sacrifices. I am not able to be there in the constant, hands-on, day-by-day way that I was able to be there for so many years. I’ll be able to do that once again and be there for her in a much more proactive way as before, but here is the paradox. I need to get my bearings. I have to make new work (the only work I can do now) so that I can take care of the very person who was such an integral part of me being able to make films the way I have. It’s a strange irony and it’s occasionally a mild sadness that I live with. It’s a struggle to do this because I’m having to dial down the magnitude of responsibilities that I have had for her (which is really tough for her) in order to make a new film which will inevitably enable me to help her again as I have in the past. It feels like a Lars von Trier film (Breaking the Waves was the first inspiration for the structure of Tarnation). People only know the 88-minute film. They don’t know the sequel I live every day. It’s pretty tough. But we’re both glad our stories are out there, and that people can personalize with them.”
Shortly before you leave, before you’ve both exhausted yourselves to the point of delirium, you pull out the Polaroid camera you believe you’ve left at home, with just enough charge on it to take a couple of shots of Jonathan sitting at a vintage phone table with just the photo cube of Renee to keep him company. You take a single shot, and then you take another one, a double exposure, which seems the perfect way to document the moment, with the person who undoubtedly inspired you to explore this double-selved life from the beginning.
Polaroids of Jonathan Caouette by Addie Tsai.
You leave Jonathan’s house, and two days later you write Vivian Kalinov a Facebook message to see what thoughts she has to offer. Vivian is an old friend of yours you haven’t seen in over a decade, but more importantly, she is Jonathan’s friend who appears briefly in Tarnation. You will watch Tarnation before you meet Vivian through the person who first introduced you to the film on that couch in Florida, before you and Vivian will sing (and sometimes she will sing while you improv poorly but sincerely on violin) acapella renditions of songs like “Magic Man” and “Ring of Fire” and “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” on a stage at Clark’s/NOTSUOH. She will respond with expected saccharine kindness, punctuated with emojis of rainbows, hearts, smiley faces, sunsets and flowers: “It is amazing to see Tarnation inspire audiences on its 15th anniversary, and I hope it continues to be remembered as the pioneering film that proves if you have a story to tell and share with humanity, you may pave your own path in telling it. He was able to edit all his many years of film footage into a great story; visually and musically Jonathan tells his story in a deeply moving, unique way that inspires us to be more tolerant, loving, and kind. I am honored to be a part of a historic cinematic achievement like Tarnation, and the joy of a quarter century of working with a beautiful, talented actor, director, and friend.”
There’s no fitting way to end this piece, except, perhaps, with Jonathan’s urging to all the could-be filmmakers out there who, for reasons of money or confidence or lack of institution, believe it impossible: “But here’s the thing, the moral of the story is there should never be any excuse. If you want to be a filmmaker, do it. Just do it on your phone. Do it any way you can. If you have a good story to tell, do it, because from screwing the light bulb and videotaping my photographs, to all of it, to losing the movie…this movie shouldn’t exist. It’s a miracle. It’s a fucking miracle.”
Experience Tarnation for yourself at QFest’s special tribute to Jonathan Caouette on Sunday, July 28, 5 p.m. at Rice Cinema. Cinema Poverté will be held on Saturday, July 27, 2 p.m. at Rice Cinema. Tickets are available for purchase here.
