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Make Lemonade
Written and directed by Jonathan Caouette, with Jonathan Caouette & Renee LaBlanc, with music by Jonathan Caouette.
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Watching Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation is disconcerting. Caouette's audiovisual style is a flashy mix of quick cross-cutting and repetition that overwhelms and disorients. The crush of explosive material here also exceeds the capacities of a single viewing. While the questions Caouette raises are nowhere so complex as those brought up by Michael Jarecki's 2003 Capturing the Friedmans, Tarnation is as emotionally draining and psychically challenging as that earlier film. It's also a sophisticated and commanding examination of the restorative power of popular culture.

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Tarnation made the festival rounds and is now getting major critical attention. Almost all is praiseful, but often as well unintentionally demeaning.

From one point of view, Tarnation could seem casually thrown-off. There's the amazing fact that the film cost $218 to make. Using Apple's iMovie, Caouette pieced together images and audio from super-8 home movies, popular music, answering machine recordings, tapes, photographs, old TV shows, clips from films, and new digital video footage. All this is shaped into a cohesive, powerful portrait of a family that-- over half a century-- both disintegrates and survives.

Caouette tells the byzantine life story of his mother-- Renee LaBlanc-- as it is intertwined with his own. Born in Texas in the early 1950s to Aldous and Rosemary Davis, Renee was a vibrant, beautiful child who, starting at 11, had a career as a model and was featured on major TV commercials. After an accident at 12, she was unable to walk; her parents decided that her condition was psychosomatic. On the advice of doctors, Renee began having shock treatments, and these continued for two years at the rate of two a week. What follows is a nightmare of psychosis, rape, abuse-- and the birth of Jonathan. Then follows his history of foster homes, drug problems, emotional instability, coming out, and eventually fleeing to New York.

With Tarnation's wealth of psychic and medical horror, were the film not based on fact, it would play like second-rate John Waters. While it's easy to be devastated by story of Renee, her parents, and her son, Tarnation has a parallel narrative that charts not only Jonathan Caouette's evolution and growth as an artist, but-- because it is told through a fusillade of images and sounds of late 20th century pop-culture-- the power and resonance of that culture itself.

As sounds and images pile up-- often in vaguely recognizable, but not quickly identifiable, snippets-- we begin to understand that Caouette is not only giving us a grand post-war pop-culture tour, but that it's precisely through this culture that he understands the world and himself. There are clips from TV shows such as "Zoom" and "The Brady Bunch," fragments of pop songs in both the original versions and as sung by Jonathan or his mother, family photos, and super-8 home movies-- and after a while the history of the culture and of the family become one.

Twenty minutes into Tarnation there's a perfect-- indeed, startling-- instance of Caouette's relationship to the media. As he's telling the story of growing up with his mother in and out of psychiatric hospitals, we see a video of an eight- or nine-year-old Caouette performing a play, or really, just a character, he has written. Looking at the camera, he begins a monologue as Hillary Chapman Laura Low, a working class battered wife and mother who we learn, as the piece continues, has killed her husband. Caouette is dead-on perfect-- if we didn't know he was a boy, we'd be hard-pressed to actually tell his age or sex. We watch Caouette as he plays with his hair and hesitates in his speech as he tries to get his-- her-- story out, and so much of Tarnation falls into place. The familiarity of the pose and the voice-- half made-for-TV movie, half Oprah-like-confessional-TV-- is unmistakable, and within the film's framework it is both eerie and revelatory.

Caouette's performance as "Hillary" creeps us out not only because it's so perfect, but because it blurs the lines between acting and life and mass culture. What does it mean that an eight-year-old can be so good at this? At the end of Tarnation Jonathan again faces the camera head-on-- this time as himself-- and talks about how he feels that Renee is under his skin, how their relationship and history is so close that there's no separation between them. The similarities between this scene and the earlier one are unmistakable. His later speech is also a "testimony"-- as is the film itself-- and we are compelled to listen.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com