Tarnation

Tarnation

I was under the impression that this was to be an exploration of how mental illness affects families through one man's dissection of his own life through hours of self-filmed video. What no one told me was just what a self-obsessed manipulative cunt this man was.

It's not that this film is just self-indulgent, that's not a criticism here. It's a film about him self and his life…like any biography it's obviously going to be self-indulgent. My problem is with the intention behind it.

Yes, the dude has had a fucked up life, but he revels in it so much that you get left with the strange feeling that he embraces these troubles a little too tightly, and shows them off a little too proudly, like a goth kid does last month's faux suicide attempt wrist slashes. I found it almost impossible to get attached to a person who we have seen staging dramatics for the camera since he was a kid, and that this film got made and released just feels like an extension of that narcissism, and not something that I necessarily felt comfortable helping to validate by watching.

You have to deeply wonder about the intentions of a person who is holding a phone in one hand, crying his heart out at hearing news his mother is sick, while holding a camera in the other hand making sure he catches every single tear he sheds. He stuck me not so much as a prodigious artist trapped under a sea of family dysfunction, but as someone opportunistically exploiting his family's sadness for artistic acclaim. There's a long shot in the film that seems to go forever, where his schizophrenic mother, her brain fractured after years of electro-shock treatment, holds up a pumpkin and starts singing and rambling about it absurdly, bouncing around the place giggling at nonsense like a young child hyped up on sugar and sweets. My first reaction was one of pity, but as the shot just kept on going, the camera shoved in her face, daring her to act-up, I actually felt disgusted at the intrusion of her privacy, the stomping on any self-dignity the poor woman might have had left. And by her son.

On the other hand, as a film-maker you have to tip your hat to the guy. Sure, a lot of the film clunks along looking every inch like the amateur home-job that it is and uses some really lame text fonts and editing manoeuvres fucking (intentionally in a wanky arts school way I'm sure), but that he is able to make a cohesive story out of his life using family photos, answering machine messages, video diaries, and embarrassing early short films, is pretty fucking remarkable. If only he didn't have to whore out his family in the process…