The Camera as a Container: Jonathan Caouette s...

The Camera as aContainer JonathanCaouettersquos TarnationADRIENNE HARRIS

Abstract This essay examines Jonathan Caouettersquos Tarnation as a creativeenterprise that opens up new ideas about documentary film and insightsinto working with new media It considers how the making of this filmworked as a prosthetic aspect to the filmmakerrsquos identity and stability Inexamining the interplay of sound image and written text I note how Tarna-tion develops an artistic meditation on a number of important topics therepresentation of trauma the abstract and formal means of expressing thefragility of survival the damage to memory and to identity that family dys-function causes the technical demands of creating narratives of broken andcontested lives The material in the film and its mode of composition fromthe perspective of psychoanalytic studies of mourning gay performance andidentity gender dysphoria and its relation to loss and artistic projects asacts of healing are also considered

Keywords container fragmentation gay identity mental illness mind-objectmourning performance transgender

IntroductionJonathan Caouettersquos 2003 film Tarnation is both a powerful formally inventivepiece of filmmaking and a mesmerizing clinical artifact In this essay I examinesome of the formal and narrative strategies used in this film in order toilluminate three interdependent projects the filmmaker pursues Tarnation isa Bildungsroman the story of the filmmakerrsquos growth through harrowingconditions of family madness childhood neglect and abuse It is also thenarrative of Jonathanrsquos mother Renee LeBlanc who after a brief rise tovisibility and glamour takes a long grisly fall into madness In addition thefilm is an account of family dysfunction over three generations I discuss thefilm in an overarching manner that emphasizes the ways in which it displaysand narrates intergenerational transmissions of trauma transmissions thataffect identity gender sexuality and creativity

The story of the filmrsquos genesis and its public history are well knownCaouette in his late 20s living as an actor in New York City put together adocumentary about his mother his grandparents and his own development

Projections Volume 1 Issue 2 Winter 2007 1-16 copy Berghahn Journalsdoi 103167proj2007010202 ISSN 1934-9688 (Print) ISSN 1934-9696 (Online)

2 P R O J E C T I O N S

growing up in Tarnation Texas Using the iMovie program on his boyfriendrsquosMac he made a film drawing on still photos (current and historic) video self-recordings from age 11 (Figure 1) home videos his early efforts to make filmsas a teenager audio and written texts and contemporary interviews Thefilm was assembled with very little money and after a long and demandingediting process the final version was submitted to and screened at theSundance Film Festival Significant media attention and commercial successensued The economic modesty of the production is part of its mystique andpart of what interests me in regard to the clinical impact and importance ofthis creative effort It is a film literally made from the most prosaic domesticapparatus from the shards of lives the detritus of culture and disturbedfamily reminiscence These disparate forms are wound into a highly creativeproduction that goes well beyond evocative pastiche The story is alwayssimultaneously about catastrophe and against all odds and mysteriouslyalways about survival The unfolding account of the period when Renee andJonathanrsquos lives overlap and explode is as much a meditation about whatcan scaffold fragile lives as it is an account of the contagiousness of madnessand dysfunction

There has been significant popular and critical interest in this film forquite different reasons First the film was made from an enormous cache ofpersonal photographic material collected and filmed by Jonathan and others

Figure 1 Jonathanat 11

T H E C A M E R A A S A C O N T A I N E R 3

in his life From the evidence family life was extremely camera dependentMore than the usual collection of home movies that has guided a numberof interesting experimental films (Michelle Citronrsquos Daughter Right and thework of Sue Friedrich come to mind) this visual archive is not solely a remnantfrom the past illuminating the present The visual material seems integral tothe way Jonathan and this family have constituted themselves For all of

The visual material seems integral tothe way Jonathan and his family haveconstituted themselves For all of themthe camera seems to be a crucial partof the familyrsquos creation of selves andfamily myth

them the camera seems to be a crucial partof the familyrsquos creation of selves and familymyth Jonathan and his family seem almostto live on camera Managing the apparatusof cinemamdashvideocams recording devicesand cameras (still and moving)mdashhas beena deep part of Jonathanrsquos repertoire fromchildhood on He was frequently the cam-erarsquos object as well as its governing intelli-gence Second the film presents a chilling documentation of his motherrsquosmental illness its location within her family and her own psyche Jonathanbraids into this material a memoir of his chaotic history Each of these storiespartakes of hope and despair Third there is the matter of the use of iMovieto construct and edit the film The resulting film combines a powerful pyro-technical reach with formal inventiveness and a searing emotional narrativeBoth in the use of personal footage and of new technologies Caouettersquosfilm opens almost a new genre part intervention part autobiography partconfession part indie film part documentary and an altogether low-budgetwork It is a film whose shape style and ambience are deeply inflectedthrough the presence of the computer as a medium of its construction

Another aspect of Tarnation that is of particular interest to me is the formalstrategies through which Caouette induces in his audience the experience ofmadness both as it may erupt intrapsychically and as it could flood into achild from the outside world The viewer is plunged into a visual and auditoryworld of fragmentation incoherence and contradictory narrative fragmentsand images (Figures 2 and 3) There is drama and melodrama There is a kindof visual hysteria of proliferating images of familiar and unfamiliar figuresGrotesque and everyday shape-shifting takes place without warning or expla-nation The sound track with its evocative music and its layering of voicesstories overheard dialogue phone messages and personal narrative oftenseems hallucinatory The provenance of many images and sounds in this filmremains unclear The film works by enactment and by representation Andenactment in the contemporary psychoanalytic sense is always partially acommunication We experience this film as spectators voyeurs simultane-ously engaged and removed But we sit also in the place of a child burdenedwith overstimulation and with family dysfunction and incomprehensibility


Figure 2 The vieweris plunged into avisual and auditoryworld offragmentationincoherence andcontradictorynarrative fragmentsand images

As spectators we feel some of the demands of survival (psychic and literal)which required of Caouette tremendous feats of invention

Figure 3 Again theviewer enters theworld offragmentation andincoherence

IntergenerationalTransmission ofTraumaIn its interplay ofsound imageand written textTarnation worksout an artisticmeditation on anumber of inter-esting and im-

portant topics the representation of trauma the abstract and formal meansof expressing the fragility of survival the damage to memory and to identitythat family turmoil delivers the technical demands of creating narratives ofbroken and contested lives and the powerful effect of cultural forms to shoreup and constitute identity itself

In this film there is a constant interplay between image and sound be-tween scenes both found and constructed and a set of narratives some in


text some on the sound track and some in voice-over Written or spokentexts contradict and at the same time underwrite the physical and visualevidence that Caouette shapes into this 86-minute riveting production Wesee identities made and broken in relation to powerful forms of prohibitionHere the ironclad oppression comes not from conventions of the state thepolice the law but also from medicine and psychiatry where diagnosis andtreatment become a terrible procrustean bed in which Renee is bound andbroken We see what the interventions of drugs ECT (electroconvulsive ther-apy) and diagnosis do to manage and produce forms of madness and psychiccollapse We see bodies that bear the imprint of both trauma and the resis-tance to trauma and to cultural repression Flamboyance and defeat inter-weave in the self-presentations of Renee and Jonathan We do not alwaysknow as must have been true for the people in this film what is a real voicewhat is imagined or what comes from the television and the movies Cultureand psyche swim in an undifferentiated soup The presence of the cameraoften seems to provoke highly stereotypic and conventional reactions in itssubjects Yet the camera as abiding presence as witness and almost asanother interlocutor also serves as a resistance to cultural normativity bothas it relates to sex and sanity

In this film and in this familyrsquos life we observe a long multigenerationalattempt to tell (and resist telling) a story In this context the camera mightbe said to function as a kind of antipsychiatry device and a force againstdisintegration The camera acts as a humanizing agent but also as an indict-ment sometimes of the family sometimes of the mental health industryThe visual record both installs and contests the institutional diagnoses andpsychiatric conclusions The mismatches of sound and visuals the strangebackground half-heard garbled voices on the television create the experiencein the viewer of a vision of the domestic or personal world as it might appearafter shock therapy Nothing is fully integrated and many strands of speechsound music and visual detail remain in chaotic fragmentation The film-maker brings us into what he imagines and conjures up as his motherrsquosmental state a task he performs for both cinematic and his own psychicends He saddles the viewer with what has been his project growing up makesense of this sad and fatally muddled story find this mother and most ofall find her mind through imaginative exploration and fantasy

The film is a documentary of Renee LeBlancrsquos life but more acutely it isan account of the filmmakerrsquos efforts to find and know her a journey inwhich the sanity of mother and child are always at stake Jonathan Caouettersquosheartbreaking ldquotestimonialrdquo to his mother Renee LeBlancrsquos brief flashingpresence as a young visible beauty and model and her long terrible fall intomadness might be seen as a form of repetition compulsion The filmmakerrsquoslife project and his creative project has been to try to make sense of madness


in ways that take him close to illness through it and into reverie and recon-struction But at many points in the unfolding of the boyrsquos life the questionof survival is unsettled and terrifyingly uncertain The trajectory of Renee LeBlancrsquos life is sadly all too clear-cut Because the filmmaker and his familykept and then used visual material from the time of Reneersquos childhood wesee before our eyes the evidence of a lovely girl destroyed physically emotion-ally and finally mentally (Figure 4)

The film braids several competing narratives to account for Reneersquos terribledecline The historical material and footage of Renee pictured in the 1950sduring her brief modeling career yields up some images that evoke anotherprecocious child object Jon Benet Ramsay leading us to wonder perhapsabout the costs of precocious beauty The voiceover narrative says simplyldquoAt about 11 or 12 Renee became sadrdquo The simplified syntax makes it appearas though a child is repeating the pared down edited story told him aboutwhat happened to his mother By 15 and 16 years of age Renee has had astaggering number of ECT treatments and many hospitalizations Over thenext thirty years uneducated and therefore uninformed parents poisonousmedicine poverty and a consequently inadequate or criminal mental healthapparatus combined with Reneersquos own fragility come together to work adevastating destruction of a human spirit mind and body

There is a tiny shard of sun and normalcy when Renee marries and hasa baby but quite quickly things fall apart inside her and out Miracle andcatastrophe follow one another in short order As the visual formats of movingand kaleidoscoping images show there is chaos splitting and fragmentingof icons sounds visuals words and texts

Figure 4 We seebefore our eyes theevidence of a lovelygirl destroyedphysicallyemotionallyandfinally mentally


Later in the film there is a retelling of this impassively spoken but visuallytortured story To think psychoanalytically here I want to draw on one ofFreudrsquos most inspired conceptual inventions nachtraglichkeit or as the Frenchat times translate this apres coup or afterwardsness This is Freud at his mostnonlinear as he charts the dynamic way a discovery of some piece of ancienthistory changes not only the past but also the present A recovered memoryreconstructs timelines along with psyches Renee gives her own account ofa history of abuse and assault by her parents When we hear Reneersquos storythe sparsely described detail appearing much earlier in the film gains a numberof new readings A fall from a roof a head injury a breakdown now lookpotentially different a suicide attempt the destruction of self and sanity inthe wake of parental damage All these different accounts of what happenedto Renee remain in unresolved tension

The stance of the filmmaker is often enigmatic What can be believedReneersquos self-report has been undermined alongside her sanity No point ofview functions as an anchor beyond the early and painful images of Jona-thanrsquos heartbreaking sorrow at the news of yet another of his motherrsquoscollapses The filmmaker very skillfully amid a film of ordered chaos carriesus along through these two terrible intertwined interdependent lives ldquoI lovemy motherrdquo he says The opening frame of the film is in the present 2002when a phone call from Texas to New York gives news of a further catastrophefor Renee and we see Jonathan break down By the end of the film we knowthat these phone calls this helpless love these grief-stricken tears haverepeated over decades The viewer has another moment of nachtraglichkeitas the first scene of the film is recast as an endlessly repeating struggle torepair and save Renee

BildungsromanOverlapping the story of Reneersquos dissolving life is Caouettersquos own autobiogra-phy also drawn from and assembled with video and photo and interview(Figure 5) The accounting of Jonathan and Reneersquos lives offered as a set offacts or lists is presented in text across the visual screen His clinical ldquofactsrdquoline up alongside hers in an eerie parallel The medical and psychiatric termi-nology the stark descriptions of both motherrsquos and sonrsquos breakdowns callout antiphonally to each other We read the dates of the breakdowns thenumber of hospitalizations the times in foster care and the year whenJonathan smokes LSD laced with pot and is again hospitalized The build up ofpsychological and mental health terminology depersonalization dissociationlithium overdose are all counterpoised to the wildly careening images andsoundtrack It often feels as though the viewer is trying to read and assimilate


a clinical case or a psychiatric report while barraged with maddening imagesmelting faces and visual chaos

Figure 5 Overlapping The flatness of the textthe story of Reneersquos

its unremarkable everyday-dissolving life isCaouettersquos own ness cannot be metabo-autobiography also lized in the context of thedrawn from andassembled with video visual material and the sto-photo and interview ries It is this gap the un-

bridgeable chasm betweenclinical recital of symptomand treatment on the onehand and chronically trau-matic and failing lives onthe other hand that begins

to work its way into this viewer There is an absolute incommensurability ofbleak life facts and mental health documentation poised against the madnessand breakdown of Renee and the deep threats to Jonathanrsquos sanity and safetyWords are spoken or words are placed over a filmed scene or image but noneof the symbolic representation seems to be able to contain what is happeningon the screen If there is containment it comes through the filmmakerrsquospalpable ordeal of creative work and I would propose from the prostheticsof performance and cultural appropriation over several generations The testi-monials of gender enacted scenes of girlswomen in distress telling theirstories whatever their florid and exciting excesses are all ways that Jonathanundertook intuitively as some form of survival These narratives are doingintrapsychic internal structural work

The filmmakerrsquos own story is captured in a set of arresting imagesscenesone in particular self-recorded when he was 11 This scene appears after asequence of confused and confusing narrative taking the story from Jona-thanrsquos babyhood through a period in which the family (all generations) is infree fall and when Reneersquos efforts to bolt for freedom collapse The child isin foster care and only back in his family several years later Renee has aseries of ECT treatments that alter her irrevocably As the camera recordssplitting images sputtering electrical storms visual meltdowns and muddlethe text on the surface of the film says simply that Renee receded fromJonathanrsquos memory Throughout this section the soundtrack plays the mourn-ful ballad ldquoWichita Linemanrdquo a song about loss about holding on in the faceof abandonment a song about electricity

In the monologue that follows this scene Jonathan becomes engaged inan increasingly wild and disturbing performance We can see how muchRenee and her fate had entered Jonathanrsquos conscious and unconscious func-


tioning This is the deepest moment of transgendering in the film a scenein which the boy performs his motherrsquos story as a ldquotestimonialrdquo the term heuses to describe what he is doing He has a scarf he sweeps his hair awayfrom his brow He acts anxious and overwhelmed speaking in the cadenceof his mother or perhaps retelling stories about his mother told by his grand-mother or speech styles absorbed from TV dramas or soap operas We cannotreally fully know the historic anchor of the ideas that swirl through hismonologue but it is a story of a ldquoyoung girlrdquo named Hilary with a viciousabusive husband and a little baby girl she cannot protect (see Figure 7) Theboy narrator gives many dates We can piece together that the ldquogirlrdquo he isenacting is about his motherrsquos age when Jonathan was 2 and that the babygirl stands in for the baby Jonathan As the scene continues the boyrsquos actingshifts into something more deeply felt less performedmdashJonathan seems tobecome lost in the performance He is really crying really recounting a taleof torment and danger And yet just as one wonders where this could gothe performer turns the table and now testifies to the murder of the abusivespouse The ldquotestimonialrdquo concludes in vengeance At this point the screengoes blank and a womanrsquos face appearsmdashghost-likemdashand a voice says sweetlyldquoWake up wake uprdquo

This big set piece opens up some fascinating questions We can see trans-gendering as reality and performance bewigged testimonial as a made upwoman recounting her own devastation Jonathan plays Renee or rather aversion of Renee He is 11 the age she was at the beginning of her fall (fromrooftops and life) It is a riveting performance increasingly ldquoauthenticrdquo inemotional terms Jonathan tells witnesses remembers repeats and worksthrough a traumatic tale The 11-year-old onscreen is witnessing more thanhe can metabolize and yet somehow is creating material that much later canenter a new and transformed account of Jonathan and Reneersquos lives At 11the son has the glimmering sense of Renee as victim He enacts her and laterthis enactment is transformed He becomes her caretaker the transformationforeshadowed in the unexpected moment in the monologue when the youngboy in character becomes the avenger This scene so filled with the tropesand conventions of melodrama TV serials and soap-operas shows just howpalpable culture as constitutive of identity can be Amid the narcissism theperformative zeal the hysteria of Jonathanrsquos performance as ldquoHilary LindaLourdquo we can also notice how much these bits of narrative stereotype andcultural convention the detritus of popular culture can shore up fragilepsyches This is interpellation and psychic containment

It would certainly be easy to fetishize the scenes of Jonathanrsquos childhoodand his adolescence as symptoms to objectify symptoms and acting out andchaotic uncertainty I am struck however by the work of containing andholding that is occurring Cultural formations and bits and pieces of received

1 0 P R O J E C T I O N S

identities are used to suture up a fragile self If this film conveys the relent-lessness of fragmentation it equally presents us with the relentless work ofstory making narrative ldquotestimonialrdquo

This powerful performance made me think of the work of Susan Coates(1992) on gender dysphoria One of her key insights is that transgenderingin the young boys she studied seemed linked to the boyrsquos experience of theendangered state of his mother Identification becomes a mode of holding

Identification becomes a mode ofholding and containing propping upthe dissolving experience of the parentwhose depression or absence in someway is keenly felt but unrepresentableas loss

and containing propping up the dissolvingexperience of the parent whose depressionor absence in some way is keenly felt butunrepresentable as loss When Jonathangets lost performing Reneersquos story we mightthink along the lines Coates proposes thathe is getting lost in order to find his motherand that performing Renee is an incorpora-

tive move in order to preserve her Coates developed these ideas about genderdysphoria into a consideration of intergenerational transmission of traumabecoming intrigued with the complex way family secrets and the psychicmaterial of one generation are unconsciously passed from one family memberto another In this ldquotestimonialrdquo we see one such passing

Gender MelancholyThe idea that gender performance is involved in the management of loss andlonging has been developed most acutely by Judith Butler in the conceptof gender melancholy Butlerrsquos focus is intrapsychic Coatesrsquos focus is moreintersubjective but both theorists point to the expression of gender identity asa process of managing traumatic loss and foreclosures on love and connectionJonathan is not a transgendered adult but drag performance flickers in andout of his childhood and adolescence both in his performances in the filmshe constructs and in his daily self-presentation

Much narrative and visualacoustic preoccupation in the film involvesnostalgia and the romance of loss The evocative mournful music playingbehind the opening credits includes the words ldquoI donrsquot need a razor blade Ineed your gracerdquo Images of Renee young and of Renee dancing recur through-out the film and are echoed later in Reneersquos dance on the beach The sound-track plays ldquoIts All Over Now Baby Bluerdquo during the footage surrounding thedeath of Jonathanrsquos grandmother a figure of great ambiguity throughoutthis film She is shown in bed holding a baby Is it Jonathan Is this a con-structed image or a real piece of memorabilia We never exactly know In somany ways the film demonstrates the tenacity and the fragility of memoryThings are held and lost inexplicably in this film Perhaps that is its centraltheme

T H E C A M E R A A S A C O N T A I N E R 1 1

There are also a series of Caouettersquos own home-made films crafted witha trio of wacky gay friends wonderfully named Spook Stacy and Bam BamThese friendships and the creative work they inspired began when the film-maker was 13 This latter material tells a coming-out story the very particularsaga of being a gay teenager in Texas in the 1980s It is an interesting andunusual story because it is about community as much as about individualityThe saving and containing capacity of gay underground culture is quite clearlyprivileged here I was struck with the degree to which school and subculturefacilitated Jonathanrsquos growth as an artist as he segues from making somewonderfully named private home movies to an entree into the experienceexposure and world of art film The visual material the videos of the boysposturing mugging sleeping and embracing are interwoven with Jonathanrsquosearliest films also shot in video There is the beauty and rambunctiousnessof boy love and boy life the rather typical boy preoccupations with grossnessblood gore and vampires Jonathan enters the gay art club scene disguisedas a Goth girl Coming out as a teenager in Texas cannot have been easy Itis not easy in large metropolitan cities but there are visions of delightmateship (an Australian term used by Henry Stack Sullivan) and exuberanceCaouette gives us a kind of ldquothick descriptionrdquo of gay adolescent culturesubculture The rituals and routines of these young men play out amid theusual montages split screens dissolving and terrifying images that catalogthe deep trouble that continues and deepens in Jonathanrsquos own life

The section covering the teenage Jonathan puts in play a number ofintriguing themes in relation to sexuality loss and the intoxicating dangerof madness The voiceover floats an interconnecting meditation on sexualityon being gay as a sensibility not a sexual life Preoccupations with Gothviolence vampires monsters and horror are interwoven with reminiscencesabout Renee The unbidden sentence ldquoI love my motherrdquo weaves amongtales of wild excess (drugs cutting and weeping) and dramatic scenes scriptedand unscripted of gay romances and melodrama Race gender extraterrestrialother worldly creatures flow across the scene This is a coming-out narrativeperhaps a story of sex and loss and how they interweave certainly And asin many moments in the film intensely difficult scenes in which Jonathanseems on the edge of joining Renee in madness and catastrophic collapseare played against a romantic soft-pop soundtrack I thought of Artaud (1958)as the theorist of extreme pressure against form the celebrator of madnessand deep expression What is so striking in Tarnation is that these apocalypticvisions are linked to the sweetest MTV voices producing ballads and nostalgia

Later in the film Jonathanrsquos boyfriend David dances along a New Yorkshore line Renee is presentmdashshe is on a visit to New York In that scene sheis carried emotionally by these two young men both as mother and as childBy this time she is a beaten down dowdy middle-aged wreck but she also


dances at the waterrsquos edge following Davidrsquos leaping and turning form (Figure6) It is a beautiful shot but not reducible finally to kitsch or obvious sentimen-tality because of the tremendous multiple losses that underwrite this scene

Figure 6 Renee alsodances at thewaterrsquos edgefollowing Davidrsquosleaping and turningform

Bassin (2000) has writ-ten about nostalgia in aninteresting way She de-constructs the termmakes it a displacementoften a working of theimaginary melancholi-cally unmourned mater-nal objects Nostalgia inher view is always aboutimperfectly grieved ma-ternal loss

Film as Clinical ArtifactA psychoanalytic reading of film draws on a number of distinct methodologicalstrategies (Gabbard 1997) What interested me in thinking about this filmwas not solely an analytic consideration of character or narrative but ratherthe use of film in personal family and intrapsychic life as an aspect of psychicregulation of containment and certainly of reparation I want to considerboth the formation of the film and the process of archiving and filming thatthreaded through this familyrsquos life as a kind of clinical artifact What I meanby clinical artifact is not simply that the film details a history of encounterswith the mental health system with madness with family dysfunction orwith gay identity Rather I am interested in the way that the projects offilming as lifelong habits have functioned in Jonathanrsquos stability and sanityThe video and the still photos are one source of memory one stabilizing wayof recording and fixing some experience in a tumultuous set of circumstancesdecades long in which rival stories great ruptures and catastrophes arethe norm

There is a period in the film when Jonathan is growing moving throughterrifying foster homes and into his own self-narrating stages when he findsrelative safety with his grandparents yet it is clear that Renee is disappearingas an explicit representation for her son The film charts this process throughmelting image splitting and duplicating faces strange fogs and hallucino-genic formations tumbling through the screen Shards of still photos briefshots of Renee and of the grandparents dot this kaleidoscopic landscape Oneis amazed at Jonathanrsquos survival but the camera the fact of film the audiencethe camerarsquos gaze seem to me to be decidedly part of this survival


What interests me in regard to the camerarsquos gaze in Tarnation is less theposition of the viewer than the regulating function that the camera deploysJonathan uses and is used by forms of cinema that carry ideology normativityand patriarchy Renee and Jonathan are surely objects of patriarchic regulationIf one thinks of the particular fate of the young beautiful Renee of thefetishized ideas of star and stardom ideas Renee herself gets caught in wemight see that the camera like the ECT machine devours this girl Her beautyis eaten and destroyed by this complex of patriarchal machinery with itsparticular attunement to female beauty Moth-like Renee and Jonathan returnagain and again to the camerarsquos gaze and embrace hoping each time bothto triumph and to be recognized

But there is another possibility that we see the regulatory function of thecamera under certain circumstances as a container as mind object as orga-nizer of story and gesture and self-characterization (Figure 7) We might alsosee Jonathanrsquos use of the camera (in childhood and as the adult filmmaker)as subversive as an attempt to repeat and undo the trauma to Renee bothin being seen by cameras in her youth and by the ensuing traumatic attacksin her life Much of Mulveyrsquos (1989) theoretical critiques centered on herconstruction of the camera as patriarchal and heterosexual as gendered andsexualized and as an apparatus of seeingcontrollingdefining In thinking ofJonathanrsquos use of camera in this film and in his early life as subversive Imean here more than simply the capacity of a filmmaker to subvert whatmay appear to be built into the apparatus of movie making

Movie making is deeply implicated in Jonathanrsquos gender play and perfor-mance And this ldquoplayrdquo I am suggesting partially secures his sanity andpsychic structure Testifying before a camera that he (as a child) controlsworksboth sides of the street There is mirroring and gazing The camerarsquos look itsgaze and stare scaffold a fragile and yet tenacious psychic formation whereself and other are inextricably engaged Can we say that is the camerarsquoscapacity to deliver evenly hovering attention the camerarsquos capacity for recep-tivity (not necessarily gendered) that may have functioned to create a holdingenvironment for Jonathan as child and as adult As he puts together the filmhe is at various times boy mother girl star all multiply configured self-statesldquosoftly assembledrdquo (Harris 2005) and the camera as a structuring figure inthe scene is a kind of conduit of culture and intersubjective process that hasa constituting and shaping force on all the characters When Jonathan holdsa camera and holds himself before a camera as he struggles to grow up andto preserve his family he is operating a living camera a mindful camera onethat holds subjects and objects in mind in ways both constructive and de-structive

The concept of a ldquomind objectrdquo appeared in some important clinical workon ego precocity (Corrigan and Gorden 1995) In that study analysts worked


with a number of very different kinds of children (victims of abuse of neglectchildren reared in poverty) who could nonetheless be usefully characterizedin their capacity and the necessity of holding themselves together withoutappropriate external containment What do you do when no one holds youin mind What to do when you must use your own mind as a self-containerwhen you as a child must make transitional spaces and structures in whichyou can try to grow and thrive Jonathan Caouette would qualify as one suchchild A number of things can be said clinically about this circumstance Oneit is not within the repertoire of every child Certain children gravitate towardextreme forms of precocity often becoming not only their own caretaker butalso that of the parental figure(s) We might think of child actors who oftenbecome the economic and psychic center of families Other children developcompetences that may be social interpersonal or intellectual A second clinicalidea about such children is that this is a costly solution leaving children withmuch inner emptiness overextended fragile and resilient simultaneouslyprone because of so much early responsibility to feeling omnipotent andalongside omnipotence such children are often prey to profound areas offragmentation and vulnerability Finally creativity and a rich internal fantasylife may be one saving component of such ego precocious mindndashobject solu-tions

Of course it is complex to build a self through image and actually mirroringapparatus but my clinical bet is that Jonathanrsquos ability to live through thedysfunction in his motherrsquos history and his own and to retain love andmemory of his mother and an ability to turn it into art and reparative lovefor her are all outcomes that have been potentiated through the presenceof filmmaking tools from early in his childhood

There remains of course a clinical mystery at the heart of Tarnation Whois saved and who is drowned and what is the difference between Reneersquosyouth and adulthood and Jonathanrsquos They are clearly linked and not linkedas mother and son (Figure 7) He holds her in mind as his parent as his fragilechild and as damaged object (internal and external) Difference is both thesurprise and the salvation of Jonathanrsquos film and I am speculating part ofthe survival of Jonathan as filmmaker

I would like these comments which appear to be psychodynamic andpsychoanalytic interpretations of the filmmaker to be understood in a particu-lar way One of the singular aspects of this film is its use of filmed materialsthat emerged in the unfolding lives of two generations of Jonathanrsquos familyTaking pictures being filmed filming and talking on camera are as muchthe topic and engine of this film as its medium and its material I am venturinga speculation about surviving trauma and some path to healing There is somuch evidence in this film of the drive or the capacity to make meaning touse the tools at hand however compromised to tell the stories Bruner (1990)


Figure 7 Renee andJonathan are clearlylinked and notlinked as motherand son

from the perspective of cognitive psychology has studied the salutary effectsof journaling in recovery from trauma

One can wonder about the narcissism of so much mediation so much lifefiltered through images and recordings But Tarnation seems to me to be astory about and an enactment of the terrible struggle to survive deep narcis-sistic and intersubjective crises We can admire and observe the deep creativeintelligence in Jonathanrsquos tactics of survival even while the struggle took thefilmmaker to the edge of his own destruction as he makes homage to thedestruction of his mother Performance in this film is deeply melancholic inButlerrsquos (2004) sense of that term carrying the signifiers of loss and damagebut it is much more solution than symptom

Adrienne Harris is Faculty and Supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program inPsychotherapy and Psychoanalysis She is on the Faculty of the PsychoanalyticInstitute of Northern California as a supervising and training analyst She isan Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender andSexuality She is also on the editorial board of the Journal of the AmericanPsychoanalytic Association Projections The Journal for Movies and Mind andAmerican Imago She and Lewis Aron edited The Legacy of Sandor FerenczyHer book Gender as Soft Assembly was published by The Analytic Press in 2005and she Lewis Aron and Melanie Suchet edited Relational Psychoanalysis vol3 published in 2007 by Taylor and Francis


References

Artaud Antonin 1958 The Theater and Its Double New York Grove PressBassin Donna 2000 ldquoNostalgic Objects of Our Affection Mourning Memory and

Maternal Subjectivityrdquo Psychoanalytic Psychology 10 425ndash435Bruner Jerome 1990 Acts of Meaning Four Lectures on Mind and Culture Cambridge

MAHarvard University PressButler Judith 2004 Undoing Gender London RoutledgeCoates Susan 1992 ldquoThe Etiology of Boyhood Gender Identity Disorder An Integrative

Modelrdquo Pp 245ndash265 in Interface of Psychoanalysis and Psychology eds James WBarron Morris N Eagle amp David L Wolitzky Washington DC American Psychologi-cal Association

Corrigan Edward G and Pearl-Ellen Gordon 1995 The Mind Object Precocity andPathology of Self-Sufficiency Northvale NJ Aronson

Gabbard Glen O (1997) ldquoThe Psychoanalyst at the Moviesrdquo International Journal ofPsycho-Analysis 78 429ndash434

Harris Adrienne 2005 Gender as Soft Assembly Hillsdale NJ The Analytic PressMulvey Laura (1989) Visual and Other Pleasures Bloomington IN Indiana Univer-

sity Press

Filmology

Caouette Jonathan 2003 Tarnation USA


growing up in Tarnation Texas Using the iMovie program on his boyfriendrsquosMac he made a film drawing on still photos (current and historic) video self-recordings from age 11 (Figure 1) home videos his early efforts to make filmsas a teenager audio and written texts and contemporary interviews Thefilm was assembled with very little money and after a long and demandingediting process the final version was submitted to and screened at theSundance Film Festival Significant media attention and commercial successensued The economic modesty of the production is part of its mystique andpart of what interests me in regard to the clinical impact and importance ofthis creative effort It is a film literally made from the most prosaic domesticapparatus from the shards of lives the detritus of culture and disturbedfamily reminiscence These disparate forms are wound into a highly creativeproduction that goes well beyond evocative pastiche The story is alwayssimultaneously about catastrophe and against all odds and mysteriouslyalways about survival The unfolding account of the period when Renee andJonathanrsquos lives overlap and explode is as much a meditation about whatcan scaffold fragile lives as it is an account of the contagiousness of madnessand dysfunction

There has been significant popular and critical interest in this film forquite different reasons First the film was made from an enormous cache ofpersonal photographic material collected and filmed by Jonathan and others

Figure 1 Jonathanat 11








































































References








sity Press

Filmology









































































References








sity Press

Filmology


The Camera as a Container: Jonathan Caouette s...

Documents

Transcript of The Camera as a Container: Jonathan Caouette s...