Candid Camera

Jonathan Caouette in his autobiographical documentary, Tarnation. Courtesy Capri Releasing

Before he settled on Tarnation as the title for the open wound documentary of his life, Jonathan Caouette considered some alternatives, including Lucid and The Day I Disappeared. They are both appropriate, because the film – made with a digital camera and edited on his boyfriend’s iMac for $217.32 cents – is about elucidating Caouette, making him appear out of fragments of music, image and text. His 31 years are collapsed to a raw, sometimes shocking hour and a half, during which he changes from wounded child to a bright, nurturing, man who is only – remarkably – a little scarred.

As a boy growing up in Texas, Caouette used a video camera to record his bedroom rock opera reenactments (he looked good in drag at a very young age) and capture the downtrodden grandparents who raised him after a round of foster homes weren’t up to the task. Every frame of Tarnation is informed by the story of Caouette's mother, a one-time child model who was given repeated shock treatment at a young age, a decision Caouette blames for a lifetime of mental instability.

“I never consciously realized what this thing I was working on for 20 years was meant to be,” says Caouette on the phone from Houston, Tex. We first met at the Toronto International Film Festival in September when he was caught in the whirlwind of hot-new-thing publicity. Caouette has bone-straight floppy hair and though he has lost his accent, his aw-shucks-sweetness is somehow southern; he makes you want to take care of him. But in fact, he’s the caregiver, over and over, and he returned to Houston this winter to help his family through yet another crisis: his mother is settling into a new apartment after a stint bunking at her son’s place in New York, and Caouette says the state government is illegally attempting to take over his ailing grandfather’s properties.

Still, even while the cinematic drama of his life goes on, Caouette must continue to promote the real cinema of Tarnation, which he’s been doing for almost a year. Next up: festivals in Florida and Belfast, then a DVD, and finally, in April, the PR blitz will end. In September, he was still flush with the excitement of the newly discovered, but nearly five months later, Caouette says he’s “tired, and a little overwhelmed. I may need therapy next year to work out what all this means.”

Yet he’s also thrilled, because the film is accomplishing what he’d hoped it would. “What I wanted to do was enable people to have more empathy for the mentally ill and to connect with a story about the human condition,” he says. “But all this – this is a trip.” “This” is the film’s trajectory, a Cinderella story for the digital age. In fall 2003, while working as a doorman at the upscale pearl store Mikimoto in New York, Caouette, a self-proclaimed pack rat who keeps everything, began editing 160 hours of footage (and some answering machine messages) that he’d accumulated over his life.

“It was this cathartic, totally organic thing. I digitized everything for fun, and I was pulling out videotapes from years ago that weren’t even logged and importing footage into iMovie. Then I’d pull out a CD and just randomly insert music, whatever I was feeling at the moment. I started editing to the downbeat.” He couldn’t afford a scanner so he would tape old still photographs to the wall, put a lightbulb underneath and capture the image with his video camera to use in the film.

During that time, Caouette, an aspiring actor, auditioned for the yet-to-be-released sex comedy Shortbus , directed by John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch). Mitchell called him back several times, and as part of his choose-me pitch, Caouette brought in a rough version of Tarnation.

“He was sitting next to me,” Mitchell recalls, “laughing through it and I was just stunned. I’m watching him play-acting as an 11-year-old battered wife, and a montage of him and his boyfriend having sex, and I was just bowled over. Here was this freakish kid who through artifice and masks survived adverse conditions. I saw this unconditional love for his mom that was so powerful.”

Director Jonathan Caouette. Courtesy Capri Releasing

Mitchell helped Caouette place the film at the MIX Film Festival in New York that fall. The festival director asked for cuts to the two-and-a-half-hour version, leaving Caouette’s nine-year-old son, Joshua, and some step-siblings on the cutting room floor (“I had a highly experimental sexual relationship with my good friend, Joan, and Josh is the result,” says Caouette, who is in a gay relationship now, and who seems to have an endless supply of casually operatic stories like this). Gus Van Sant came on as co-producer, and with a cash infusion – music rights alone reportedly cost $400,000 US – Tarnation hit the Festival circuit, including Sundance and Cannes, to great acclaim and a slew of awards. At Ebertfest, Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert’s festival, Caouette experienced the “depersonalization disorder” with which he was diagnosed at 13 – the day he disappeared. It was originally triggered by smoking angel dust joints dipped in formaldehyde; since then, he’s struggled with the dislocating sensation that he is outside his life, looking in. “Ebert would ask me a question and I couldn’t answer him because it was Ebert asking me a question so I’d have to say to myself: He’s asking a question, now answer,” says Caouette. “I’ve become very acclimated to [depersonalization]. It’s a mind over matter thing. You just plow through.”

But is it healthy for someone with a disorder that means his life is always mediated to choose a career – filmmaking – that’s all about mediation, a career that puts a camera between Cauoette and the world?

“Oh God, yeah, it’s been extremely therapeutic doing this,” says Caouette. And yet, for now, the camera is off. In the past year, he has recorded nothing. “It makes you deal with life in a very different way, in a way that I never really did before. It’s like a heightened responsibility,” he says. Then Caouette backtracks, possibly realizing that he’s sounding like the unflattering headline the New York Times ran about him: “The Man Who Was Raised by a Movie Camera,” a phrase that reduced him to yet another confessor of the reality TV epoch. “In the 88-minute film Tarnation, it conceivably could look like I had a camera on all the time, but that was never really the case. I’d get inspired in waves, but it wasn’t like I had an obsessive need to keep it on at all times.”

His lifelong passion for movies was encouraged by a Houston film critic who had adolescent Jonathan as his little brother in the Big Brothers Big Sisters Association. Hitting the clubs as a teenager, Caouette was introduced to underground filmmaking, movies like Diva and Liquid Sky. “Movies were a sanctuary,” he says. “I was just enthralled by every aspect of the cinema. I would go to the movie theatre with my grandfather and record the audio on a tape recorder, and then we would go to the drug store and I’d pick up drawing paper, and I’d draw out the movie frame by frame, sort of storyboarding the audio. I’d collect these movies, boxes and boxes of weird squiggly drawings.”

Tarnation opens with Caouette receiving the devastating news that his mother, Renee – a gentle woman with a teenaged giggle who has been diagnosed as a schizophrenic – has overdosed on lithium, prompting him to return to Texas. But the film ends with Caouette moving Renee to New York to live with him and his boyfriend in their Brooklyn apartment. He was planning to bring out Josh and Joan, too. “I wanted to reinvent the family,” he says. But it didn’t quite work out. He felt his mother wasn’t getting the best care in New York, and he moved her back to Houston to live around the corner from his grandfather. Josh is still in San Antonio, Tex., with his mom.

“This time of my life is very humbling. I really have to be the parent that I’ve always been, and there’s something humbling and gratifying about it,” says Caouette. “It’s nice to be home. I’ve put all my Tarnation money into saving my grandfather’s house and if I can acquire enough funds, I’ll get care for [him and my mother].”

For Caouette, any incoming funds won’t be from confession. He is ready to tell someone else’s story, and though Hollywood beckons, he’s scoffing. “I don’t want to remake The Fog,” he says.

Asked about an upcoming project, he starts talking quickly, excitedly: “I want to do at least two more DIYs, Do It Yourself films. Here’s what I want to do next: In the ’70s, from ’74 to ’77, there were three movies made by different directors starring the same woman. I can’t tell you who. She assumes the same aesthetic but not the same character, and I want to take all three of these films and reaugment them and remix them into a new film that’s going to have a completely different narrative. Isn’t that cool?”

It is. But before that, Caouette is off to Dallas to shoot a cameo in a film, starring Thora Birch, called Fat Girls. “It’s about reaching your inner fat girl, for anyone who’s ever been a scapegoat or outside the spectrum,” he says. In a life of cinematic twists and turns, here’s one final surreal moment for the ongoing Jonathan Caouette movie: “And it’s co-directed by Matthew and Joey Lawrence, you know, of [’90s TV show] Blossom fame.” Caouette starts laughing. “My life is so weird."

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.