B.

RUBY RICH

QUEER
CINEMA
THE DIRECTOR'S CUT

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

DURHAM AND LONDON

2013

:l 2013 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on
acid -free paper oo Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Minion Pro by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rich, B. Ruby.
New queer cinema : the director's cut I B. Ruby Rich.
pages em
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN

978-o-82235411-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN

978-o-81235428-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Homosexuality in motion pictures.

1. Gays in motion pictures. I. Title.
PN1995-9-H55R53 2013
791.43'653-dCl}

1012048672

! : ,; .
I .'

JONATHAN CAOUETTE

What in Tarnation?

II

: ~

In 2003 buzz was circulating on the streets of Park City, the

kind of buzz to which people pay attention because it emanates
from audiences, not just a paid publicist (as if there isn't always
a hidden push from that maligned profession). Word was that
a newcomer, Jonathan Caouette, had made a powerful debut film about his
painful life and his mother's near-destruction in the Texas mental health system, produced for no money flat, to spectacular effect!
Tarnation is an adrenaline-fueled mix of documentary and performance
relating a tragic autobiography through home movies, purloined television
footage, and a mix-master fuU of sampled tunes. Even the most ignorant press
and industry folks safely pronounced the film genius, given that the names
of Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell appeared on the screen as endstage executive producers. Caouette, who had quit his day job as a jewelry
shop doorman to finish in time for Sundance, had grabbed the golden ring.
Where, though, could Tarnation go next? That was the follow-up buzz.
After Sundance, what? Its emotional bravery and stylistic audacity made an
intoxicating mix, but as one distributor pal confided, "It would take two million dollars just to clear the music rights!" As it happened, it reportedly cost
less than a quarter of that. By then, Tarnation had nabbed a distributor, gone
to Cannes, won a prize at the Los Angeles Film Festival, and penetrated that
shrine of cinephilia, the New York Film Festival. Not bad for a little digital movie edited on iMovie from scraps Caouette had recorded since early
adolescence.

',

' 't

..

According to the apocr hal .

night oil on his b .r . d}'PD . }et tr~c S;lga. Caout'lk had burned the midO} men
a\'JJ Sanm P . but its built-in software to edit them I
az ~ wnsu~Jtr i.\l.Jc, with nothing
screen, like some sort oflatt d d~ ~nchola nut of his system and onto the
er- ay gtal Go th r l'
VJ without a club or h
C
' t t:. .l Jtlllg to music, a private
s ow, aouette channd. 1 1 .
.
style true to th
b'
ll
lis way rnto a format and
.
e su 1ect matter. The total cost- . . . ,
JUSt as fascinating 10 th

JUS! ma szoo-has proven

e press pack as tl1 c .lu
10 h rograp/1\'.
'
.
W'II
'
M

J Jam orns agent" d . d h

. ' Yes now I havea
a nlltte t e shl'l'nish 1

when he passed th
h
.
r .
lut tr.msformed Caouette
roug San Franc
Th f4
Jsco rt'Cl'ntlv to promote the film 2
e ocus on budget isn't fair. Wha ' .
.
..
.
little to do, ultimate! with .
. . Is l~lportant about 1amation has very
get. What mark
ellher liS tMnvtc gemsis or its lunch -money buds arnatwn as so impo I
. .
. .
.
courage its f,
I
r ant IS tis orrgmalrty and emotional

orma approach to de i
its wrenchingly
. .
P ctmg Oll'ntal states as POV on screen,
unanttcJpated stories th 3 t
r IJ I .
gaze and 't
Ulllll
)cfore the viewer's startled

t smatter-of-fact queerne F'

.
of subject and st
h
ss. In ally, tt s the creative synchronicity
1 at makes Tarn r
Yet
now that the part
a 1011 worthy of the public's attention
Ys over and the jud
tickets begins to kick in.
gment of folks who actually pay for their

n y. .

'(

''1!

Ho~des of voyeuristic documentaries have been made over the years ab;~~..
the powerleSs or victimized, from early cinema verite classics lik~ Rich~d
Leacock and Joyce Chopra's Happy Mother's Day (1963) to Nick Broomfield's

Hit the rewind button Ba k

young boy alread b c up twenty years or more. On screen there's a

y altered and bruised b

I I
enough spunk to b
h'
ut c ear y a survivor. The boy's got
usy mself with d
b
show him the way
f h'
roppmg read crumbs that will one day
out o IS Jewish wh 1't
h
netherworld of fo t h
e-tras Houston existence, out of a
s er omes and d
the magical world f
.
rug overdoses and mental hospitals, into
o moVIes and clubs d
Tarnation is first and f,
an New York City.
oremost an autob
h
ograp y. Texts pop up on screen
earIy on like a gra h'
p c tattoo, detail
h 1'1':
Caouette, his moth R
mg t e 11e and history of one Jonathan
er, enee and h
d
a fable, the on-screen t 'tl
IS gran parents Adolph and Rosemary. Like
.
J es tell of terribl h.
tng them damaged . th
e t mgs that befell our heroes. renderIn
e world The
.

openmg words? "Once upon a time in a

small Texas town i th
n e early 19Sos a good
and Adolph got marri d Th
woman met a good man. Rosemary

e ey had a b
'ful d
th e1r
lives was br'gh
h
eautt
aughter, Renee. Everything in
1 t, appy and p
..
ourselves when a
.
romsmg. Ah, we viewers know to brace
narral!ve starts
l'k
aIready opened With fl
out e that, especially when the film has
I h'
a ash-forward t 0 th
It um overdose and J th
e present, revealing Renee felled by a
.
.
ona an, her son d
an chromcler, ill with worry and guilt.

I was always a diehard packrat. I always just held on to everything. I accumulated 160 hours of stuff. I always wanted to be a filmmaker, since I
was four years old. I always wanted to tell a story about my life, by way of a
narrative, utilizing actors. I never realized I was inadvertently making this
movie for twenty years. That is one reason I wanted to use text, to invoke
personality disorder. It sufficed as a kind of frame because the movie is
going off in so many weird places anyway.

Electr~shocking a Narrative
Caouette began Tarnation at the age of eleven. No, that's not quite right He
began consciously performing for the camera at that age. No longer a mere
participant in home movies, he stands alone in front of the camera speaking
in a first-person address. But he's not exactly himself, as if we know what that
was. Instead, in drag and distraught, the young Jonathan offers up an imperson~tion, presenting "a testimony" about Caroline and her husband who
drinks and does dope and beats her, fidgeting with "her" hair, weeping. Wh~
is this? Whether his mother, or a neighbor, or a fantasy of a movie star, shes
a show-stopper.
,'

'I

82

BULLETINS FROM TH

E FRONT

.,

: ....

...

pair of Ailee~ Wuornos docs. Unlike them, Tarnation is suffused with a com- ';,
passion and tenderness virtually without precedent. Its spotlight of empathic
love bathes its sinners in forgiveness and redemption. That's true even for the
one who's the filmmaker himself. Indeed Caouette is on screen nearly nonstop, emoting, performing, and finally even mugging for the camera, saving
himself in life by preserving himself on film. He records "testimonies" repeatedly and, like a video cheerleader, gets his kin to do the same, delivering star
turns aimed at salvaging their lives and making sense of it all, just this once.
Tell it to the camera!
At his San Francisco screening and interview sessions, Caouette proved to
be a s~asoned pro already, yet with a touching enthusiasm not yet sucked out
of him. Rumpled, short on sleep, he sucked on cigarettes and blinked into the
sun poblside at San Francisco's late beloved Phoenix Hotel. He still couldn't
quite b~lieve how far Tarnation had taken him, but there's no doubt he sees
film as his life's calling:

Testifying to Trouble

'
(;

.
..;:

'

Jonathan Caouette 83

. ':

So are the texts that interpolate and structure the narrative, an intetlige~t
device for conveying the unrepresentable. For example, continuing the fable:
"In 1965-99, Renee was treated in over one hundred psychiatric hospitals.
Records now indicate there was nothing initially wrong with her." She~~
originally sent to a hospital for help by Adolph and Rosemary, after a iill
from a roof left her paralyzed. Today she'd get therapy and antidepress~is;
back then, she was given electroshock therapy twice a week for two ye~~.
And then more.
k.

.,

If much of Tarnation's exposition is delivned in an electroshock bl~st

straight from the screen with graphic intensity, the texture of the lives it~~
plores is nothing less. His mother and grandmother vamp for the cam~~
he delivers confessions alone in the night, and peril lurks between the re~ls.
Caouette's brilliant grasp of the visual clearly goes way hack: at mome~ts.

Tarnation plays like a catalogue of consumer video clfccts of the past twe~~
years, some cheesy, some poignant, some both. The screen splits along wfth

mu-

Jonathan's and Renee's mental anguish and institutionalizations, images

tate and multiply, the wholeness of the screen becomes fractured, and subj~ctive states swamp all objective stability.
L

His mother is central to Tarnation and to Caouette's life, to the point t!2_at
we witness his driving back to Texas to rescue her and bring her home to !ive
with him and boyfriend David in Brooklyn. Renee is what Divine was to John
Waters, what the Factory stars were to Warhol: a larger-than-life

pre~e~ce

who eats .up the camera and rewards all attention with unique performances.
In Renees case, she claims links to Elizabeth Taylor and tells her own tales
of tragedy. And indeed life has been cruel to her the difference is that she's

J~n~than:s mom, and he never stops loving her or, paying attention to hetit's

his ~nt~xication that the audience picks up, a passion made manifest by~e
SUbJeCtiVe eye through Which We are thrust into this story of mother and son.
. , Some pundits have forged links for Tarnation through scandal, claimlng
Its what Andrew 1 ki' c

b. en
. .
arec s apturmg the Friedmans (2003) would have . e
If directed by the sons themselves, not first-timer Jarecki and editor Richard
Hankin. For others of us, an entire
1y different

d:
documentary comes to min

in which his mother or grandparents tell him to turn off the camera; notably,
all occur toward the latter part of the film, when he clearly knew he was on to
something and had begun working on "my movie." (In one scene, Grandpa
Adolph even tries to call the police to stop his grandson's filming him.) If
those moments disturb the loving harmony that otherwise prevails, they're
a necessary reminder of the power relations that lurk behind the surface of
most documentaries and, however disguised, contribute to their shape and
direction. The difference is that, here, Jonathan is son, grandson, director,
cine~at~grapher, and coeditor (helped by Stephen Winter, producer, and the
director of the MIX festival in New York, where a three-hour Tarnation first
premiered).
By n~w Caouette has seen Grey Gardens and, of course, loved it. But he
doesn't consider his own film a documentary: "I prefer to call it a my:' he
confesses. Asked to name film influences, he bypasses any reference to documentaries in favor of an excited litany: "David Lynch, Mulholland Drive,
Derek Jarman, Alejandro Jodorowsky, El Topo, Sidney Lumet." Months
later he expands the list: "There's so many, it's so hard to choose. I was as
inspired by acid-trip animated madness like Dirty Duck as by My Beautiful
Launderette, Love Streams, Do the Right Thing or Rashomon. I'm very equalopportunity when it comes to movies and there's still so much I haven't seen
that I can't wait to get a chance to!" 3
As a. Texas kid, Caouette had joined a Big Brothers program that paired
fath,erless boys with role models; he was matched with Jeff Millar, a film critic
for a Houston paper, who took him to screenings and obviously changed his
life. The clips from childhood and adolescence that cycle through Tarnation
favor horror and splatter genres; they alternate with the hyperreal encounters
With his family and his poignant narrative of his own travails, from childhood trauma to his-and-her drug overdoses and mental health interventions.
Th~oughout he maintains his particular brand of creativity. One of the rare
scenes videotaped outside the home is a record of his high school play, cowrit
ten With an old boyfriend; it's a musical, based on David Lynch's Blue Velvet
with songs by Marianne Faithfull.

th~ .Maysles brothers' Grey Gardens (1975), an indelible portrait attacked by

cntics of its time
1
d d by
.
.
as exp OltatiVe but vociferously and publicly defen e
Its subJects Big Ed'
d L'
tty
'
te an
title Edie, who came across then as just as nu
as Caouette's grand
h
.
.
mot er, grandfather, and mother do today-and Just as
t h nlled to be documented.
.'

Except when th
. s
eyre not. To his credit, Caouette includes several sce~e

84

BULLETINS FROM THE FRONT

f'
'1:

.J

Queering Documentary Style

In cinematic terms, Tarnation is poised at a complex intersection of trends
and lineages. In spirit, it harkens back to the euphoric days of the New Queer
.
CIDema,
suggesting nothing so much as t h at ear11e r wunderkind Sadie Bent

G .
i'~'
;,

Jonathan Caouette

es

ning, and her Pixel vision masterpieces. Like her, Caouctll' is a master of the
late-at-night-in-my-room-with-cheap-technnlog}' ode, a hard of queer adolescence coming into being on videotape, but with Texan sensibility and a
touch of Tennessee Williams decay shifting the balanCl'. I.ong after the mar-

sometimes invent weird scenarios, like: I'd die alone in my apartment and
my footage would be discovered by someone, Blair-Witch style and t~en

they would build something out of it, which then made me mad, whch
is funny. I was like, I'm not waiting till I'm dead for this film to get madefS

ketplace has taken over the NQC label and filmmaker s h<n-c opted for deals

Not a chance, Tonathan Caouette. Tarnation is out, and there's a wonder

over discoveries, Caouette brings it all full circle with his raw and absolutely

fully mad idea in the wings: a new story stitched together from a ~eries of cult

new style perfectly matched to the pains and passions of his life.

films from the 1970s, all starring the same actress, redeployed mto a com6
pletely different and original Caouette narrative. "I like always to be doing ten

His queerness marked him from an early age and informs Tarnation
throughout, even as he has gone in other directions within this one piece. His

things at the same time: admitted Caouette. "It's just how I'm hard-wired."

club-kid immersion in a counterculture mythos inlkcts the w0rk as well, so it

was no surprise to find that his years in f [ouston and New Yo rk were indeed
club-centered. He was a natural at thirteen, smuggling himself into Houston

Notes

clubs as a "petite Goth girl." At one point, he tried to support himself as an

This chapter originally appeared as "Tell It to the Camera; Sight atrd Sound 54

actor and ended up doing stints in Hair and a European tour oi Rocky Horror

(2005). 32-34

Picture Show. Throughout he "always was a film bug , but the cut-throat part,
the finance, was all so daunting." Props to the gay and lesbian film circuit: it

~as the introduction to MIX through a friend that led Caouette to the film
world, recognition, and the important assistance of MIX 's Stephen Winter.

Tarnation isn't being released into the world of the early 1990s when the
NQC was the rage of the moment. instead its documentary credentials ensure

that it flies in the face of two dominant trends of the mom ent: on the one
hand, the move in the United States toward big theatrical -release documen
taries in the wake of box-office successes like Capturing the Friedmans and
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9!11 (2004); on the other, the cultural obsession
with reality television shows, as even the Osbornes lurk in semiparallel in the
background. Caouette may well be pointing the way to a new approach to
both documentary and autobiography precisely by refusing categories and

1.

Thanks to Alexis Fish for insisting that I see Tarnation and arranging for me

to do so.
.
k f m an
2. This quotation and all others, unless indicated otherwise, are ta en ro
. S F csco in 2004, when he was
interview conducted in person with Caouette lfl an ran 1
on a press tour for Tarnation's impending theatrical release.
.
.
b h. producer Stephen WIDter,
3. Quotation emailed to me after the mterv1ew Y 15
"as dictated by" Caouette.
4. He returned to acting again in Short Bus; see below.
5 Also via Winter's email.
.
n Mitchell's Short Bus (2 oo6),
6. Caouette had a cameo as an actor m John Camero
. .,.
d
h t film All Flowers rn rme,

playing the "Blondie-Grabber:' He has since ma e as or

'
h. mother
.
d 11
up documentary on IS
'
starring the sublime Chloe Sevtgny, an a o ow
Walk Away Renee, in 2011.
7. Also via Winter's email.

insisting instead on a hybrid approach that accurately encapsulates the tone of

his life. Purity isn't his game. But he's generous and inclusive, posing a casual
model of what life looks like today in America for a damn talented queer boy
who has just turned thirty-two, for whom the contents of his life and the stuff
of film have merged:
It's w~ird for me to think back on it because although I never, ever, in
my Wildest dreams, thought the stuff I was shooting would ever get into
Cannes or even be shown outside my bedroom, I always did kind of
know that all the craziness that I was going through and all the footage I
was shooting would come m
h andy somehow, somewhere. I wou Jd even
jonathan Caouette 87
86

BULLETINS FROM THE FRONT