Tarnation is a very personal documentary exploring the director's history and the pain that his mother went through with her various psychological problems. There are two ways to look at this film: either you can see it as a soul-searching document produced by Caouette, or you can see it as an egotistical project taken up to achieve notoriety and project depth. While I think the former view is less cynical, I think I'd lean toward the latter. The film was sold as being about Jonathan and his disturbed mother, but his mother feels almost like an afterthought. The film is almost always, and almost always gloriously so, about Jonathan Caouette. He had a fairly difficult life, it is true. But whenever I personally feel my own life is terrible, I think of a scene from Voltaire's Candide, where each person on a ship is asked to tell their sob story, and each story is more horrific than the last. Yes, Jonathan, it was bad, but others have had much worse, and much more interesting lives. And when you put your face on screen for eighty minutes of the time, use third-person narration to describe the events in your life, and have all of your greatest works of creation on display, it's hard for the audience not to find it egotistical. Still, the film can be affecting, and the editing (done on a Mac) shows great skill. The film was an obvious influence on director John Cameron Mitchell's film Shortbus, in which Caouette appeared in a bit part.
