Queer Aesthetics

Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation (2003): A montage language for coming into queer selfhood

Lecture notes, clips, and resources

1. Lecture summary: We started with a discussion of “aestheticism,” noticing the way that aestheticist strategies which coded sexuality and spirituality as “artistic form” in the work of Oscar Wilde – and usually as “excessive” artistic form which subverts the relation between confession, transgression, and medical pathologization or legal punishment. We saw the way this oddly direct and indirect insistence informed the mediation of Alla Nazimova's first self-produced film in Hollywood in 1922, in her treatment of Salomé – the transposition of aestheticist strategies from nineteenth century stage to twentieth century screen, where by “aesthetic” flow seems to float above the “spaces of confinement” figured in the play and the film – the court of Herod, an almost prison-like space of confinement where Salomé becomes mobile dances the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” disappearing into a stream of liquid texture. Too, we see Salomé occupying key sites of imagination: Salomé as the rarest of white peacocks, as inheritor of hidden jewels. Thus, while the film lacks overt representation of queer identities or embodiments or political problematics, we notice the way Nazimova built her proposal for a modern cinema on a notorious work by a queer aestheticist writer, Oscar Wilde, on the one hand, and we noticed this proposal for a freer cinema as coming within a tension between confinement, on one hand, and a higher- level movement of fluidity and flow that moves through those “confined spaces,” and travels through this highly coded work of queer art as a whole.

You may have also noticed the way that even a recent film like Moonlight seems to alternate between patterns of “flow” and spaces of “confinement.”

2. Recent, more representationalist films continue to make us question how a self that is disciplined through social institutions as “abnormal” finds their way towards expression, a “language” relating self and society. This effort inevitably entails marshalling social relations, ideas of the self, material resources, self-presence, and even a kind of historical momentum towards some futural desire, enabling an engagement with self-fashioning that does not simply end with their own termination – either in medical terms, as “perverse” or “insane,” or in legal terms, as “punk” who will be institutionalized in order to be further punished. Here, the materials and effects of aesthetic experience are not simply sense and sensation but also the mediation of self and society in terms of embodied memory and embodied desire. Thus, the history-making queer cinemas of the later 20th century, from Kenneth Anger, Jean Genet, through Barbara Hammer and Cheryl Dunye, move from asserting the embodied self as the site of self- and social fashioning, and towards embodied memory and desire as “aesthetic material.”

3. The implication here is that some process of self-assertion takes place that is both individual and collective, and yet, happens in the manner that in some ways corresponds to the composition of, or exhibition of, an artwork: just as an artwork in the modern sense renders the invisible visible, so the process of queer self-fashioning makes the queer self visible and audible, and tactile. We can see Rigoberto González' act of writing blossoming from the “cocooned” spaces of his youth in a similar way.

For Hammer, the notion of self-naming in a paradoxically realist “politics of abstraction” was crucial not only to understanding self and social making, but also to a search for queer history that would lay the groundwork for a future politics. As Laura Sullivan suggests, Cheryl Dunye insisted on the historical register as well, and on the at times necessarily fictive nature of queer history – you may have to invent the history you need in order to move fully into the future. In these films, “montage” is crucial to the presenting of queer self presence as having both the powers of memory and the powers of desire, that is, both past and future, even if neither past nor future is neither given nor secure.

4. Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation draws on the larger problem here – how is it that a self without historical precedent engages in a historical process that renders itself present despite official, institutional, as well as unofficial, “popular” campaigns of terror that render their history vacant in an attempt to cancel out their future?

5. And the film also relies on the montage of aesthetic form and, in fact, of queer self fashioning, that allows Jonathan to tell the story of his own coming into a sense of self. Most remarkably, his story not only tells of his own coming to self-presence, but it unearths the story of his mother's loss of self-presence, and embraces his mother's fractured, fraught, sometimes cruel story of trying to hang on to her own sense of self in the midst of an extreme policing and pathologization of female sexuality. Here, too, we recall Salomé, and the ways in which Wilde presented queer aesthetics as much as a problem of queer practices of self-making as much as a problem of “racial othering” (the reflexive Orientalism of that work) as well as the punishment and policing of female desire.

6. Just as Foucault claimed that the diagnosis of the abnormal was “a new form of racism,” and described it appearing on the basis of the medical policing of female desire as well as ideas about labor, we should see “queer self- fashioning” as, in fact, a kind of work, the affective and material labor of “making up” a queer self that can sustain historical memory and futural desire in acts marking our self-presence.

7. Doubling of practices of looking, as Halberstam suggested; archival practices of re-reading history, as in Foucault or in Stone's essay; self-naming, as in Hammer's “politics of abstraction”; and the calculation, through digital montage, of a history that is necessarily as fictive as it is descriptive: all of these are engaged by Caouette in Tarnation.

8. Jonathan's own process of self-naming relies on what appears to be his claiming of a fictive, speculative, or at least often questionable version of his mother's history, by means of which he not only recovers his own experiments in the act of self-making, but further, by the end of the film, ends up re-assembling not simply a film of his life, but his actual nuclear family, when he is able to gather himself, his mother, his birth father (and presumably his lover), in his New York apartment at the end of the film.

9. The result, wavering between horror-style images of the self as fractured and contingent, and music video style sequences that present this fractured and contingent self as precariously enduring in lived time, serves to relate his own coming of age to his mother's precarious sense of personhood. In fact, Jonathan crafts this memoir out of samples of popular media genres: horror, on the one hand, and music video, on the other. The result is a story in which “saying I” is not a given, but a poetic feat achieved against and in spite of an array of extraordinary forces: the patriarchal “nuclear family”; predatory social relationships; medical and legal diagnostics and policing; gendered and sexed logics of freedom or dependency; and no less important, the audiovisual mediation of the self as fractured and dissociated in the postmodern, high tech mediascape of the mid-to-late 20th and early 21st centuries.

10. Digital filters and effects suggesting the fragmentation and cohering of the self, differentiating the use of film (horror) and television genre (music video) styles suggest, respectively, the horror of the violence experienced by a contingent, fracturing self, and the self image thereof, as well as the precarious reintegration of that self, speaking to its futural movement, through audiovisual practices making the use of digital composition techniques an allegory for queer self fashioning.

2. Clips:

6:00 min.: holding on to the image of his mother – this image works as a cipher for the rest of the film, suggesting both Jonathan Caouette's own narrative of coming of age while experiencing dissociation disorder and various kinds of traumatic experience and abuse, along with the entangled narrative of his mother's becoming schizophrenic: two entangled stories of “dissociation” as “kinship”.

The language of the film is established here. First, the use of music video-stye composition to produce the effect of retroactive history being narrated. Second, the use of “horror-film” like imagery to suggest a self whose sense of personhood is entirely contingent on processes of mediation rather than, say, an internal sense of selfhood or kinship relation. Third, digital effects emphasizing “multiplication” suggest the forces at work: Renee's becoming ill, with the opposite effect of de-

multiplication suggesting some temporary return to the appearance, if not the reality, of “normative” selfhood.

8:00 min: music video borrowed as narrative form … in the absence of some actual coherent narrative of selfhood. The soundtrack here is “Naked as We Came,” by the group Iron and Wine, suggesting the sense of intimate bodies being exposed and made highly vulnerable to powerful and violent forces.

10:45: Renee meets Steve …

12:00: To Glenn Campbell's “I am a Lineman for the County,” Jonathan is adopted by his grandparents (his mother now placed in jail or otherwise institutionalized), and then, in foster homes. Jonathan is subjected to abuse in foster care. Renee's parents continue to order shock treatment for her in Austin State Hospital, so that at 25 years old, little trace of her personality remained.

16:00: “My name … is ...” Jonathan as abused housewife, giving “testimony”

20:00: “Hi camera … coughing … TB – I got TB … tobacco and beer!” Rosemary appears in his “Movie”

22:16: Young Jonathan explains himself... Renee's narrative is entangled with his.

43:45: 1992: “Do something else, you know?” …. The self as doll or as puppet whose strings are being pulled by some other agent. Here, Renee cannily performs as doll, but with herself pulling the strings … a complex performance of objectification, instrumentalization and abuse, and selfhood.

44:00 min.: "nobody on the line"; the self as a lip-synching subject in formation, to the track “Diviner,” by a little known group called Hex (Steve Kilbey, of The Church, and Donnette Thayer, of Game Theory). Here, the “multiplication” and “re- integration” of the self are stabilized and endure in time, without becoming a normative portrait of the author.

3. Resources:

A. Here, the lyrics to Hex' song “Diviner”, used in the key sequence starting at about 44:00 minutes, above, in which Jonathan is pictured lip-synching in a video taken of him as a teenager. His face is digitally post-processed so that it hangs together in a doubled pattern that both makes him identifiable as a person but distorted in a struggle to cohere as a person. It is as if here he is able, through a performance of musical self-imagining borrowed from the logics of music television, to balance his identity amidst the processes of fragmentation and reintegration that have defined his mother's struggle for selfhood.

“High, after the summer Find all the wells are drunk dry Miles and miles of starburn Branded on the hide of the night

Diviner

Low, before the winter Loser, these vessels are full Drop between drop of moonshine Slipping on the surface of our day

Diviner (Water underground) Diviner (Rock ceiling fossil pool) Diviner (Blind transparent fish) Diviner (Seek the liquid dark)

b. Caouette followed up Tarnation with another film that concentrates more on his mother's attempts to maintain her fragile mental health. That film is called Walk Away Renee, and it also uses digital effects in often stunning ways to suggest what Caouette sees as his mother's experience of the world around her, during a road trip from Texas to New York in which they lose her medication and cannot get refills because she is between doctors. It's available online, and is worth seeing, especially if you plan on writing on Tarnation.