Walter Benjamin
Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (translated by Howard Eiland)
Harvard University Press, 2006
192 pages
ISBN 06702222X

Walter Benjamin
On Hashish (translated by Howard Eiland et al.)
Harvard University Press, 2006
180 pages
ISBN 067402211

Until recently, Walter Benjamin was a figure many had heard of, but few had read extensively. In 1968, twenty-eight years after Benjamin took his own life while evading Nazis on the Spanish-French border, his friend Hannah Arendt edited a translated volume of his essays named Illuminations. It contained what is probably his most famous piece, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ along with meditations on several of the subjects that occupied Benjamin: modernity, time, memory and history as refracted through the lens of modernist literary experimentation by Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka and the Surrealists. Benjamin’s intellectual eclecticism was on full display, and he happily married Marx, Freud and Nietzsche with delightful irreverence.

If this volume served to whet the appetite of English-language readers, then Harvard University Press’s mammoth project to translate and edit something approaching a complete works has revealed an oeuvre of formidable depth and richness. Alongside the four volume Selected Writings, and the vast, unfinished Arcades Project, have arrived two relatively slim, but precious new volumes. One is a fragmentary collection of autobiographical reflections called Berlin Childhood Around 1900, long planned by Benjamin but unpublished in his lifetime, and never before translated into English. The other is an extraordinary collection of his writings about his prolonged interest in and experimentation with cannabis, On Hashish.

Deeply attracted to the myth of Ariadne, Benjamin saw reading and writing (and getting stoned) as a process of unravelling, and these cryptic, seductive texts lead us into a labyrinth in which we discover the author’s perceptual consciousness reflected in a strange, distorted glass.

Baudelaire, a writer with whom Benjamin was genuinely obsessed, wrote that ‘genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.’ What Baudelaire meant by this was that in childhood we possess an artistic sensibility based on a freshness of perception, which is usually lost in adulthood. Innocence and curiosity are requisite to great art, and there is an element of this to be discerned in Berlin Childhood. With painstaking care, Benjamin renders the objects and places which surrounded him as a child as repositories of hidden meanings.

My favourite of these moments is ‘The Sock,’ in which a mundane item is transformed into a lesson in modernist aesthetics. Benjamin’s socks were stored in the traditional fashion—rolled up together and then turned inside out—and as a child enjoyed thrusting his hand into the interior: ‘It was the “little present” rolled up inside that I always held in my hand and that drew me into the depths.’ On drawing his hand out again, however, ‘something rather disconcerting would happen’:

I had brought out “the present,” but “the pocket” in which it had lain was no longer there . . . It taught me that form and content, veil and what is veiled, are the same. It led me to draw truth from works of literature as warily as the child’s hand retrieved the sock from “the pocket.”

Much of what is told in Berlin Childhood is allegorical. Not allegorical in that dull sense of tiredly arranged representative figures, but in Benjamin’s own sense, which tells us that the future is contained within the past. So although Baudelaire’s childlike perceptive freshness and curiosity are preserved in Benjamin’s autobiography, the innocence is not. Indeed, one passage in Berlin childhood refers directly to what is called the ‘counterpart’ of déjà-vu:

the shock with which a word makes us pull up short, like a muff which someone has forgotten in our room. Just as the latter points us to a stranger who was on the premises, so are the words or pauses pointing us to the invisible stranger—the future—which forgot them at our place.

This passage occurs in a fragment called ‘News of a Death.’ Benjamin’s father comes into his bedroom in order to explain (haltingly) that a cousin has died. At the time, the child displays an unnerving indifference, for he hardly knows the man in question. He does however, take great care in noticing his surroundings, ‘just as a person pays closer attention to a place where he has a presentiment that, one day, he will have to retrieve from it something forgotten.’ Only years later, as the final sentence discloses to us, does Benjamin discover the truth behind has father’s obfuscations: the cousin died of syphilis.

Benjamin’s casual ‘just as a person,’ a mannerism he learnt from Proust, makes very little sense really, for logic tells us that, if we had this presentiment of forgetting, we would presumably remember rather than forget. Only, for Benjamin, this is a necessary forgetting; a forgetting in order to remember. To use experience to create a fresh connection between the past and the future across time is to effect a short-circuiting of history, which redeems that past from effacement.

It is not clear to us why this syphilitic death should be important to Benjamin’s future. There are a number of hints and traces of sexual awakening patterning Berlin Childhood, but little indication of where they might lead us. This ambiguity, or more precisely unfinishedness, is highly characteristic of Benjamin’s writings, relatively few of which reached publication (remember, it is the unravelling of the prose that gives pleasure). In fact, the fragment named ‘Sexual Awakening,’ the final part of Benjamin’s projected volume, tells us ostensibly very little about its promised subject. Rather, we are given an anecdote about a child getting lost in the city on a day he was supposed to be attending synagogue. Typically, this fragment (and the entire autobiography) are cut short at the point where the awakening takes place.

Autobiography is conventionally expected to be an exploration of origins, yet Benjamin seems most interested in the point of dismemberment, where the indeterminable space between past and future is to be negotiated. According to his own perspective, all of this is as it should be. In his study, Origins of German Trauerspiel (Ursprung der deutschen Trauerspiels, 1916), he writes that the concept of origin ‘wishes to be known, on the one hand, as restoration and reinstatement and, on the other hand, in this very reinstatement, as uncompleted and unresolved.’ This is the temporal space that Benjamin felt needed to be reoccupied by experience, in resistance to the brutal, impersonal, historical force which manifested itself in western Europe (and more than anywhere else, in Benjamin’s Berlin), during the late twenties and thirties. Unfinished is, after all, provisional, negotiable and most importantly open to the fluxing potential of the future. It is anti-totalitarian, in fact.

The historical location of Berlin Childhood’s composition is absolutely crucial to its design. ‘In 1932, when I was abroad,’ it begins, ‘it became clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting farewell to the city of my birth.’ This was because, as a Jew, Benjamin’s existence in Berlin had been under threat from a steadily growing tide of public anti-Semitism, and he spent most of 1932 in Spain and Italy. The words of this introduction themselves were written in 1938, just after Krystalnacht, when the residents of Berlin ransacked Jewish homes and businesses. Once again, presentiment plays the key role in the autobiographical project. Benjamin conceived of Berlin Childhood as a kind of inoculation against the forthcoming destruction of his past by history:

My assumption was that the feeling of longing [for the past] would no more gain mastery over my spirit than a vaccine does over a healthy body. I sought to limit its effect through insight into the irretrievability—not the contingent biographical but the necessary social irretrievability—of the past.

Berlin Childhood could only have been written by an exile, knowingly based as it is in this experience of loss. The directionless wanderings of the young Benjamin through his apartment and the city he lived in not only recall Baudelaire’s, and later Proust’s, flânerie, they also anticipate their author’s later exile in Paris, rehearsing a defensive strategy based on fluidity of purpose, and of identity.

Reading this autobiography it becomes clear that Benjamin consciously placed himself in this tradition of flâneurs and dandies, with Baudelaire once more providing a conspicuous model. In fact, Baudelaire published a book about eating hash called Artificial Paradise (Paradis Artificiels, 1860), which Benjamin read and found unsatisfying. He told his friend Ernst Shoen in 1919 that it was ‘reticent’ and ‘unorientated.’ ‘It will be necessary to repeat this attempt independently of this book,’ he wrote. Baudelaire’s study is thoroughly entertaining, partly due to this reticence. He claims early on, rather unconvincingly, that the detailed accounts he gives of cannabis-induced intoxication are based on interviews with addicts. Benjamin, on the other hand, is perfectly candid about his consumption of vast quantities of high-grade hash.

A large section of the volume On Hashish is taken up with notes made, with pseudo-scientific seriousness, on the psychoactive effects of these sessions. Needless to say, Benjamin was often incapable of moving, let alone writing, and so appointed a dutiful friend to write down his observations, while the patient did his best to articulate his thoughts. Also included are several brilliant, anecdotal essays on Benjamin’s stoned wanderings in Marseilles, and excerpts from letters and other essays that deal with intoxication.

Getting stoned is the occupation par excellence of the flâneur. For Baudelaire, this figure is bound to temporality, a perspective that provides one of several connections between Berlin Childhood and On Hashish. The flâneur is, for example, ‘the painter of the passing moment and of all the suggestions of eternity it contains.’

The experience of loss, in other words, or even the loss of experience, is reified. In Berlin Childhood the past is remembered just as it is forgotten, its ‘irretrievability’ caught and dramatised in articulation. In his hash trances, Benjamin describes something very similar, a state of perception he called ‘the colportage phenomenon of space,’ in which ‘we simultaneously perceive all the events which might conceivably have taken place here.’ Here, history is made material, distilled into a single spatial entity to be apprehended by the subject. What separates this from the autobiographical strategy is the lack of experience, the absence of the subject from history, which becomes characterised as an empty and homogenous medium:

In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal. Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness—a mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic calm, satanic knowing.

For neither Benjamin nor Baudelaire believed the satanic was necessarily something to be shied away from. Benjamin called this state ‘profane illumination’ and saw in it the potential for a transfiguration of modernity. This was also what attracted him to the surrealist project: the attempt to ‘win the energies of intoxication for the revolution.’ In addition to seeing the potential offered by this revised historical consciousness, he was also seduced by the transformative power manifested in language when under a hash trance. As Berlin Childhood shows, Benjamin was always attracted to the potential for correspondence (or, using his French terminology, ‘mêmité,’ same-ity) between objects as offered by their names. We read, for example, about how the young Benjamin discovered the value of tinkering with words, sounds and meanings in his play, transforming the mundane ‘Kupfersticken’ [copperplate engravings] into his own neologism, ‘Kopf-verstick’ [a head-stickout]: ‘if, in this way, I distorted both myself and the word, I did only what I had to do in order to gain a foothold in life.’

Predictably then, in On Hashish, this metonymic instability reaches new levels, as Benjamin immerses himself deeply in particular words and phrases, repeating and admiring them with childlike wonder, only to discover they are not what he thought and that they lead to the most unexpected of meanings. Benjamin’s fascination with Surrealism makes much more sense having explored On Hashish, and this seems particularly appropriate given that it was Georges Batailles, a one-time friend and later vociferous critic of the Surrealists, to whom Benjamin entrusted his writings when fleeing Paris in his last weeks.

Reading On Hashish, it is often difficult to take much of the material seriously. Some of the observations Benjamin makes, together with the (mock?) seriousness with which they are recorded, are simply hilarious. From the casually recorded ‘oven turns into cat’ (observation no. 13), to Benjamin’s digression on the merits of gigantic cakes, and his resolution, one stoned night, to order every single item on a café menu before going to another restaurant ‘to dine a second time,’ there are many humorous moments. However, despite the apparent gap between Benjamin’s enthusiastic recruitment of hash for the revolution and his skewed observations, he insisted that his experiments ‘may turn out to be a very worthwhile supplement to my philosophical observations, with which they are intimately related.’ He is absolutely right about this, and On Hashish, as well as Berlin Childhood, slot unexpectedly well into the expanding Benjamin oeuvre, providing fascinating new contexts for addressing and engaging with this expanding body of translated work.

Will Norman is a DPhil student in literature at New College, Oxford. His work focuses on Vladimir Nabokov and modernist figurations of time and history.

Caché (Hidden)
Directed by Michael Haneke
France, 2005

Munich
Directed by Steven Spielberg
USA, 2005

Austrian director Michael Haneke has been making feature films for almost twenty years and yet only recently has he been recognised as one of the most challenging and compelling filmmakers in Europe. Having produced most of his early work for Austrian television during the eighties and nineties, Haneke came to broader public attention after directing La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher) in 2001, which won him three awards at Cannes. His most recent offering, Hidden, is set to bring him deserved critical acclaim. This unsettling film clothed as a psychological thriller poses some urgent questions which extend beyond the confines of its genre and encompass our very modes of seeing and interpreting.

Georges (Daniel Auteil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are a bourgeois intellectual couple living in Paris with their son. The film opens with an uncomfortably long, silent shot of their house, filmed from the street. This is only the first of numerous moments during which the audience is left uncertain of exactly what, or who, lies behind this camera-eye—and whose perspective it shares. In this case it transpires that we are watching, together with Georges and Anne, a video posted through their own door, precipitating fears of a mysterious voyeur. The plot is thus driven by their own descent into paranoia as more videos and sinister drawings follow. Similarities with the opening of David Lynch’s Lost Highway quickly dissipate as, rather than becoming entangled in a confusion of contiguous postmodern worlds, Georges gradually becomes convinced of the origins of the tapes in his own troubled history. The voyeur, he believes, is an Algerian farmhand who worked for his parents in his boyhood, and whose parents were killed in racist riots during the 1960s. Georges’s own lies and deception led to the boy being taken away from his home and into care. The campaign of voyeuristic tapes and drawings are thus, Georges reasons, an act of blackmail and revenge.

It is at this point that the film’s real subject begins to emerge. Haneke’s strategy comprises of a coldly distant, non-intrusive direction which allows the audience to form their own alliances and judgements in the accusations which accompany the disappearance of the couple’s son, and Georges’s subsequent confrontation of their supposed tormentor. The question which plagues viewers as they shuffle confusedly from the cinema following the film’s devastating conclusion is the extent to which their own prejudices have been revealed to them by this mirror-like quality in Haneke’s direction. The passivity and distance imposed by the camera and narrative structure has to be filled by the viewer’s own ideology, a troubling prospect for the white middle-class intellectuals who formed the majority of the Oxford audience watching this with me.

Hidden presents a bigger story than its plot suggests. Implicit in its tragic narrative is France’s brutal colonial history—a ghost that refuses to be exorcised as the rioting in its deprived and forgotten banlieues only last year demonstrated. More than this, though, the filmgoers of any nation which has colonised and oppressed, which has exploited and looked down upon its immigrants, will feel the quiet power of this movie. I say quiet, because the real stories in Hidden are the ones happening off camera, in the minds of its viewers. These are the stories of the immigrants who live, die and are judged without their voices being heard. In one harrowing, single-angle scene, the Algerian boy is dragged from Georges’ parents’ farmhouse into the back of a car. In attempting to escape he runs away from the authorities, off-camera. The steadiness of this shot, its refusal to slavishly follow its subject, its oblique depiction of the boy’s guardians turning away and retreat into the security of their house, is the perfect embodiment of Haneke’s professed credo:

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.

*

Steven Spielberg’s latest blockbuster, Munich, provides an ideal contrast to Haneke’s aesthetics and the ideal object of his polemic. His film, ‘based on real events,’ stars Eric Bana (fresh from his virtuoso performances in The Hulk (2003) and Troy (2004)) as Avner, the idealistic Mossad agent chosen to lead a group of assassins in killing men suspected of involvement in the terrorist murders at the Munich Olympics of 1972. The title of the film proves to be slightly misleading, as, despite the dramatic action sequence which opens the film, and the subsequent flashbacks (apparently haunting the mind of our hero, although he wasn’t actually there), the events in Munich function simply as a way to kick-start the plot. Predictably, the Jewish agents engaged in their cold-blooded task form a neatly diverse selection of moral stances to the job they have been assigned, ranging from ‘let’s shoot the bastards and enjoy it’ to the dawning revelation that ‘maybe we’re no better than they were.’ Tormented by moral scruples and the suspicion that killing people doesn’t really help much, Avner eventually breaks with his Mossad boss (a mercifully good performance by Geoffrey Rush) and returns to domestic bliss with gorgeous but curiously mute wife and newborn baby.

Fortunately for a film that clocks in at two-and-a-half hours, Spielberg is a master of the action/suspense genre. Deploying skills honed in films like Saving Private Ryan rather than Schindler’s List, he endows Munich with some genuinely high-quality scenes, pulling out all the stops in drawing the audience into high octane gun battles and heart-stopping suspense. Occasional excesses, such as an overdone orchestral soundtrack, mar the moments in which, it seems, we are expected to feel sorrow or pity. There is even the odd echo of Spielberg’s finest moments from the ‘Indiana Jones trilogy,’ in which brief flashes of ironic machismo humour penetrate the moral searchings of the protagonists. The only problem is the apparent demand of the film to be taken seriously.

As is usually the case with historical films, Munich’s ideological encounter takes place in the present rather than in the past it depicts. It doesn’t take Spielberg’s self-conscious placement of the twin towers in the final frame of the film to tell us that what is really at stake is the West’s and specifically America’s response to September 11. The necessity of maintaining some kind of moral high-ground in the response to these attacks, and the acknowledgement that a violent response will not prevent further violence but only increase its likelihood, has occurred to most (several governments notwithstanding, admittedly), without having it patiently dramatised for us at the cinema. It is precisely the events in Munich, in the quiet bits between the bomb blasts and flying bullets, which reveal its weaknesses. In the one clumsy attempt at giving an authentic voice to a Palestianian militant, Avner (implausibly posing as a Soviet agent) conveniently discusses the Israel-Palestine conflict with a PLO member. Unlike Haneke’s Hidden, Munich relies almost exclusively on words to signal interpretative potential. This set-piece jars as the inevitable deadlock of two earnestly given view-points is dutifully expressed. In Hidden, words are always lies, attempts, as Harold Pinter has memorably put it, at ‘continual evasion.’ The title of Heneke’s film comes to refer to that which the bourgeois intelligentsia has buried or obscured in language. There is something, Haneke seems to be saying, which film can do that other media cannot. The bare image, carefully chosen, and recorded unblinkingly, can act as something like a conscience. The space and freedom to discover this yourself is clearly not an option offered by Spielberg.

Will Norman is a DPhil student in English Literature at New College.

Der Untergang (Downfall)
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004

Oliver Hirschbiegel’s $10 million epic Downfall has been billed as one of the greatest ever war films, but the poster’s misleading tag line will not prepare you for the idiosyncratic presentation of this ground-breaking film. Those expecting nail-biting or stomach-turning battle sequences, heroic feats of strength and determination or dramatic acts of violence will, for the most part, be disappointed. Downfall is set predominantly in Hitler’s bunker, charting in agonising detail the last days of the Nazi regime as Russian forces inexorably advance on Berlin in May 1945. Stylistically, it resembles a stage-play more than an epic, thriving on intimate and claustrophobic set-pieces: Hitler dining heartily with his secretary on the eve of his death; Eva Braun writing a final, chatty letter to a cousin; Joseph Goebbels and his wife calmly orchestrating their family’s group suicide; Hitler’s most loyal followers drunkenly awaiting their fate with cigarettes and schnapps. Downfall is not a film about the Second World War so much as it is a fi lm about endings — and in particular, about dying.

The fact the Downfall takes as its subject the collapse of a regime that continues to haunt European consciousness with an unease that discourages representation has made many viewers and commentators nervous. In a film which aspires to an unsettling naturalism, Hitler and his henchmen are occasionally in danger of appearing human, capable of wounded pride, tenderness, exuberance and even (most dangerously) love. In Britain, at least, there has been a tendency to stow away the complex and unstable idea of Nazism safely in a box labelled ‘Evil’, where it can be occasionally recovered and brandished by guileless journalists and politicians in response to suitably outrageous acts of bigotry, racism and authoritarianism. Hitler has been transformed into a symbolic and absolute embodiment of such wickedness. From Prince Harry’s fancy dress gaffe to Ken Livingston’s ill-judged comparison of a journalist to a concentration-camp guard, the invocation of Nazism has demonstrated its enduring power to outrage and unsettle the public. This film with its unshakeable focus on some of the most hated figures of history, seems to be indicating a difficult truth—that the Nazi hierarchy was made up of extraordinary, pathetic and faintly ridiculous human beings. This last point is particularly striking, for despite (or perhaps because of ) the film’s tragic intensity, the audience contrived to find occasional humour in Hitler’s impotent outbursts and Goebbels’ unhinged theorisings. Such moments depended on a brief separation of what was occurring on the screen from its historical reality, as, for a moment, the world’s most notorious dictator became little more than a senile, ranting geriatric with an increasingly weak grip on reality.

One of Downfall’s most striking features is its insistence on isolating this gap between the unshakeable will and authority of Hitler’s National Socialist ideology and the material reality of its consequences. The bunker in which most of the film is set serves as a metaphor for authority’s innate ignorance of the events for which it is responsible. While Eva Braun sips white wine and Hitler wistfully meditates on non-existent German divisions on their way to save Berlin, the film occasionally cuts to the carnage occurring in the streets only yards from the bunker, where child soldiers are sent out against the Russian tanks with neither adequate arms nor training. Significantly, this truth is inherent to all hierarchical power structures, not just to Nazism. The difference here is that, as every member of the audience knows, our on-screen Hitler and his officers were facing an inevitable end, one dictated by historical truth. Germany lost the war. Hitler was defeated. Weren’t the accounts settled?

This brings us to an important question. Most of the characters are despicable, the plot predictable, Hitler’s ranting grating…and yet the film is utterly mesmerising. Why? Perhaps for its historical value; the screenplay is based on Joachim Fest’s notorious first hand account The Last Days of Hitler. Downfall demands, through its style and sources, to be taken seriously as a historical document. It is not entertaining, but educative, promoting a more thorough ‘understanding’ of history. Perhaps we should ask exactly what kind of understanding this is, for there is little insight here into historical process, no revelations of vital factors affecting the outcome of the war. Perhaps, instead, the film satisfies an innate desire for truth, the thrill of the real—‘is this what really happened to one of history’s most enigmatic figures?’ If this is the case, then the film is reduced to documentary, something akin to the strangely vivid colour footage of Nazi parades and rallies which survived the regime and find their way regularly onto televised history programmes. These films always seem rather disconcerting, occupying an ambiguous space between a securely distant past and an immediate present. In some senses, this seems to be what Downfall aspires to, especially in its pre-credit sequence which details the historical fate of all the characters, as if the film flowed seamlessly from its end into the tides of history. The odd, jarring interview with Heidle Junge, Hitler’s personal secretary, now in her eighties, furthered this effect. Young and attractive in the film, the sight of this elderly lady grappling with her conscience as she attempts to make sense of her past in the light of the present unsettles the viewer as the film ends.

Having witnessed the unambiguous demise of Nazi Germany, an ending enacted not just politically but physically, in the bodily destruction of Hitler, Braun, Goebbels and the rest, are we now to be told that we cannot forget, that the meaning of this film spills out of the cinema into our present-day existence? This, ultimately, is Downfall’s alluring paradox. Meaning depends largely on the formless mass of cultural baggage an audience brings to the cinema. Despite, as its name suggests, its almost fetishist adherence to historical ending and demise, its very existence in the present and its aggressive insistence on authenticity, means that this particular episode of the past remains with us, un-exorcised. As so often with historical films, it tells us more about the place we are in now than the place we were in then. Not many years ago, a film of this kind, especially one made in Germany, would have been unthinkable. Its making demonstrates that the phenomenon of Hitler has begun to be assimilated into a cultural narrative. At the same time, however, its apocalyptic structure stubbornly resists being dragged into flow of time. Cinema by its very nature lays claim to an ability to transcend history at the same as it betrays its historical moment. Downfall revives, just as it simultaneously lays to rest, the memory of Nazism.

Will Norman is a DPhil student in English Literature at New College, Oxford. He writes on Nabokov.

Tarnation
Directed and written by Jonathan Caouette, 2003

Tarnation is a film that asks difficult questions of its own genre. Jonathan Caouette directs a piece that is ostensibly a documentary chronicling his own life and relationship with his family. This, we comfortably assume in the opening minutes, is the essential shape of the picture. Jonathan is an unusual child, an exhibitionist who from the age of eleven habitually videoed himself giving ‘testimonies’ to the camera about his emotions and feelings. In one early instance, aged eleven, Jonathan dresses up as a coquettish and distraught young woman self-consciously and melodramatically confessing how she has been beaten by her hard-drinking husband. The ‘real’ a, captions tell us, was abused regularly during his time as a foster child. The implication, then, is that when we watch Jonathan through the lens of his odd collection of home videos and snapshots, we are watching not the traumatic events themselves but rather the attempt to articulate and deal with that trauma through role-playing and dramatisation. A documentary, in other words, about how to deal with reality through the creation of fictional selves.

Jonathan Caouette, it seems, has always had a taste for performance. This is apparent not just through his confessional ‘testimonials’ but also through his self-presentation throughout the film. He disguises himself as a woman to get into gay nightclubs at the age of thirteen and also has a penchant for directing his own gory home-made horror films. He and a friend write a musical adaptation of David Lynch’s surreal, disturbing Blue Velvet for his high-school friends and Jonathan films himself miming the words to Marianne Faithful songs. His life as we discover it on the screen is a series of melodramatic, sexually charged, and violent self-dramatisations. 1 e difficulties for the audience lie in the oblique relationship between Jonathan’s own performance and the distressing story of abuse, mental illness, and dysfunction which is disclosed to us through captions and video excerpts of his troubled family. The difference between the two modes, one real and the other performed, is genuine. The style of the direction, however, serves to undermine our ability to distinguish between them. After all, Caouette makes no attempt to conceal the utterly subjective telling of the story, which continually teeters on the brink of complete self-indulgence. Among the home-movie clips he has spliced cuts from eighties pop-videos and even feature films. One particularly telling section has scenes from Roman Polanski’s horror film, Rosemary’s Baby cut with footage of Jonathan’s strange grandmother, named Rosemary. The grandmother, it must be said, has little chance to speak for herself, and even less chance of redeeming herself after her association with Polanski’s disturbing imagination.

Tarnation can be usefully contrasted with one of the most unusual American films of last year, Capturing the Friedmans. That too was built around the obsessive self-documentation of an American teenage boy as he grew into adulthood in a respectable suburb, and also dwelt on the dark secrets of family abuse and dysfunction lurking behind a veneer of normality. Capturing the Friedmans, however, was always about a search for an objective truth. Even if that truth proved ultimately unattainable, it nevertheless provided a focus and drive compelling the narrative. In this sense the film provided a paradigm for the documentary process and the assumptions which lie behind it – that a ‘real’ story exists beyond and independent from the film-making process, and that the aim of the film is to bring us as close as possible to that truth. Tarnation’s innovation, conscious or not, is to obscure for us that ‘real’ story by telling another, that of its construction and evasion through its protagonist’s performance. By the end of the film, the truth about Jonathan’s past and his mother’s mental illness becomes not only impossible to determine but also irrelevant, for the audience is caught up with other, more nebulous concerns – who is the ‘real’ Jonathan, when is he acting and when is he ‘straight’? The most disturbing implication is the suspicion that there is ultimately little difference between the two, and that Jonathan has finally succeeded in turning his life into the melodrama he always wanted. At one point we discover that as a teenager he harboured fantasies of making a movie of his life-story, starring Joni Mitchell as his mother. Tarnation, it seems, is the fulfilment of this dream, only with the actors playing themselves.

The most effective moments of Tarnation are those that are most heavily stylised. The caption telling us of Jonathan’s mother’s electroshock therapy may provoke real pity, but it is the sudden flicker of Francis Bacon’s harrowing portraits of disintegrating selves that truly unsettle. Likewise Jonathan’s ‘testimonials’ are strange enough in themselves but especially so when accompanied by a dark eighties goth soundtrack. In addition to personal documentation, this film is also a testament to the power which popular culture has held over a generation of American (and, for this viewer, British) imaginations. Caouette presents a life refracted through the lens of popular music and film (although perhaps ‘popular’ is an unfair word, as Jonathan’s punk, goth and camp glam phases were all conceived as alternative or counterculture in their time). The consequence, however, is a sense of disorientation, an identity crisis which may have relevance beyond Caouette’s own story, encompassing a generation weaned on David Lynch, MTV and Jane’s Addiction. Somehow Tarnation manages eventually to wind its way towards adulthood. The comparatively unmediated conclusion, when Jonathacn takes responsibility for his mentally incapacitated mother, produces mixed feelings. The return to the conventions of documentary is a sign that our protagonist has grown up, and discarded his narcissistic tendencies in order to care for another person. There remains nevertheless, a nagging disappointment, a persistent desire for the seductive drama of adolescent angst, which is so comforting in its indulgence and effective in masking for us the banality of genuine suffering.

Will Norman is a DPhil student in English Literature at New College, Oxford. He writes on Nabokov.