Formative Omittance in Fun Home and Tarnation
In Alison Brechels Fun
home and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation
are films that were meant to provided evidence to how the main characters lives
are shaped in their adulthood. Fun home is an autobiography of Alison
Brechdel that is meant to incomplete memoir to her life, while exploring a
several narrow topics. Tarnation is used
as a tool by Jonathan Caouette to describe the cause and effect of his family
problems. Both mediums are use techniques
in order to convey messages, metaphors, and imagery in directly, while guiding
the audience into seeing things from the author’s and viewpoint. Both Fun Home and Tarnation use cut and paste
techniques in order to piece together cohesive stories while omitting things
they believe would unravel their theories.
Fun Home is defined as an autobiography of the life of
Alison Brechdel and is intended to be a memoir, which focuses on some of her
memories up to her early twenties. Two of
the major topics of the story are Alison Brechdels development into her adult
self and her investigation into how her father passed away. Alison
Brechdel writes Fun Home going back
in forth in time making connections between her early childhood and her adulthood
while illustrating scenes that she believes led to her sexuality and lifestyle. Throughout the story, she makes parallels to
her father lifestyle and her own, as they both internally lust for the same sex,
and how she believes how her father shaped her individuality. But her portrayal of her father and her lifestyle
lead to questions to of how her siblings managed to have different
developmental outcomes, despite having the same father. It leads to question whether or not the
author wanted to support some old theories of nature versus nurture, as the
story focus purely on the nurture side of her development.
Laced throughout Fun
Home is her theory of the death of her father and what she believed to be
the cause of death. She challenged the
official cause of death (which was by accident) by providing a theory of him committing
suicide due to his lifestyle. The author
defined her viewpoint of sexuality in the book, and then introduces an
alternate cause of death for her father that ties directly into her own sexuality
by associating his death to his homosexual lusts. Alison chose to use her father’s death in as
a way to exemplify how she feels society views homosexuality, while omitting many
other possibilities that could have been the cause of his suggested suicide.
In Tarnation, Jonathan
Caouette uses a collage of clips and interviews to tell a story of his family
issues related to trauma and abuse. The
large theme of the film is that their problems are caused by their family
heritage directly by them co-habituating or through hereditary relations. He
films footage of his parents and grandparents as well as himself to define his
family and their similarities. At the
end of the film, he wished that “he would not end up like his mother”, while
suggesting that his later life may be end up being similar to his mother. By spending large amount of film time
focusing on individual members of the family, he makes it appear as if the
issues are actually being caused within the family, rather than by external
factors. One major omission made by Caouette
was the absence of his brother in the film.
By not focusing on the personality of his sibling, Caouette makes the external
factors such as drugs and shock treatment a more plausible explanation to the
cause of the family’s problems.
Both stories are definitely focused on the agendas of the
authors based on many known stereotypes.
It is also clear that there was a lot of manipulation in order to have
the audience understand both authors point of view.
