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.