Soon before his 81st birthday in 1973, Chicagoan Henry Darger, who had no family and no close friends, was forced by ill health to move to a Catholic hospital from his Lincoln Park apartment. Upon entering the one room where Darger had lived for more than 40 years, his landlords Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner discovered that he'd exactingly created a fantasy world via 300 paintings and a 15,000-page novel. Darger, who worked by day as a janitor, had for decades been nightly inventing the alternate universe of the Vivian Girls, seven angelic sisters who lead a rebellion against godless, child-enslaving men.
Upon Darger's death not long after, the Lerners decided to leave his apartment intact and share his artwork with the world. Since then Darger has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and has become the most famous of outsider, or self-taught, artists. Now director Jessica Yu has crafted a documentary that takes its title from Darger's world. In The Realms of the Unreal is both a fascinating biography and a mystery story without a solution. How could this portrait of a dead man who left no relatives, had no real friends and spent all his free time secretly creating a fantasy world be anything else?
Yu's captivating account draws on the self-history that Darger left behind and she was able to photograph the apartment before it was dismantled in 2000. Both these offer tangible clues into what made Darger tick and the film also makes obvious connections between Darger's terrible Dickensian childhood and his mythical creation. But Yu, one artist observing another, perhaps, doesn't presume to offer any real psychological evaluation of Darger's personality or motivations. For example, Darger often drew the sisters naked and with penises but who can say why? Neighbors and co-workers, who barely noticed Darger when he was alive, suggest innocence about sex as one possible reason but though Yu undertook years of research into Darger's work, she doesn't really seem interested in hypothetical answers and the film is stronger and much more tantalizing because she allows Darger's work to speak for itself.
As excerpts from Darger's book are read and the paintings are crudely animated, aping the style of the pictures ( which are reminiscent of Op artist Peter Max's work ) , many other questions came to mind but are left unasked. Why did Darger only fixate on little girls? What happened to Darger's long-lost sister? Why was the apartment dismantled? Did Darger ever speak of his work or show it to anyone during the decades that he worked on it? Did he suffer from a mental illness like Avoidant Personality Disorder?
Yu cannily has the movie narrated by child actress Dakota Fanning, which adds another level of creepy fascination—especially when pictures of the little girls being tied up, disemboweled or frolicking as dragons fly overhead are shown. Darger's lifelong struggle with Catholicism ( there are distinct similarities between C.S. Lewis' Narnia and the Realms ) , his early attempts to adopt a child, his teenage friendship with another man ( who seems to have been his only friend ) are just more interesting components of the mystery.
Darger had no TV or radio, slept in a chair, and was too poor to afford to keep a pet. 'I never had a good Christmas or even a good New Year's all my life,' he says in a voice over as portrayed by actor Larry Pine, but apparently the power of his imagination and the need to create kept him going. Always, we are told, 'he wanted the quiet rapture again' referring to his boyhood days of innocence that seem to have become inextricably tied to his fantasy world. Toward the end of the film, after the Lerners had discovered the work, one of Darger's neighbors visited him in the hospital and shyly told him that he'd seen the paintings. Darger's eyes widened in shock and then he sadly said, 'Too late now.'
Yu's film, which details the triumph of an everyday man's imagination over his bland reality, is a fitting epitaph that might have surprised and delighted the secretive, creative subject it seeks to portray though, that too, we'll never know. If nothing else, the film certainly makes a persuasive argument for a creative retreat, a 'quiet rapture' of one's own. Opens Friday at the Music Box. www.musicboxtheatre.com .
Jackie Curtis
Flamboyant transvestite Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis is featured in another fascinating documentary opening this week, this one at Facets. Though we are told repeatedly throughout the first half of Superstar in a Housedress that Curtis was a brilliant performer who was outrageous both on and offstage, it's the group of comrades that reminisce about him that hold the attention.
Seeming like a collection of folks from either a Fellini or Almodóvar film, this disparate group chat on and on about how Curtis ripped up designer clothes, had terribly witty things to say, doodled on the walls of friend's homes and helped himself to drugs, liquor and whatever else he could get his hands on because 'he couldn't help it.' But they're a really fun bunch of New York 'love me' types—though obviously many have seen their heyday come and go—and the interiors of their collected apartments are at times more interesting than their stories of Curtis writing the first drag queen parody musical or whatever it was.
Then, at the midpoint, we begin to see old videotapes of Curtis in action and finally get a sense of his genius—his blurring of all sexual borders and obvious influence on everything from the Dr. Frank N. Furter character in Rocky Horror, David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and more recent drag superstars like Charles Busch and Joey Arias.
This entertaining, diverting documentary, narrated by Lily Tomlin, with its audacious cast, ends with the details of the bizarre circumstances surrounding Curtis's drug overdose at 38 in 1985 ( he died in bed after having sex for the first time with a woman ) and subsequent, outrageous funeral. That such circumstances, 20 years after his death, can still provoke shock, amusement and sadness among his friends and audiences who knew nothing of Curtis would certainly have pleased such an outré persona. See www.facets.org .
Cowboi
Local Film Event of Note: Saddle Up, Cowboi is a 20-minute, Chicago-made mockumentary from director and writer C. Byrne that explores the behind-the-scenes machinations of putting together a drag king act. Byrne and cast members will be present for a reception, screening ( which will include outtakes ) and panel discussion of the video at Chicago Filmmakers on Saturday, Jan. 22 beginning at 7:30 p.m. Further information at www.chicagofilmmakers.org .
Chasnoff Film Screened by Marriage Group
Equal Marriage NOW! will celebrate the one-year anniversary of San Francisco's Winter of Love with a special presentation on Saturday, Feb. 12, 4-6 p.m. at Gerber/Hart Library, 1127 W. Granville.
There will be a screening of Academy Award-winning filmmaker Debra Chasnoff's documentary One Wedding and a Revolution, which chronicles San Francisco's first same-sex wedding between longtime lesbian activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, who had been together for 51 years at that point and were founders of the pioneering lesbian-rights group, Daughters of Bilitis, in the early 1950s.
Following the screening, local couple Lee Neubecker and David Greer will speak about the experience of being one of nearly 4,000 same-sex couples married in San Francisco.
The event is free, call ( 773 ) 243-2576 or visit www.equalmarriage.now.org .
