Call it groundbreaking, beautiful, harrowing, sui generis—just don’t call it a masterpiece. Exploitation masquerading as tribute, Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation doesn’t deserve the distinction. No movie this insensitive to the pain of others—and to the ethical questions inherent in filming real lives—deserves canonization. Hailed as a breakthrough in the digital democratization of film, not to mention a new diverging branch in the documentary’s evolution, this confessional is movie as memoir, cobbled from footage and photos spread out across its maker’s life. Caouette himself proves a natural. The way Iron and Wine’s “Naked as We Came” glides plaintively over a recollection of his mother’s youth, or the bracing assurance of the collages that attest to her lost beauty, offer fleeting glimpses of lyricism and evince a talent for montage and pop mythologizing.

But if this be a valentine to a mother, then Caouette has a strange way of showing his love. Tarnation is problematic from the very first shot. Throughout the movie Caouette films himself acting out the role of protagonist in the drama of his life. A damning avatar of American narcissism, his movie is a quintessential artifact of this home-movie-obsessed generation—the unquestioning belief in the infinite interestingness of his life qualifies him as just another citizen of our reality-TV nation. By itself, this solipsism would be merely annoying. But in implicating his family in his own drama-queen dreams, Caouette crosses the line. Capturing his mother Renee’s descent into madness, Cauoette inserts scenes of himself crying into the camera—my how he hurts for her! The most distressing set piece is a musical number, filmed in an unbroken take, in which a far-gone Renee sings gibberish and dances with a pumpkin. Nothing is out of bounds; everything is material.

Has he no sense of decency? Pretending to be a meditation on the blurry line dividing living and performing, the redemptive value of art and trash, and the sense of purpose imbued by the camera’s gaze, Tarnation is finally nothing more than a snuff film without the gore. Emblematic of its falsity is the final scene of Jonathan sleeping beside Renee, a peaceful vision of mother-son affection that casts a spell until you remind yourself that he planned, arranged, and edited that moment. The tacit belief is that acting is living—that artifice and exaggeration are no less real than reality. It’s a difficult notion to swallow when you see this poor woman reject her son’s attempts at filmed interrogation, only to be finally captured when she has no chance to refuse. Transforming Renee’s suffering into our spectacle, Caouette shows that he doesn’t think about movies much or deeply—and even less about the lives of others.

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