Tarnation.

Jesus. I just watched this movie twice in a row, and there are some things about it that are amazing and moving. But a lot of it seems kind of narcissistic and self-serving. It seemed to me like ... he was using the camera lens as a mediation, recording/telling/creating his own life instead of just living it and experiencing it. It seemed that the turning point (from relative innocence and honesty to self-consciousness and falsity) happened around the time that he knew that he was going to make a movie about his family someday. I'm not saying that he always knew that it was going to be distributed and released publicly.....but he did enter it into film festivals, after all.

So it just seems ultimately kind of dishonest to me. He's so aware of the camera, the camera almost becomes a character in the film, and you forget that you're watching a movie that he made himself - it doesn't even seem weird at first, because, after all, we're used to seeing really intimate, wrenching, emotional moments caught on screen...by ACTORS, in movies that don't purport to be true. However, this is supposed to be truth (whatever truth is for him - he was too little to remember any of these events for himself, and his mother's and grandfather's stories are differ strongly in their accounts of the facts of her mental illness, so it seems that with this film he's trying to cobble together some kind of truth for himself) - and yet, the camera is on while he's calling the hospital after his mother's lithium overdose and subsequent coma. WHO DOES THAT? Does that seem like real emotion? Setting up the camera before you make that call so that nothing will be missing from the movie?

Am I just being a stick about privacy or somethin - is this some kind of culturally produced preconception that I hold, that authentic emotions are ones that are usually experienced privately if possible, and that one's genuine pain shouldn't be marketed?