In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger (2004)

There are always people you wonder about. People who take out the trash at the high school. People who work the nine to five shifts at the diners and gas stations. People who, in other words, live lives that aren’t routinely glamorized by Hollywood films. Someone once told me that there’s nothing more poignant than the sight of someone eating alone. I’m not sure if I agree, but it would certainly rate high on that meter of things that can casually break your heart. It is particularly poignant to see someone eating alone while obviously on a meal break in the middle of a shift of a thankless job that I’ve just described. What do these people do for happiness? What is their source of hope?

Henry Darger was one such person. A reclusive, fearful mouse of a man, Darger worked a variety of janitorial jobs until he was forced to retire at the age of 73. Several years later he died. His neighbors, who helped him get along financially from time to time, opened his small apartment-and discovered thousands of pages of writing. A few hundred of them are a sort of autobiography; several thousand more are an epic, epic, epic fantasy novel: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger is filmmaker Jessica Yu’s exploration of this man. Yu’s technique is admirably, deceptively simple: she tells Darger’s story through the art itself, as that was the only thing Darger left behind. Portions of the novel are memorably dramatized and large patches of Darger’s extensive illustrations are allowed to breath and move and inhabit the world that seemed to so consume this man. The autobiography is recruited to serve as substitute narration, an act of acknowledgment that Darger was determined to avoid while living.

Darger’s work is inspired and disturbing, revealing a lonely, paranoid, probably obsessive compulsive personality; a man who grew up bad and incapable of forming significant human contact. Darger, like many a writer, invented a new world as substitute for understanding the old one. Darger personifies the idea of the artist that we tend to glorify without thought: the man who has to create to live. In the Realms of the Unreal acknowledges the lunacy that resides on just the other side of the artistic coin.

These are the sorts of documentaries that appeal to me, these fringe stories of existence that point toward a larger acknowledgement of how befuddling life in general can be (another recent example being Crazy Love.) Yu’s film is beautiful and well-crafted; respectful of Darger but not overly sentimental as to his problematic nature. One thing did trouble me while watching: Darger’s work, and pre-occupation with little girls, seemed to me to be highly suggestive of pedophilic desires. Watch Darger’s desperation over finding a photo of a murdered girl that haunts his novel. Watch the frequent scenes of torture and violence that pop up in his book. Yu barely addresses this particular issue; she favors the “lonely old man” angle. Lonely old man, sadly, is the best that Darger could hope for.

★★★½

Posted on January 25th, 2008 in Reviews, Documentary, 2004 |

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