Jeff Feuerzeig's Portrait of the Artist By David D'Arcy April 14, 2006 - 8:18 AM PDT "That's the whole movie, pain brings truth." The artist's story that tends to make it to the screen usually fits the solemn Van Gogh/Schiele/Pollock template of a misunderstood prodigy who flares brightly and painfully, and then dies, preferably young, preferably unloved by the woman he desires, preferably unappreciated, at least while his body's still warm. Singer, songwriter and artist Daniel Johnston is still very much alive, and expanding in size as life goes on. The miracle here is that he isn't dead, given his mental illness, and given that he tried to kill himself and his father. It's all in the documentary that follows Johnston's odd creative life from fundamentalist West Virginia to Austin to manic depression to life again outside Austin under the watchful eyes of his aging parents. Director Jeff Feuerzeig had a lot to work with in The Devil and Daniel Johnston. The richness of the palette that he can draw from makes for a rich story. Johnston started filming himself at a young age with home movies about his relationship with his mother (a sadistic shrew on-screen). He played both roles in those, complete with an Anthony Perkins wig. Fortunately, his own psychodramas would involve a lot less violence. Johnston also has a deadpan lucidity when he talks about his bi-polar condition. Much of this film will make you laugh; it's the sort of reaction you might have if what passes for Americana on pubic radio were funny. Johnston drew constantly. He also taped all his songs again and again, because, oddly and somewhat predictably, he had no way of duplicating tapes. Johnston is not interviewed on camera, a peculiar situation for a film that seems to have gotten complete access from his family, yet the archive he's left (and is still creating) is a narrative line in itself that runs parallel to reminiscences and reflections by family, friends and a former manager who is now an ex-friend. The twists and turns of his life make for a "you-can't-make-this-stuff-up" narrative. Improbability becomes completely normal. Put simply, there doesn't seem to be a cliff that Johnston won't jump off of. Part of it is personality, part of it is his manic-depression, whose symptoms are unleashed when Johnston fails to take his medication, and that happens often enough. Much of this chaos is filmed, and if it's not filmed, it is remembered vividly by those who lived through it with him. When college love fails with Laurie, a girl who's engaged to the local undertaker, Johnston heads to Austin for life with his sister, until he skips out with a carnival, and then ends up back in Austin, working at MacDonald's, where he remains even after he slyly gets a spot on MTV. Fans (and everyone else) then have to reach him at MacDonald's, since he doesn't have a phone. The manager even enjoys having a star wiping off tables, for a while. His uniform would probably do well on eBay, if it hasn't already. That odd tale is just one story strand among many. In another strand, and this one has witnesses, an epiphany comes when Johnston emerges from a portable toilet in a parking lot after a long visit, and gets nailed with a punch from an angry carnie. Go figure. As Johnston-worship intensifies, so does his mania, sending him back to an institution, where he ends up scuttling a long-term recording contract that took years to arrange. Soon, after exploits that the film should be allowed to disclose, Daniel's parents become convinced that he is better off when he's supervised all the time. Who could disagree? We viewers enter the film at that point, and then begin the ride that Feuerzeig takes back and forth through time. As one person put it, "Daniel's going to heaven, because he's sure been through hell." Whatever you think of Johnston's drawings and songs - if you don't like them, just be aware that he has fans all over the world who can sing his songs back to you, word for word, and they will - a film like this does give you a chance to compare his lyrics with his visual art. For all the talk about his life being integrated into art, agglomerated would be a better word. The drawings and the lyrics diverge from each other. Johnston's songs are personal, autobiographical, self-deprecatingly witty in a minimal way, and they deal less with images than with feelings, mostly feelings of being victimized, expressed in the simplest of lonely-guy language. His pictures are composed mostly from a set of repeated images - a superhero modeled on Captain America, a bleeding eye, ghosts, a figure who seems to have had his head sliced off (in a way that makes his head look like the spout of a bottle, out of which all sorts of things can flow), and Satan (naturally). Put enough of them together on a page, and they can look apocalyptic - exactly what Johnston wants. (And what the Museum of Modern Art wanted, it seems, since MoMA bought a drawing that Johnston made in high school that was recently on view at Clementine Gallery in Manhattan.) Johnston doesn't talk in the film much about the images themselves, although sometimes his songs shed light on them. There's one called "I Had Lost My Mind," about a man who lost his head in the most literal kind of way, allowing everything else to pour out - now that's an image. (It's also the image on the cover of Johnston's pivotal early recording, Hi, How Are You. It was a lot cheaper than a photograph then.) Mostly Feuerzeig lets the work speak for itself, which it does well enough, whether it's a song lyric or a picture. Ultimately, that's more successful than trying to get inside Johnston, much of whom remains inscrutable even after almost two hours. This is a movie, after all, not an academic case history. More than images or music, Johnston the character and his misadventures keep you with this documentary's story, without the pretentious pageantry of Matthew Barney or the cheap tricks in the portrait of another outsider, Henry Darger, In The Realms of the Unreal (2004). I spoke to Jeff Feuerzeig about filming Johnston's life and art. Why did you think that Daniel Johnston would be a good subject for a film? Daniel Johnston's life, his journey, his music and his art, I believe, is an incredibly compelling and inspirational story. Had anyone tried to make a documentary about him before? No. There was talk that there should be one. Matt Groening had publicly said that there should be a Daniel Johnston documentary. A lot of people said that. [Producer] Ted Hope felt there should be one. I felt there should be one. Henry Rosenthal felt it. A lot of people felt it. Daniel Johnston - if you Google his name, there are hundreds of pages written about this guy and his art and his music. With no corporate agenda whatsoever, it's spread all over the world for the last twenty years, through osmosis, and that's a testimony to the power of his music and art. It keeps touching people and reaching people all on its own, and we don't get that any more in our pasteurized, homogenized corporate society. We don't get anything like that. The medium is never the message, the message stands alone. His songs of unrequited love are unique and singular. What's better than an unrequited love song? Nothing. It's certainly better than a falling in love song. Falling in love, there's a little more illusion. Pain brings truth. That's a great line right there. That's the whole movie, pain brings truth, because I don't think anybody's ever been this close in cinema to that really fine line between madness and creativity, perhaps genius. Daniel Johnston, because of his self-documentation, because he's literally reported his entire life on cassette, he takes us right to that edge, and that is a very very compelling place to be. He takes us to that edge in his own life, which is really scary. His art and music is so fragile, you feel like it could fall part at any moment. It's almost like a great circus performer on a high wire. You wonder if he's going to make it across, and he does make it across. That gives you this visceral thrill. That's what happens all over the world. That's why artists like Tom Waits, Beck, Flaming Lips have begun covering Daniel's songs. There are about 160 artists all over the world who have covered his songs. Clearly the music is really touching them. How were you able to get the kind of access you had to his family to get the full story - not just to get it, but to film it? The balance of getting the truth was simple. I just presented the truth without glorifying it or sugarcoating it. The family had asked me to tell the truth, and they'd also asked me to leave in the drug use and the LSD, and things like that. Their goal was to help other families that might have a son or a daughter than suffers from bipolar disorder. They were open and wanted to share, and they certainly needed to download. The dad's story about the plane crash was told to me the first day I met the man. I did not ask him. He just started telling me the story, and he broke down and cried. They're very open about this, and they also have a deep understanding about this journey through madness that Daniel's taken them on. Often in that journey through madness, the pain of the family that's forced to be on that same journey is never really considered. And the brothers and sisters, and the friends, and the managers and the ex-girlfriends. There's certainly a major truth in that, and it's a major part of this film. Manic depression, mental illness really does affect everyone around a person. It's not just one person, everybody suffers with them. Still, Daniel Johnston has subverted everybody. He's subverted what art is supposed to look like. He's subverted what music is supposed to sound like. And that's when you realize that perhaps a great artist has walked before us. You've made music documentaries before, and you've shot musicians. This is not a music doc. It's a portrait of an artist who also happens to be a musician. The art is as important as the music. We don't want to ever call this a music documentary. That's a ghetto. Do people come out of screenings with any particular questions? They want to know where to get this music, which is the entry point for them. They all want to know what happened to Laurie, his muse, and why she's not in the film. Or, I should say, why the contemporary Laurie is not in the film, where there is just the Super-8 of her. Why was that? It was very simple. Henry [Rosenthal, the producer] and I really wanted to film Laurie. She was a big part of the Daniel Johnston universe that he created. And especially, we wanted to know if she was real. We thought that maybe he had invented the character, like any of his other characters - the girl that married the undertaker, and not him. She was real, and he had made those incredible Super-8 films when he was a kid. One of the films was of him chasing Laurie, and her being flirtatious, blowing a kiss right into his lens. It burned a hole right in his brain, and he was a goner forever. When we found that film and found that that's how he's preserved her, frozen in time, and that's what he draws from for his inspiration, we thought that we would honor Daniel's vision of her, and not show the contemporary Laurie. But anyway, she'll be on the DVD, because they had a reunion last year at South by Southwest. There will be a Laurie featurette. Will there be a sequel? Absolutely not. The sequel's going to be playing out right in front of your eyes, in real life. The fact that we've exhumed Daniel Johnston, who was really an enigma, who's a living ghost - which is certainly what the film tells you - and that he's alive, and his work is being bought and sold, and his art is at the Whitney [Biennial], and people are continuing to cover his songs. As a living artist, he's going to see his art being appreciated. That's something that Van Gogh never got to see. back to articles >>> Index "That's the whole movie, pain brings truth." back to articles

David D'Arcy Besides reviewing art and film for National Public Radio, David D'Arcy has also written for the Art Newspaper, the Economist and other publications. February 6, 2007. Mark Savage & the D.I.Y. Aesthetic by Jeffrey M. Anderson February 3, 2007. Seeing the Humor in Sexual Identity by Michael Guillen January 29, 2007. Smokin' Aces with Joe Carnahan and Jeremy Piven by Sean Axmaker January 26, 2007. Include Me Out: Interview with Farley Granger by Jonathan Marlow January 25, 2007. Grindhouse: Chapter Four - The 1960's by Eddie Muller January 19, 2007. Charles Mudede: Zoo Story by Andy Spletzer January 19, 2007. Mark Becker: Merging the Personal and the Political by Sara Schieron January 19, 2007. Micha X. Peled: The Lives of the Sweatshop Youth by Hannah Eaves January 16, 2007. Djinn: A Taxi Driver Dreams of Perth by Jeffrey M. Anderson January 12, 2007. Clint Eastwood: Flags and Letters From the "Good War" by Jeff Shannon view past articles