On an ordinary winter day in 1972, an eccentric and cantankerous retired janitor asked his landlord to help him find a new place to live. At 82 he'd become too feeble to climb the stairs to his room, so the landlord helpfully obliged and later returned to clean out the man's apartment.
What he found there was an entire world he never knew existed, a find that became one of the most notorious discoveries in art history.
The landlord was Nathan Lerner—photographer, designer, and curiously, inventor of the bear-shaped honey dispenser—and his tenant was Henry Darger, novelist, visual artist, and the subject of filmmaker Jessica Yu's new documentary In The Realms Of The Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger. It's the rarest of biographical films: an attempt to get inside the head of one of the most puzzling, intriguing and troubled artistic minds of the 20th century, but without hammering the audience over the head with psychobabble, allowing audiences to make up their own minds about the man and his world.
 Still from in The Realms of the Unreal. At McCalls run. (Image courtesy www.wellspring.com/movies) |
With a personality like Henry Darger that's no small feat, due in part to so little being known about him to begin with. What is known is that his early life was almost Dickensian in its general bleakness. Around Henry's fourth birthday his mother died in childbirth, and the baby girl was given up for adoption. Henry's father, a mild-mannered tailor, cared for his son for the next four years until he became to ill to carry on, at which point the boy was placed in a Catholic boys' home. There he suffered continual conflicts with teachers and fellow students (particularly a bully named John Manley), was treated as a pariah for making "strange noises," and was eventually given the nickname "Crazy" before being shipped off to The Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, IL. His father died shortly afterwards, and soon Henry started making escape attempts; at age 17 he finally succeeded, and journeyed nearly 200 miles on foot back to Chicago. There he found work as a janitor, a vocation that kept him employed for the next 50 years.
It was a drab and unremarkable public life. But operating in almost complete isolation, Darger fully retreated from the everyday and poured every ounce of waking energy into nurturing his private world. The center of that universe is a fifteen-volume, 15,000 page-novel entitled "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion."
Apparently begun in 1910, the dense and action-packed work describes in obsessive detail a war between the Satanic nation of Glandelinia and the Christian nation of Abbieannia. "For more than 43 years, child slavery existed in the Calverinian Country," Darger writes. "Hundreds and thousands of children torn from their parents, made to work themselves to death without getting a cent, and horrors upon horrors almost equal that of perdition." To free the enslaved children, the Abbieannians wage a four-year war against the godless Glandelinian slave owners. Under assault by the evil Gen. John Manley, millions of young girls suffer every possible torture, but seven plucky sisters—The Vivian Girls—lead a rebellion and survive the ordeal intact, thanks in part to the intercession of 45,000-foot-long dragons and one Capt. Henry Darger.
Even better-known in art circles are Darger's otherworldly illustrations. Betraying his love for Civil War history and minutiae, Darger created maps, portraits, flags and, most famously, panoramic 12-foot-long murals rendered on butcher's paper with the cheapest tins of children's watercolors. Ostensibly displeased with his drawing skills, he traced figures from catalogs, comic books and newspaper advertisements, sometimes using healthy chunks of his take-home pay to have photographic transparencies made from which he could copy scores of human forms. The tableaus are richly-detailed tapestries resplendent with enchanted landscapes under ominously pregnant storm clouds.
And above all: the girls. Hundreds, if not thousands of them all told, wide-eyed waifs seen both in repose and in battle, the latter often depicted as far more courageous than the men that enslave them. They appear in multitudes of frocks and summer dresses, often unselfconsciously naked, and most perplexing of all—equipped with male genitalia. It's a motif that comes off as both perverse and oddly innocent, naïve even, as if Darger were so unfamiliar with the ways of the world that he was unaware of the difference between boys and girls.
 Still from in The Realms of the Unreal. At second battle of McHollister run. (Image courtesy www.wellspring.com/movies) |
Even for those well-versed in the idiosyncrasies of so-called "outsider art," the immense weirdness of Darger's work is daunting. But once the shock wears off, an exquisitely bucolic beauty emerges, a pastoral reverie where the most awful of horrors are continually perpetrated, yet always with a hint that the evil will be vanquished. It's a fantasy world of pure escape that acknowledges reality just enough to make the fantasy all the more poignant and peculiar, a world made public not by design but by accident, with details intact that most would be embarrassed to reveal.
There's a purity to Darger's work that Yu respects deeply, and she captures the sometimes eerie essence of it with warmth and sensitivity. Documenting an artists' work can be a difficult challenge; there are only so many slow zooms and sweeping pans a director can employ before the visual palette becomes static and dull. Though Yu sometimes opts for the simplicity of a camera aimed at a canvas, she's also made a bold imaginative leap by animating many of Darger's murals, using a technique that both brings motion to the work yet preserves its essentially 2-D characteristics. She also employs two different narrators, one as Darger (as both author of the book and narrator of his autobiography), and Dakota Fanning as the third-person docent of Henry's mind.
Most thankfully, Yu avoids the trap of relegating Darger to the "outsider" ghetto or treating him as an inscrutable nutcase. She understands, and conveys back to us, how important Henry's inner world was to him, how fully fleshed and three-dimensionally real it was to him. Henry had no "real life" in the conventional sense of the planet Earth most of us inhabit; the peerless breadth and depth of his creations were life itself for him. One suspects that in a perfect world he would have been happy to traffic with the normal people, respected as a serious artist with hopes and dream and talents; but since that world didn't exist, he was forced to create it for himself, and live out his days there. In some hands that story would be a tragedy about imagination's inability to transcend reality; Yu makes Henry's dream a triumph.