In the Realms of the Unreal - Henry Darger Film Bio

As a fan of the art of Henry Darger, I very excited to have an opportunity to see In the Realms of the Unreal. Ever since I first read about the lonely janitor and his strange body of art in a scholarly journal nine years ago, I have wanted to learn more about him and his creations. The film takes a three-fold path of exploration, looking at Henry Darger through his art, his own words about his life, and interviews with people who actually knew him. The director makes it clear that not one of these elements holds the answer to "who was Henry Darger," but puts the available material in front of the audience so that we can reach our own conclusions about him and his work. This ambiguity pleasantly leaves Darger's mental state a mystery for the viewer to unravel. What is most important is his art.

The movie makes viewing Darger's art an especial pleasure, showing his studio, his materials, his finished work in its original format, and full screen depictions of many of his paintings. It also proposes answers to some of the more curious aesthetic questions about his art, such as "Why the little penises on the naked girls?" Rather than positing that they were hermaphrodites, the movie suggests that Darger's limited exposure to the world may have left him unaware of the differences between little boys and little girls. But the real treat for me was the movie's incredible animations of his drawings, which really made Darger's "The Story of the Vivian Girls" come to life. Animation was also used to capture his working style by showing how images taken from coloring books and children's tales could be layered, enlarged, and flipped, as well as reused over and over again.

In the Realms of the Unreal did not ignore the dark side of Darger, with a substantial look at his mutilation images (which contrast starkly with the prettier works of little pinafore clad girls in fields of flowers). It very happily ignored the question of whether or not he was a pedophile, though, and provided little commentary on his religious obsessions.

An aspect of Darger's life which was highly important to his artistic production was his poverty. Working as a janitor did not provide him the means to access high-quality art supplies, which meant butcher paper and child's watercolor pots were the most appropriate materials for him to work with. It also made his habit of digging in the trash to look for discarded books and such seem very sensible - much as he patched and repatched his clothes, he found no shame in repurposing other people's discards. It also explained what seemed to me his poor grammar and childish writing. Since he was taken out of school at the age of twelve, it is unsurprising that his words and orthography seem the work of a person with an under-developed mind. But after seeing the movie, I no longer saw him as a "simple" man but rather an under-educated man.

As a close, the movie noted that only when Darger was committed to the same poorhouse where his father died did anyone see his art. When one of his neighbors came by his sickbed and told him how wonderful his paintings were, his reaction was shock, then "Well, it's a little too late for that now, isn't it?" I found it very sad to walk out of the theater thinking that the state of isolation he had lived in his entire life was so extreme that we were only left with little fragments of his existence. In the Realms of the Unreal helped me better understand both Henry Darger and his life without oversimplifying any of it, and I highly recommend it.