In the Realms of the Unreal Movie Review

Henry Darger lived the life of the obscure artist more completely than most of his ilk would find possible. A quiet shadow of a man, he kept to himself all his years, never once divulging any interests to outsiders (except for a strange attention to the weather) and just plugged away at his janitorial jobs. He never had unsuccessful gallery shows, didn’t attend art school, and never once railed against a conservative art establishment and philistine buyers who didn’t understand what he was trying to do. Nobody even knew he could draw. But after he died in 1973, at the age of 81, and his landlords were cleaning out his apartment, they discovered a lifetime of work: masses of paintings and drawings, stretching up to 10 feet long and often double-sided, and a 15,000-page novel called In the Realms of the Unreal. It was a little bit of a shock.

Jessica Yu’s documentary In the Realms of the Unreal is a meditative look at what little we know about Darger’s life, and the massive body of art that he left behind, utilizing the barest scraps of primary information available (there are only three known photographs of him) and Darger’s own diaries. It wasn’t an easy childhood by any stretch of the imagination: Darger’s mother died when he was four and his father gave him up for adoption a few years later, dying not long after. Darger was sent to an asylum for “feeble-minded children” in downstate Illinois. After serving in World War I, an experience that he found quite horrible and would haunt his art years later, Darger returned to his hometown of Chicago, where he would spend the rest of his years working janitorial jobs at hospitals and composing his multimedia masterpiece.

The story behind Darger’s novel (which shares the same universe with his paintings and drawings) is as fantastic as it is troubling. A surreal stew of religion-haunted science fiction, it tells the tale of the seven young Vivian girls and the war they fought on the behalf of enslaved children against the evil Glandelinian army. It’s a baffling work, where young children are tortured and killed by the godless enemy (many of the girls drawn with male genitalia) but are led by the Vivian girls to defend themselves in rousing battles that consume thousands of lives. Darger was a compulsive Catholic and this view of the universe hangs over his art, as does his troubled childhood (Darger shows up in the book under his own name, acting as avenger) and utterly naïve view of sex (one friend of Darger’s opines that he drew the girls incorrectly because he very likely had never seen one naked).

Perhaps in keeping with Darger’s unofficial status as one of the greatest “outsider” artists of the past few decades, Yu eschews the usual lineup of talking heads (writers, other artists, museum curators, and the like) who could come on and expound about the greatness of Darger’s work, preferring to dive into the work itself, with long views of Darger’s paintings, occasionally animated, while the narrator reads from his diaries and novel. While this keeps the film on a nicely personal level – all we hear from are Darger’s neighbors, the people who knew him best and yet barely knew the guy at all – it does leave a certain gap in terms of the appreciation of the art itself. We know that Darger drew his inspiration from his life, Catholicism, popular magazines and works of fantastic fiction, but how does his work compare with other artists, especially other outsiders like himself? Not that some starchy fellow with a Ph.D. is necessary to interpret all of this for us, but it would have been useful for Yu to include more information on Darger’s current place in the art world firmament.

An ordinary man with an epic imagination, Henry Darger created an explosive and disturbing body of art that will likely never be quite understood. But while this film is an admirable attempt to open up the life of a recluse, its soporific PBS style and muted tone don’t quite seem to do its subject justice. Although In the Realms of the Unreal is a decent introduction to Darger’s work, he ultimately deserves something much stranger, far more unreal.

The DVD includes an interview with the director and other extras.

Aka In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mysterious Life and Art of Henry Darger.

It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.