Film review of the documentary In the Realms of the Unreal, originally published (under the name R.G. Strait) in OC Metro, 2005.
As far as the world knew when he was alive, Henry Darger was a soft-spoken eccentric who worked long hours as a Chicago janitor, was a regular churchgoer, and mostly kept to himself. But when Darger shuffled home each night to his cluttered, dusty, boarding house room, he set off on a journey to another world of his own devising.
Darger’s creation, “In The Realms of the Unreal,” is beautiful, horrifying and tragic. “Realms” consists of both a 15,000 page novel (so far as anybody’s worked out, the longest work of fiction in human history) and a series of Darger’s own gigantic, crude but potent illustrations. The more you learn about Darger, the less you understand him. And the more you want to know.
“Realms” chronicles the escapades of the Vivian Girls, virtuous Catholic children who fight an eternal war against the Glandelinians, a race of wicked men in mortarboard hats. Sometimes the girls in Darger’s illustrations have horns or wings, and when they’re depicted naked (as they often are, quite innocently) they usually have male genitals. If anything, it’s all even stranger than it sounds.
The scenes Darger painted were equal parts Lewis Carroll and Hieronymus Bosch. While he painted many scenes of the girls frolicking in fantastical, Eden-like gardens, he also painted truly ghastly scenes of the girls being bloodily tortured at the hands of the Glandelinians. If Darger sounds like a potential serial killer, there was indeed great violence in Darger’s soul; but as Jessica Yu’s new documentary - also titled “In The Realms of the Unreal” - takes us deeper and deeper into Darger’s lonely yet teeming world, it’s not the horrors suffered by these imaginary little girls that will bring a tear to your eye.
I’ve been fascinated by Darger’s work since I first encountered it a decade ago, and as an amateur Darger scholar I went into Yu’s documentary assuming I wasn’t going to learn anything new. I’m glad to say I was wrong; the film is a revelation. Yu has gathered the few people who can say they knew Darger in his later life, and their descriptions of this peculiar old man are full of baffling contradictions but they nonetheless add up to a fascinating whole. Darger was so profoundly alienated from his fellow humans that he could barely speak, but it’s obvious that he has remained a vivid presence with these people, who still speak of him with respect and a genuine fondness.
It has been said that since Darger kept his work secret during his lifetime, we should honor him by locking his work away now where nobody can see it. It’s an argument I have no sympathy for: Darger’s tragedy was that he had nobody he trusted to share his world with; now he can share the wonders and terrors of his imagination with all of us, and be celebrated in a way he never knew in life. Darger’s lonely torment is ended at last.
