"In the Realms of the Unreal" is the name of the 15,000-page children's fantasy novel written by Chicago janitor Henry Darger,
who left it among his things when he died in 1973 at the age of 81. The title is borrowed for Jessica Yu's uncommonly interesting and lovely documentary about Darger and his work. Darger himself seemed to dwell in an unreal realm, as documented in the other major written work he left behind, his life story. He had a Dickensian childhood, more or less orphaned, sent to a home for "feeble-minded children" (which he doesn't appear to have been) and made to do menial labor on work farms. As an adult, he was reclusive and a devout Catholic. He wanted to be left alone. He never married. The hundreds of paintings he did to accompany his book suggest he had a limited knowledge of the opposite sex: The children are often painted naked, and the little girls have penises. Coming from other minds, this would be creepy and unsettling. But Yu's interviews with the people who dealt with Darger -- his landlords, his neighbors, and so forth -- reveal a man universally considered innocent and child-like. He was naive, maybe a little feeble-minded after all, and had no prurient interests of any kind, at least not of which he left behind any evidence.
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