monday, april 21, 2008
Swimming to Cambodia
The unexamined life, as Socrates famously pointed out, is not worth living. By that standard, Spaulding Gray lived one of the most fantastic lives of worth. Sadly, he didn’t see it that way.For most of his adult life, Gray ruthlessly dissected his experiences in performances that were basically autobiographical monologues. It was a pursuit that should have kept him comfortably ensconced in the suffocating embrace of the New York art scene.
In 1987 filmmaker Jonathan Demme made a movie of one of Gray’s best-known monologues, Swimming to Cambodia. It was a fortuitous collaboration and, as a direct result, this offbeat artist’s particular métier was able to find a much wider audience. Which is all the more surprising when one considers the disaster this film could have been in the hands of lesser artists.
The concept is relatively straightforward. In 1983, Gray traveled to Southeast Asia to play a bit part in Roland Joffé’s film,
Gray then created a monologue about that experience as well as others he had while in Southeast Asia. Over the course of two years he perfected this monologue and, in 1986, Demme filmed it over the course of a trio of performances in 1986 at the Performing Garage, in NYC.
But instead of a simple filmic record of the performance, what emerges is something altogether unique – a synthesis of the two artists vision; three actually, if you consider the essential musical contribution of Laurie Anderson.
Yet, instead of an antiseptic experiment in aesthetics, Swimming to Cambodia is buoyed by a faith in humanity rarely seen as honestly on the movie screen.
Demme turned out to be an inspired choice of director as well. Just off the success of Something Wild he was still three years from his big breakthrough with Silence of the Lambs. Mostly, he was known at this point for delightfully offbeat – but small – comedies such as the wonderful Melvin and Howard.
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Instead, Demme married the minimalist setting and with and understated approach to camera work to allow the viewer to behold the band’s energy to grow and grow and then almost explode in a fantastic orgiastic frenzy. He achieved something most thought impossible – he showed the world that this was a band that could rock and, dare I say, funk out.
So handling a quicksilver charisma was par for the course by the time Demme got to Gray. Still, there is a big difference between David Byrne’s edgy energy and Gray’s barely subdued neurosis. The solution was simple. Let the former run wild across a wide stage and sit the latter firmly at a table in front of the camera’s eye.
The set, such as it is, consists of the table, a pair of maps and a background painting of the sea and clouds. A column and tree are to one side but only show up once or twice. A ceiling fan directly above. That’s about it.
Given the setting and the technique one expects to get a full-on dose of Verfremdungseffekt. Instead, the dropping of the fourth wall and the static setting of the film gives Gray a larger stage upon which his personality can roam. It’s more Shakespearian than Brechtian in this sense.
For one thing, while Brecht might have eschewed catharsis by terror and pity, Gray positively embraces it. In fact, Gray uses anxiety and fear as a means to strip back the illusions and try and see the core of humanity in his subject. Even if it means testing a South African in the waters of the Indian Ocean.
The infamous ‘distance effect’ is short circuited by Demme as well. His introduction is critical to drawing the viewer into the performance. Seeing Gray walk along the regular streets of his life and into the theatre reinforces the feeling that this monologue is part of his life he is sharing with us – not something we are voyeuristically peeking in on.
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So by the time he starts speaking we are ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. In return, he offers a frantic sincerity and conviction. There is nary a trace of ironic detachment in his entire monologue. He’s droll, sarcastic and even a bit defensive but he’s devoted to the idea of honestly confessing his experiences. You just wonder if the catharsis is intended for him or the viewer – but that’s minor.
Yet, despite the bare the setting is, it’s fascinating to first watch how Demme pulls you into the narrative that Gray begins frantically reeling out. The camera wooshes forward, the lights shine and dim, quick edits between one camera and the other. It all works together.
One of the best examples is the section where Gray describes the Bangkok's Pat Pong night market and the various styles of depravity that occurs there. Demme dims the backlights and allows a garish green and red glow to envelop Gray – like the slightly scary, quite sweaty and entirely disturbing hue of a cheap bordello in Southeast Asia.
Still though, this is Gray’s show and once he sets down the glass of water and gets started you have no choice but to follow his mesmerizing narrative. It seems, at first, to simply be a loose series of recollections about a somewhat unusual experience he had but, before long, you realize it’s a fantastically structured argument against the forces of moral destruction in the world.
For every camera effect Demme is pulling out of the bag, Gray is matching him with a narrative one. At one point he pauses and points out that every thing he is saying is true with one single exception. Of course you are now waiting for that exception and when it arrives he smoothly moves forward onto his mission. It’s a deft way to create anticipation on the part of the listener while uniting seemingly disparate elements of the monologue.
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Every so often, the technical tricks intrude on the spell Gray is so deftly casting but never very much and never for very long. The distance-effect is useless in this instance due to the sheer power of the storyteller.
Ironically, despite flaunting the Brechtian convention, the film succeeds on Brechtian terms; having watched Swimming to Cambodia , the viewer has a sense of sympathizing with the situation Gray has described rather than with Gray himself.
In fact, one thing that makes Gray’s monologue so unique is how his dedication to the humanity doesn’t let him become clouded by the shibboleths of politics and elitism that tends to swallow so much of the avant guard.
Because while this film and Gray’s artistic effort might be part of the whole New York art scene it only stands as a contemporary to the performance art excesses that marked the mid 1980s. His artistic tradition is much much older and more traditionally American – oral storytelling.
Typically this is categorized as folklore and denoted to the basement of inquiry where other rustic artistic traditions are banished by the artistic elite. But Gray seems to have understood that this type of storytelling is actually bedrock of this country’s artistic heritage.
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American storytelling in this tradition is an eminent mix of tall tales, humor and god knows what else. Entertainment is the point it begins at and, from there, it moves outward to provide moral instruction, practical knowledge and, if the teller is good, personal insight. It is folklore in its truest sense.
It also helps that Gray has a zest for idiom and metaphor. Take his description of the Khmer Rouge as “a strange bunch of bandits, hanging out in the jungle living on bark, bugs, leaves and lizards, being trained by the Vietcong. They had a back-to-the-land, racist consciousness beyond anything Hitler had ever dreamed of. But they had no scapegoat other than the city-dwellers of Phnom Penh.”
That paints a mental picture infinitely more powerful than simply reading the numbers of victims. Only photos of the destruction can match it but then, there is an automatic withdrawal for sanity’s sake if nothing else. The metaphor alone has a chance to touch the hem of the horror and give the mind a sense of understanding.
Yet, as deftly as Gray is able to hold the viewer under his spell, there is a feeling he keeps them emotionally at bay as well. Every so often, and very subtly, he gives a reminder that this is a performance and, as open as he may seem, there is a great deal he is holding in reserve as well.
Again, Demme has set you up for this in the introduction. As Gray makes his way to the stage he makes a slight hand gesture – an upturned palm toward someone offscreen. It could be an admonition or simple recognition or both. Either way, for the viewer emotionally rushing forward in expectation of the film it is a sharp setback that puts us in our seats like the audience we’ve just seen.
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Still, while the droll and amusing banter keeps you entertained the emotional heart of the film is the slaughter of more than 2 million Cambodians in 1975 when US forces pulled out and left the Maoist Khmer Rouge guerrillas take control of the country. It’s a perilous conceit which many critics – including the legendary Pauline Kael – felt failed miserably.
(In this, Demme, who finishes the film with shots from The Killing Fields of the Cambodians doomed to the massacre with the departure of the Americans has to be held culpable as well.)
I’m not so sure that is the case, though. Gray’s matter-of-fact manner of explaining how the horror came about is all the more emotionally powerful due to his means of coming to understand it. He is the typical ignorant American at the start needing a Brit - Roland Joffé – to explain to him his own history.
From there he – and we the viewers – undergo a gradual understanding of the scope of what happened in the fields outside of Phnom Penh and how our ignorance makes us somewhat to blame for it.
''Who needs metaphors for hell or poetry about hell?'' he points out. ''This really happened, here on this earth.''
In light of that, the introspective man has to seek a certain perspective and balance. The search for the perfect moment he then embarks on is less to find a narcissistic nadir than to discover a high enough point of view to have the perspective to understand the scope of all he has learned.
Attaining it is impossible, of course. But trying is the point. Trying and then sharing what you have learned with others.
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