Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia: The Article
[In the following essay, Phelan provides critical analysts of the stage, film, and text versions of Swimming to Cambodia. Phelan is critical of Gray's egocentrism and "opportunistic" discussion of Cambodian genocide as a foil for his own spiritual awakening.]
The most remarkable thing about Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia is its Zelig-like ability to change its form. First "an experience," then a memory of an experience, then an improvisational performance of a memory of an experience, then a performance script, then a book, then a film, Swimming to Cambodia is perhaps the ultimate postmodern text—ubiquitous, slippery, and apparently immune to the law of genre. But as Zelig soon discovered, such a Protean existence has its price. Swimming to Cambodia's easy mutation suggests that its ontology lies less in its ability to be taken as a "vessel for great themes expressed through mighty events," as James Leverett intones in his Introduction to The Book, and more in its hollowness—its extremely malleable surface appeal.
Swimming to Cambodia is a dramatic monologue about Gray's experience playing the U.S. ambassador's aide during the making of Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields (1983). In the three live performances which were combined in Jonathan Demme's superbly edited film, Gray expertly employs four props—a notebook, a glass of water, a map, and a pointer—to expound the history of U.S. intervention in Cambodia, the ascendancy of the Khmer Rouge in 1975, and the subsequent deaths of about two million Cambodian people. Along the way, Gray also tells the story of noise squabbles with Soho neighbors, stand-offs with Renée Shafransky (his lover and the producer of the film), and his indefatigable pursuit of "Perfect Moments." This pursuit leads him deep into the waves of the Indian Ocean, into a severe economic lust which sends him to a Hollywood agent, and eventually to the performance/film itself. When he experiences his first Perfect Moment it is in the Indian Ocean; for Gray Perfect Moments are timeless perceptions distinguished by a nostalgic transcendental "oneness" with his surroundings:
Suddenly there was no time and there was no fear and there was no body to bite. There were no longer any outlines. I was just one big ocean. My body had blended with the ocean. And there was just this round, smiling-ear-to-ear pumpkin-head perceiver on top bobbing up and down.
Gray wants to turn this perceiver into the performer and the "poetic reporter." He defines a poetic reporter in his "Author's Note" as:
… more like an impressionist painter than a photographer. Most reporters get the facts out as quickly as possible—fresh news is the best news. I do just the opposite. I give the facts a chance to settle down and at last they blend, bubble and mix in the swamp of dream, memory, and reflection.
Gray's theatrical minimalism and simple sentences fit well with his persona as poetic reporter in Swimming. Sitting behind a desk in a plaid flannel shirt and speaking for about an hour and a half. Gray seems more like a casual and slightly bemused academic than an actor with Hollywood aspirations. Gray's persona in Swimming, however, does not work as well with this material as it has in the past. Irony, his most congenial affect, is not a sufficiently complex attitude to treat the "gruesome period from 1966 to the present" which constitutes present-day Cambodia. In this monologue, Gray's ambition is greater than his skill.
In 1979 Gray explained that his move from acting in other people's plays to performing his own solo pieces was precipitated by the conviction that what he was doing on stage was akin to freestyle body-surfing: "The text was like a wave I was riding, and the way I rode that wave was up to me." As a member of Richard Schechner's Performing Garage and Elizabeth Le Compte's Wooster Group, Gray has had a long and distinguished career in avant-garde theater. In 1981, after playing Hoss in the Performing Garage's production of Sam Shepherd's Tooth of Crime, he remarked:
After I do the long monologue about the fighter Richard [Schechner—the director] said to just finish that, stand in front of the audience and allow myself to come to a neutral place so I'm no longer the character, and just look at the audience's eyes. That time I could feel the charge that had been building up peel away like an onion and I came to this extremely neutral state. Everything disappeared and the audience and I were one, and from there I went on to the next scene playing the old man, and that was such a wonderful transition.
For Gray, performative Perfect Moments consist of these experiences of "oneness" between himself and the audience. In Swimming to Cambodia, however, we hear so much about other Perfect Moments that there is little time or energy for creating a new one there in the theater/film.
In his exuberant "Author's Note" to Swimming, Gray outlines his aesthetic theory: "all human culture is art. It is all a conscious contrivance for the purpose of survival. All I have to do is look around me." In practice, unfortunately, the liberating claim that all of human culture is potentially "performable" (able to be represented "on stage") becomes in Gray's text only another opportunity to see himself. This visual/psychological claustrophobia does not seem to trouble him; in fact, he celebrates his endless self-seeking: "You never know when they're [Perfect Moments] coming. It's sort of like falling in love … with yourself." It seems never to have occurred to Gray that falling in love with someone else might be less than a Perfect Moment but more like a Textured History; nor does he consider that a psychological Textured History might be more suitable as a parallel narrative to the story of the tragedy of Cambodia. And perhaps most inexplicable of all is Gray's apparently unconscious exploitation of the history of Cambodia, which he uses essentially as a structure to frame his "poetic reports."
Pauline Kael's remarks in The New Yorker have succinctly outlined all the reasons why Gray's boyish irony about performing in a movie about Cambodia, finding an agent, struggling over weighty decisions about spending two weeks in Krummville, New York, or mainland Thailand, while also expressing outrage at the Khmer Rouge's decimation of the Cambodians, could be construed as opportunistic:
The high point of his monologue comes when he hears for the first time about our secret bombing of Cambodia, and what the Khmer Rouge did to the Cambodian people in 1975, driving them out of the cities and to their deaths. Mostly, his tone has been gentle mockery of himself and everyone else, but now he's upset, indignant. He's incredulous and horrified as he describes the exodus; he's an actor who has just discovered strong material and he builds the tension…. Is he effective? To judge from reactions to his stage performances and to the new concert-film version, definitely. Yet I can't be alone in feeling that he's a total opportunist, and so unconsciously that it never even occurs to him that there's anything wrong about using a modern genocidal atrocity story to work up an audience.
Although this unconsciousness has been apparent in Gray's previous performance work, it comes acutely to the forefront in Swimming to Cambodia because the monologue purports to be at least in part "a portrait of an artist" coming to political consciousness. But the structure of Gray's monologue inevitably leads one to measure the death of two million Cambodian refugees against his epiphany in the Indian Ocean. Such inappropriate measuring is more than aesthetically unfortunate; it also is historically arrogant.
Gray's task as a performer is to use himself as a kind of epistemological gauge; all experience and all representations of that experience must be filtered through him. Diametrically opposed to the Stanislavskian approach in which the actor emptied himself in order to let the character live, Gray's performances attempt to use the performance situation itself to fill himself with becoming/expressing/being Spalding Gray. The logical outcome of this impulse is manifest in his performance called Interviewing the Audience, in which he does just that.
In theory, Gray's project is important and interesting. Performance Art's most radical and innovative work often involves a thrillingly difficult investigation of autobiography. By rejuvenating the possible ways of presenting and representing the self, Performance Art has changed the notion of theatrical presence and widened the methods by and through which the self can be narrated, parodied, held in contempt, and/or made to be the source of revelatory vision and thought. The divergent work of Linda Montano, Karen Finley, Stuart Sherman, Chris Burden, John Malpede, and Lily Tomlin, to name only some of the best-known artists (as distinct from the most interesting) involved in this project, gives some sense of the scope and range of this re-investigation. Gray's work, perhaps more than anyone else's, has been able to bridge the gap between avant-garde and pop culture. Gray has made no secret of his eagerness to be "a star" and he seems to have less hesitation than one might expect about "crossing over":
I always wanted to be a star in the finest sense—to be there, to be brilliant…. [T]he only way to be a star in our culture is to enter into the media at large. You have to be a household word. I wanted to be in performance and also be a star.
The obvious risk in Gray's work is that this performed self will be inadequate, boring, superficial. In order to minimize that risk, Gray affects a blanket irony. But unlike most of the other performance artists engaged in rethinking autobiographical "texts," Gray's work consistently returns to one theme: his most consistently expressed emotion is one of loss. "I have had this feeling [of loss] for as long as I can remember. It is the feeling that the 'I' I call 'me' is only a visitor here. No, not even a visitor because a visitor goes elsewhere after he visits." The visits recorded in Swimming to Cambodia, paradoxically, are visits recorded by one who does not leave the tight moorings of the "I"; Gray never really swims off the shore that is Gray-in-Performance.
In Swimming, this paradox is heightened because the narrative chronicles Gray's increasingly desperate attempts to lose himself (and his money) while swimming in the Indian Ocean; the increasing desperation comes from the painful realization that performing in a movie about "a modern genocidal atrocity" keeps the performer successfully insulated from the effects/affects of that atrocity. Gray repeatedly marvels at the fake blood, the fake fire, and the expensive composition of the fake "historical record" everywhere operative and visible in making The Killing Fields. But while Gray finds all this artifice perversely marvelous and absurdly appropriate, he also recognizes that it does not quite provide him with the material he needs to become "a poetic reporter" of anything but "absence." Hence, he begins to concentrate his will on experiencing a Perfect Moment—a performative "oneness" that he can embroider, embellish, and repeat in the performance. So eager is he to lose himself that he manufactures losses where there are none: he jumps to the conclusion that he has lost his swimming partner Ivan, when Ivan is himself safely bobbing beyond a wave Gray cannot ride. Gray's ubiquitous sense of loss is so great, his performances suggest, that as a spectator I can admire his strength for speaking about them, but I had better not ask him to let them go. In Swimming, Gray's "speaking" is not in any way an authentic exposure, nor is it a sincere attempt to "share" his selfhood: Gray's cathartic exercises are self-enclosed. More troubling, however, is that Gray's work manipulates the spectator into feeling either empathic sympathy or profound impassiveness. These are the only choices. And neither of them advance or invigorate theatrical performance.
Gray is obviously an attractive and charismatic performer, but increasingly he is a "safe" one. His attempt to use himself as his own material is no longer unusual or raw; he himself has polished it and other performers' more radical self-explorations have inured us to the shock such an approach originally had. Increasingly, Gray's work seems quite far from his purported project of using art "as a conscious contrivance for the purpose of survival." I don't begrudge Gray economic or popular success, but I am disappointed that he has not faced the truly radical innovative edge in his project. To face this edge in Swimming would require that Gray abandon his boyish unconsciousness and explore his own misogyny, racism, colonialism, and economic imperialism, which run like sludge throughout his text. Such an exploration would not abandon irony, but it would add to it a more challenging intelligence. I don't care one bit that Gray has all of these embarrassing attitudes toward other people and other cultures, most of us do; but what I find disappointing is his assumption that this can be glossed over without comment in favor of some boyish charm or political naiveté. He makes it clear early on that being apolitical is a bonus in Joffe's eyes. After hearing Joffe's plot summary of Killing Fields, Gray tells him: "'I know nothing about what you've told me. I'm not very political—in fact, I've never voted in my life.' And Roland said, 'Perfect! We're looking for the American ambassador's aide.'" This kind of joke is funny at first. But the humor never gets any smarter or any deeper, despite Gray's assertion in the "Author's Note" to The Book that he "still understand[s] and love[s] America, precisely for its sense of humor…. Humor. The bottom line." Gray seems unable or unwilling to consider the politics of most of the humor in Swimming to Cambodia. This quick-take approach gives Swimming an appealingly polished surface and a completely unthreatening substance. It also is responsible for the easy and multiple transformations to which the text has lent itself.
The most successful of these transformations is the filmic one, and a large part of that success comes from Jonathan Demme's ability to critique Gray's unconsciousness. Relying only on a few slides, some remarkable lighting effects, several well chosen clips from Joffe's film, a zippy musical score composed by Laurie Anderson, and Gray's commanding physical presence, Demme is able to enhance Gray's "epiphanies," transforming them into visual/psychological wonders. Perhaps the best moment in the film occurs when Gray is narrating his Perfect Moment in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Demme's camera starts to rock back and forth as if it too were in the ocean. Gray's narrative is so thrilling, Demme seems to suggest, that the camera itself is carried deep into the waves just to find out "what happens next." Moreover, as Gray describes his little perceptor/performer bobbing up and down on the ocean the camera seems to position itself in a logically impossible but visually compelling space: we seem to see both what Gray is seeing and we continue to see Gray seeing—Demme seems to locate the spectator behind and in front of Gray's eyes. (Perhaps the most celebrated example of this dualistic camera vision is in Hitchcock's Vertigo, when Jimmy Stewart is losing his mind and we see him fall through mental space; but that sequence relies on animation while Demme's is "naturalistic") As Gray recites his narrative denouement—
And up the perceiver would go with the waves, then down it would go, and the waves would come up around the perceiver, and it could have been in the middle of the Indian Ocean, because it could see no land. And then waves would take the perceiver up to where it could look down this great wall of water … far below, and then "Whoop!" the perceiver would go down again—
the camera rocks back and forth. Gray, still sitting in the Chair behind the desk, practices yoga head rolls while the camera "bobs" along with his modulating voice. Demme manages to find the perfect cinematic device to express Gray's Perfect Moment. Moreover, Demme underlines the failure of Gray's own vision. By virtue of appearing to be both inside and outside Gray's eyes, the camera effectively underlines Gray's inability to see anything other than himself. While the camera can, as it were, forget its own ontology and see as if it were Gray, Gray himself lacks precisely this visionary grasp.
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A New Face in Graver's Corners
Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia and the Evolution of an Ironic Presence