“I’m not making up any of these stories I’m telling you tonight.”
Spalding Gray addresses us directly.
“Except for the fact that the banana sticks to the wall when it hits.”
He’s sitting at a wooden desk with a notebook and a condenser microphone. He’s performing a monologue.
The monologue is Swimming to Cambodia. It was written and performed in the mid 80s by Spalding Gray, a sometimes actor and monologuist who leapt into the East River in 2004, and adapted to film by Jonathan Demme in 1987. The adaptation, though, is hardly that: Barring the almost unbearably 80s prelude, Demme does little more than document Gray’s absorbing performance. (It’s more Stop Making Sense than Silence of the Lambs.) It’s all monologue, and it’s perplexingly engaging.
Swimming to Cambodia is ostensibly about Gray’s experiences in Thailand shooting Roland Joffé’s preachy The Killing Fields in which Gray played a bit part. But he is unstuck in time. The structure of the narrative could, with equal conviction, be called lackadaisically whimsical or pressingly thematic. He leaps capriciously between the film shoot in Thailand, his girlfriend’s loft in Manhattan, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the bar carriage of an Amtrak train. If there is an conscious thematic strand running from beginning to end, it’s well disguised.
Empathy is perhaps the most conspicuously recurring motif. Gray frames discussion of the Cold War with an anecdote about a raucous neighbour in Manhattan with whom he was unable to find peace: “There are people [in the apartment building] saying we should start a collection to hire a vigilante to off this woman – to kill her – and I find I’m not saying ‘no’. That’s how New York has changed me: I’m willing to put money into the pot.” His subject matter is almost exclusively politically charged, but he hardly draws any definite conclusions. He conveys, rather, bewilderment: “How does a country like America – or rather, how does America, because certainly there’s no country like it – begin to find the language to negotiate or talk with a country like Russia or Libya, if I can’t even begin to get it with my people on the corner of Broadway and John Street?”
It is moral ambiguity that allows Swimming to Cambodia to remain timeless, while The Killing Fields fades from relevance. Gray paints in neither black or white. He discusses, without condemnation, the American bombing of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, Thai prostitutes (‘There’s a saying that Thais are the nicest people money can buy’), trigger-happy Cold Warriors. Even his discussion of Pol Pot, a man by most accounts responsible for the death of about two million Cambodians, hardly casts aspersion. He places the blame, rather, on the cosmos: “perhaps an invisible cloud of evil that circles the Earth and lands at random places like Iran, Beirut, Germany, Cambodia, America, set the Khmer Rouge out to commit the worst auto-homeo genocide in modern history.”
It is the business of his monologue to consider geopolitics within a framework of, primarily, emotion. In a resonant episode, we are introduced to an officer in the US Navy named, or called, ‘Jack Daniels’. Daniels is a delightfully dogmatic anti-communist whose rhetoric includes: “The Russians are stupid people; they’re backwards. You know on their ships, they don’t even have electrical intercoms? They still speak through tubes?”
Gray tells us: “Suddenly, I had this enormous fondness for the Russian navy, for all of Mother Russia. The thought of these men, like innocent children, speaking through empty toilet paper rolls, empty paper towel rolls, where you can still hear doubt, confusion, brotherly love, ambivalence, all those human tones, coming through the tube.”
Spalding Gray’s magnetism is difficult to distil. He’s an enthusiastic observer. And there’s a charming neurosis about him. (He’s been aptly dubbed the Wasp Woody Allen.) He’s appropriately self-conscious and insecure. “All weakness tends to corrupt,” he says. “Impotence corrupts absolutely.” He’s scared of commitment to Renee, his long term partner, and, in roughly equal measure, to America: “I can’t even look at a weather map anymore! It’s too big! That’s why I moved to Manhattan – I wanted to move to an island off the coast of America.” Gray exhibits a mercurial ability to place in harmony emotional pathos, political rumination, and stand-up comedy.
But it’s his perpetual bewilderment that’s most engaging. He makes no claims to understand anything fully. Or even remotely. The world is too complex for coherence. In lieu, he shares inchoate thoughts, semi-truths, half-judgments and deep-seated fears. To demand more is hubris.
This thesis is most succinctly articulated by (or, at least, attributed to) Spalding Gray’s friend, the South African playwright Athol Furgard, towards the end of Swimming to Cambodia: “The sea’s a lovely lady when you play in her. If you play with her, she’s a bitch. Play in the sea, yes, but never play with her. You’re lucky to be here. You’re lucky to be alive.”
I endorse Swimming to Cambodia. Watch it if you can find it. It’s entirely beyond criticism.
