Initially it was Spalding Gray who approached the director Jonathan Demme with the possibility of turning his 1985 monologue, Swimming to Cambodia, into a feature film. Even though he has been quoted on several occasions saying that ‘it was never my [his] idea to put them [the monologues] on film,’ Gray seems to have seen past his former reservations, thus allowing himself (and his performative persona) to ‘cross over’ into a new medium. In an interview with Cineasté magazine, he espouses the reasons for this ‘sudden’ change of heart:
It’s less expensive to see, so you get an audience that cannot afford a theater ticket. Second, you get an audience that would never go to the theater at all, but which does go to the movies. The surprising thing that happened in retrospect is that because the film is so minimal, because there are no cutaways, the audience is required to make their own film. That’s not to say that doesn’t happen in the theater, but it happens differently in the movie theater. I think you come to film with certain expectations and conditioning. You have seen so many movies before that offer a kind of literal representation of reality. When it’s not there, there is the motivation for the audience to make self-cinema.
This sense of contesting, multiple audiences (the movie-goers giving documentary cinema a try, the cineastes making a leap of faith and considering the filmed monologue as a veritable cinematic form, the penniless theatre aficionados experiencing a re-packaged ‘live act’ performative gesture) endows rather than pilfers away Gray’s performative style, perhaps all done unwittingly, with the unspoken awareness of both subject matter (the experiences leading to and fro his casting in Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields) and its ‘execution’ (how to ‘speak about’ someone else’s traumatic past without exploiting it for obvious personal gain). A veteran stage performer, schooled in the performative exploits of the New York avant-garde scene during the nineteen-sixties and seventies , Gray proceeds to situate his dramatic practices (in this case, the monologue delivered in a film format) within a cultural environment (American) that is inextricably tied to his own dramatic self-enactments (the 1987 Jonathan Demme film was shot during three separate live performances in Gray’s ‘performative habitat’, the Performing Garage on Wooster Street in Lower Manhattan, where he has been ‘present’ on stage for nearly three decades).
On a virtually empty stage, save for a few props (four to be exact – a glass of water, an open notebook, a map of Southeast Asia, and a pointing device), sitting behind a desk, wearing the quotidian plaid shirt and blue jeans, Gray unravels his ‘speaking memory’. Working with a handful of props that do not appear to be even there, on stage, next to his demure figure, Gray approaches the unseemly complexity of his experiences heads (vocal cords) on: the audiences’ attention is focused on the only relevant signifier of meaning, Gray’s multifarious voice; everything else (shirt, jeans, notebook, map) plays second fiddle to the performer’s reverberated life experiences. Consequently, Gray the performer ‘speaks’ so that the audiences present may ‘partake’ on what anthropologist Marianne A. Paget calls ‘Erlebnis’ (life as lived through).
The technique of speaking directly to an audience dates back to the times of Ancient Greek play-practices. The term for such a scene in a drama is parabasis. Traditionally rendered in form of an ode which members of the chorus in a classical Attic comedy put forward, directly, to present audiences, a ‘parabasis’ semi-sequence was seen to exist independently of the play’s action, and usually marked the anticipated ending of Ancient Greek (Hellenic) comedic performances. However, this technique has been used by the likes of Sophocles, in his tragedies, and Shakespeare, in his characters’ soliloquies as well as at the beginning and ending of certain plays. In more recent times, ‘parabasis’ story-sharing has also been put to use by some of America’s most resounding theatrical voices (including the likes of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Tony Kushner, August Wilson, to name but a few - consider Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, where the playwright has his alter ego, Tom Wingfield’s character, reach the audience by standing in front of a veil so as to distance himself from the play’s action when commenting on the story of his family’s life. In Kushner’s ‘Theatre of the Fabulous act’, the two-part Angels in America extravaganza, all of the characters (of this or the other world), at one time or another in the play, address the audience directly, in parabasis fashion, delivering some of the play’s most somber comments on the political and social reality in contemporary human relationships. Likewise, both Miller and Wilson, respectfully, endow their (this time around) supporting characters with the ability to project their private thoughts directly to the audiences: with Miller, it is usually a female character, such as Joe Keller’s wife, Kate, in All My Sons, whereas with Wilson, the emphasis is placed on the racial rather than gender distinction of the marginalized character, as for example the case of the victimized musician Toledo in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. (See C. W. E. Bigsby’s A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982-1985), and Modern American Drama, 1945-1990 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992)).
Moreover, this story-telling ritualistic practice descends from a narrative as well as a dramatic tradition; it is particularly present among oral storytellers who employed the technique to regain the audience’s attention during lapses in action, to underline certain parts of the plot, or to pass on moral and philosophical statements about their characters’ life-choices. Without referring to this old story-teller’s ‘stratagem’ by its westernized name, Native American writer, scholar and activist, Gerald Vizenor, talks about the sheer ‘trickery’ of the parabasis story-telling routine, and its place in the novels, oral histories, tricky liberation stories by what he calls ‘postindian writers’. According to Vizenor, the ability to shift personalities and skins when creating a narrative voice or voices, to go in and out of temporality herein perceived against the tradition of the realist novel or story, allows Native American story-tellers to create a narrative ‘native presence’ that acts both as a revision and a futurity, which then in turn, helps ground the exigency for ‘survivance’, in both text and discourse.
In that respect, when Gray voices the final thoughts of his performance in Demme’s 1987 filmed version, telling the audiences that he finally understands what killed Marilyn Monroe, as an auto-performer he re-members the potentially ‘futile power’ voiced memory takes on in a public space, like a theatre house or a cineplex. At the same time, he and director Jonathan Demme make sure that the audiences remain seated for an additional writing on the screen, which reads:
TO THE CAMBODIANS AND CAMBODIA, A COUNTRY BEYOND MY IMAGINATION AND MUCH TOO FAR TO SWIM TO.
The dedication segment, together with the Marilyn Monroe remark, both conveniently sparse, carry the weight of the monologue’s leit motif; they open up, rather than enclose, the auto/ethnographic journey that Gray the performer ‘tracks’ for his audiences. The dedication, for one, is a cleverly disguised warning about the journey itself: if what the audiences are looking for is an ‘historically truthful’ ethnographic account of what life has been like for the Cambodian population during the sixties and seventies of the past century, what it truly ‘felt’ like to live through the era of great social and political unrest, what it ‘took’ to survive the toll of the Khmer Rouge’s punishments, they (the audiences) have signed up for the wrong journey. Instead, what they are about to pay witness to, in Demme’s 1987 filmed version of Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia, is a narrative about the craft of narrating life’s minutiae, an auto/performative piece about the art of dramatic recollection, an auto/ethnographic attempt which scrutinizes and elaborates on the notion of art-full (re)presentation of historic events.
Listening to Gray’s personalized expose of art imitating life imitating art, I, myself, felt a disquieting sense of hearing someone talk about my own life, not that I have personally experienced the same mixture of candor, humor and imaginative non-fictionality as Spalding Gray has. Even though, throughout the film, the audience is aware of Gray’s presence on and off the screen, body and head attached, every time the performer opens his mouth, the audiences’ attention drifts towards the voice rather than the body it belongs to. The film critic Roger Ebert identifies this omnipresent story-telling trait as part of another, earlier twentieth-century medium, the radio. Ebert links the ‘radio phenomenon’ of the monologue’s filmed version to the spell-binding effect Gray’s storytelling practice exhumes: although what the audiences look at is a single face on a small screen, what is said (and how it is said) supplants the physicality of Gray’s body. Essentially, the filmed monologue unfolds like a ‘radio play’, allowing the present audiences to picture-add, in the solitude of their imaginative minds, the visual memories to Gray’s spoken recollection.
Consequently, I, too, managed to ‘locate’ myself within the volatile ‘spaces’ of his ‘spoken memory’. In that respect, when he tells us that he finally ‘gets’ what killed Marilyn Monroe, we are offered an investment into our fascination, and at the same time, our disregard for auto/biographically linked art. Henceforth, if we choose to deny the private self its sacred abode in the immediacy of our secluded lives, we then run the risk of breaking off the umbilical cord that ties us to a historic past, while, at the same time, we allow for that past to ‘take over’ our memories and ‘shape’ their (re)presentations on a larger cultural canvas, oftentimes changing them beyond recognition. In a sense, we remain tempted to look for ‘alternative’ ways that might satisfy our ‘disrupted’ private lives and their undaunting ‘affairs with the past’. We then ‘go after’ men and women who seem to have lived their entire lives in the public’s eye, born and raised, and killed in its vicinity. We crucify them over and over again, as they help appease our immanent sense of guilt, betrayal, inadequacy, disconnectedness, boredom. We seem to need them today more than ever, since the present-day rules of ‘detached self-immersion’ are blighting. We create iconoclastic cultural narratives that no longer require the icon; only the thought of it will suffice.
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