2nd
Gray’s Anatomy (1996)
Spalding Gray talks to the camera (to himself) for an hour and half while being wheeled through a series of themed sets. The background noise is directed by Stephen Soderbergh, but the performance (and the film) is all Gray. He delivers a continuous monologue. He wrote it. It’s good. Any actor will tell you: that’s a rare thing. Good Monologues are stories that would fall flat as essays or bore as coffee anecdotes, but are sharp, clear, and witty when preformed on stage. The explicit element of “performance” is important - the fear of failure must always be imminent. Will Gray forget his lines? Will he over-emphasize a punchline? Will his throat seize up from too much exertion? Filmed, we lose all these anxieties (excitements; everyone wants to see the trapeze artist fall — until she does) and a lot of the tension gets let out of the piece because we know the director can always call for another take. Soderbergh does his best to build sensation by breaking up sections of the monologue into separate thematic set pieces; the gimmick both works and doesn’t. Gray rambles on gamely from behind an aquarium, in a false-wall cathedral, and in front of green screens. Sometimes Soderbergh’s self-justifying strategy works, as when shadow puppets act out a gruesome operation behind Gray while he details the same with words. Other times it seems like a competition between director and star. Who will win: Gray’s booming voice or Soderbergh’s booming camera?
The monologue is neurotic - Gray, suffering from a “corneal pucker,” tries to circumvent Western medicine with fetishes, diet changes, and sweat lodge retreats - and you get the sense, especially when he forces his voice into a false nasal register, that the storyteller was not lying when he claimed to be a WASP born with a Jewish soul. Either by effort or by fate, Gray became on stage a charming and bizarre Woody Allen type, a victim of modernity and self. A Woody with a full head of hair. Gray made four of these monologue films - Swimming to Cambodia, Monster in a Box, and Terrors of Pleasure and this - all in the late 80s and early 90s. After that he acted in other people’s stuff, wrote, and put on revivals of his old shows. In the early 2000’s, a serious car crash left him both emotionally and physically scarred, and his neurotic tendencies came to an awful sort of bloom. He became obsessed with designing a “creative suicide.” His wife, and Oliver Sacks, tried to dissuade him. “You would be much more creative if alive.” In 2004, Gray killed himself by leaping from the Staten Island Ferry. He had watched the film Big Fish the night before.
Spalding Gray was a gifted verbal thinker. Seeing him preform on stage would have been better than going to the movies. Any movies. Gray’s Anatomy, and his other concert pieces, are not the ideal way to experience his intellect or wit. But they’re what we’ve got. Check out one of his films. Swimming to Cambodia was directed by Jonathan Demme, if names matter to you. I don’t know if his family gets a cut from netflix rentals, but it’s worth a shot.
