We want life to feel like it does in the movies, to be alive with the intensity of so many heightened moments, adrenalin-charged climaxes in which all the senses are hyper-tuned. And so Gray stays on in Thailand after his part is finished because he can’t leave until he has had a “perfect moment,” and in that moment an ultimate epiphany. He hangs around for the shooting of the scene where the Khmer Rouge blow up a Coca Cola factory, and the journalist John Swain, who is running alongside, out of camera range, with the actor who is playing him, exclaims with a swell of ecstasy in his voice “What a lovely war!” as he relives what for him may have been one of his own “perfect moments.”
For Sydney Schanberg that “perfect moment” comes when, with a gun at his back, he defies his Cambodian captors and walks out of the hut towards the Americans who have just arrived. He gambles that they won’t shoot him in front of the Americans. Gray reveals that Schanberg told him that he “never felt so alive as in that moment.”
Spalding Gray giving a brief history of the bombing of Cambodia in his performance Swimming to Cambodia. Photo: Jay Thompson published in Media Arts, Spring/Summer 1985.
What kind of society have we become when the only time we feel truly and fully and vitally alive is in the face of violent death? When in the absence of that experience we must substitute a drug in order to simulate that feeling of meaning and power.
Gray is on a train in Pennsylvania and he meets this sailor Jim who says he used to be stationed in Cuba but now he’s in Philadelphia and he can’t say what he does because it is top secret. He’s got a redneck accent and little ears like pasta shells and he likes to swing with couples, and he’s very high on blue flake cocaine. It turns out he’s the guy who is sitting in a room in a nuclear submarine with his finger next to the green button connected to a rocket with a nuclear warhead. But he’s not worried, he tells Gray, because there’s a bombproof underwater room where they’ll go if he pushes it. It’s not that real life isn’t as strange as Dr. Strangelove. It’s just that it can’t be re-edited. The pieces can’t be glued back together after they’ve been blown apart. The death of the body is irreversible.
If our sense of what is “real,” what is “alive” can be measured by the degree to which we feel pleasure or pain, then the pervasive sense of “unreality” in our lives may be equated with an absence of feeling. It is the numbness that is our real enemy.
Gray tells us quite matter-of-factly, like a man reading a newspaper, that General Craighton Abrams thought there was a headquarters in Cambodia like the Pentagon, that Pol Pot was educated in Paris on Mao and Rousseau, that Nixon spent a lot of time watching movies about General Patton, that Lon Nol gave poetic metaphoric speeches full of magical Buddhist symbols, and that he cried. Maybe, just maybe, five years of bombing with twenty-five percent losses set the Khmer Rouge up for genocide. Maybe it could make anyone go mad. Maybe it could happen anywhere. Even here. Maybe every country should make a war movie, Gray tells us, instead of a war.
Reluctantly Gray returns home and experiences severe culture shock — a sense of deflation, flatness, isolation. The world that is familiar seems alien and ugly, deaf and blind. It is a profoundly lonely experience. Cambodia is incised on his consciousness and it throbs. He is torn between his feeling of guilt and helplessness on one side, and his own personal ambitions on the other, his desire to return to Southeast Asia, and his instinctive understanding of the necessity of capitalizing on his role in the film and advancing his career. He comes to terms with his sense of loss and ambivalence with the realization that his work is the only instrument he has, and it is his survival.
It’s too late to become a doctor or lawyer, he tells us, but he could play one in Hollywood, and we laugh with him. He goes to LA, gets frisked by the cops for brown bagging a beer in the street, and feels like he is in a scene in Hill Street Blues. He visits the Cambodian refugees in Long Beach who were in The Killing Fields and they’re wearing dark glasses and want to know how to get a Hollywood agent, and Gray imagines a Norman Lear sit-com — aka Pol Pot.
It was not a “lovely war” for Dith Pran, or for Dr. Haing S. Ngor the Cambodian gynecologist who plays Pran in the film, and whose own story is very much like Pran’s. It is important for us to remember that, and that Ngor had to relive the horrors, not the high points of his life in the making of the film. We must not forget that it is Pran’s story, and Cambodia’s barely told story that unfortunately made both Schanberg’s and Gray’s possible.
Gray synthesizes everything that happened to him and the result is Swimming to Cambodia, a very moving and insightful work. He does what he knows how to do, which is use the medium of art and theater to look into himself and our culture, and through that process tell us about ourselves. If we will listen he can make us remember that Cambodia is still there and still dying. He can make us want to know more about what happened there, how and why. And he can make us question not only the values that make all the Cambodias of the world possible, but the celebration of those values. If we are willing to really think about it, maybe, just maybe, a change is possible.
Photo: Jacki Apple.
… In West Texas there’s really no reason to have a memory until you get your first car…and usually when you get that car and take it out on a highway, just a flat farm road at night, and you drive it as fast as it will go, and you turn the radio up as loud as it will go…and one of the voices I remember during my adolescence — it was like the first kind of outside voice — was Wolfman Jack who was in a little radio station in Del Rio, Texas….
Terry Allen 1994
Terry Allen’s Radio Cinema (2000/2018)
Radio especially is really about images for me. It’s not about language per se, or theoretical musings. It’s really about making an image happen that gets into your brain….I think it is about cinema. I think you see it. If you listen to it you don’t have any choice but to see it.
Terry Allen
Radio Cinema. The phrase itself seems a contradiction in terms. Unless of course you came of age in a car, speeding down the American highway with the radio turned up, pumping out the soundtrack to the wide screen panorama playing itself out on the windshield. Big cars and rock ‘n’ roll and gravelly voiced disc jockeys traveling down Route 66 from the New Jersey suburbs all the way to LA. Rebel Without A Cause meets The Graduate. It’s a whole montage of images and sounds. Lives played out to Alan Fried and Wolfman Jack1 and Janis Joplin, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, the Supremes and The Doors, Good Golly Miss Molly and Blue Suede Shoes. Recalling the role radio played in his teen years in 1950s Lubbock, Texas, Terry Allen told me “… a lot of us, maybe ten or fifteen people would go out into a cotton patch in our cars and park ‘em in a circle with the headlights facing in. Everybody would tune to the same radio station. We would turn on our headlights and turn up the radios and DANCE in this circle of cars ….” If that’s not cinematic I don’t what is!
Still, the traditions of narrative fiction in radio are rooted in theater. It has understandably been a playwright’s medium, not a cinematographer’s. The ear supersedes the eye in aural space. Thus stories have been told through dialogs and monologs. However, the generation of American