Perfect Match was a paradigm of alienation in the computer age — Press 1 to enter your profile, Press 2 for the Perfect Match bulletin, Press 3 to start the process, etc. The process is repeated for age, height, size, race, income, genital size, meeting preference — phone, letter, fax, video, modem, or in-person. At each selection preference the number of possible matches decreases until there is only one left. Guess who? None other than YOURSELF! The ultimate safe sex!
In the finale, Telecumference, Alta turned the international teleconference into a masturbating group orgasm with exclamatory moans and groans in six languages.
Goss set up a cause-and-effect equation that demonstrated that the solution is no solution. He framed this subject matter so that we might think about it in a larger social/political context, but did not get beyond clever illustration. It was a little bit like that recorded voice that asks you to PRESS 1, etc. But maybe that’s the point.
On the other hand, one might consider an even more insidious parallel. The Virus, that alien invader of both the body and the computer, does not distinguish flesh from circuitry.
Or is that just our way of trying to humanize our technology?
The Making of Cambodia: Spalding Gray and The Killing Fields (1985)
Cambodia, land of the Khmer people, lost civilization of Angkor. The name evokes mysteries, a specter of beauty and horror, ruined temples and valleys of bones. For several years Cambodia slipped out of the news, replaced first by Iran, then by Beirut and Central America, places that became of more vital concern to American “security.” Cambodia, a country that disappeared in the media, vanished from American consciousness. But then it never really was that present. It was that place next to Vietnam that we had bombed and abandoned. It was supposed to have been secret at the time, and it was never regular fare on the Six O’Clock Evening News. Later we could write it off as another one of Nixon’s follies. We heard about what happened there after we had gone — the Khmer Rouge massacres, the “killing fields.” But unlike Vietnam we didn’t actually get to see it. It still remained shrouded in secrecy, something too awful to imagine, a place possessed by madness, drenched in blood and bones. No longer vital to American interests, no longer “on the menu” as they say, this desiccated Cambodia with its millions dead and millions more starving could be forgotten, wiped out of the news and our memories so that we might divest ourselves as a people and a nation from responsibility.
To make Cambodia the subject of a live performance or a film — be it art or entertainment — and to say something meaningful is an exceedingly difficult task. Too often such subject matter is turned into media clichés and political rhetoric, either the patriotic propaganda of the self-justifying conservatives, or the moral pontifications of the leftist liberals, both wrapped in self-righteousness. To penetrate the defensive indifference of an American public that takes comfort and satisfaction in the irrational platitudes mouthed by its leaders on TV is equally challenging. Politically speaking, Cambodia is neither chic nor profitable these days. It’s old news and we have short memories. If you are under twenty-five it’s ancient history, and that is who Hollywood says the movie-going audience is.
Both British producer David Putnam and New York performer, writer, and master storyteller Spalding Gray approach the subject of Cambodia through personal stories invested with complex human emotions, rather than overtly political expositions. Putman’s film The Killing Fields directed by Roland Joffe, re-enacts a “real-life” story — that of the friendship between New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg and Cambodian journalist Dith Pran at the time of the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, and Pran’s subsequent struggle for survival and eventual escape from the Khmer Rouge. Gray’s latest monologue performance Swimming to Cambodia, Parts I and II, recounts his own experience of getting the part of the American Ambassador’s aide in The Killing Fields, of being on location in Thailand during the shooting of the film, and his difficulties in returning home.
Ruddy-faced, gray-haired, and dressed in a red- and- green plaid shirt, Gray sits at a table facing us like a newscaster. In Part I he is flanked on either side by a full-color map of Asia, and a black- and- white bombing map of Cambodia. “Saturday, June 18, 1983, Thailand, the Gulf of Siam,” he begins. He leans forward, his surface demeanor deadpan, matter-of-fact. But his delivery is intimate and intense, a fast-paced bombardment of anecdotes. He is like a friend sitting across a table from you at dinner telling you in detail the kinds of things you only tell a very good friend, and it is mesmerizing. Gray’s uncompromising candor and self-scrutiny, his ability to observe and report without judging, give the work its power and authenticity, as well as its dialectical tension. The contradictions within his narrative lie side-by-side, skin-to-skin, in an unlikely embrace. Gray allows us to make our own connections and conclusions, and in the process we discover that he has told us a lot of things we might prefer not to think about.
In his search for the “perfect moment” and what that means to him, he covers a lot of territory. He goes from the night on the beach on the Gulf of Siam where he hallucinates after two hits on a Thai stick and sees himself as a corpse lying in the sand, to a Kodachrome day at Paradise Beach on the Indian Ocean with water buffalo posing like they’re “in a Robert Wilson piece.” Gray and Ivan, one of the British cameramen, swim out farther and farther, testing the waters, and he realizes Ivan’s idea of a “perfect moment” is death. Gray takes us from the American Ambassador in Thailand (formerly the ambassador to Cambodia) who describes Cambodia as a “sinking ship,” to the Vietnamese Embassy where Tom Bird of the Vietnam Veterans Ensemble Theater explains to the Consul from Hanoi what being on the back burner means, “It’s like rice and coffee. Coffee (Central America) is the one the front of the stove now.” And then from the burning rubber tires, black smoke and fake blood of the movie where Ira Wheeler, former head of the Celanese Corporation is now an actor playing an Ambassador, sweats inside a black Cadillac while he’s “working on his emotions,” to those moments of confrontation in Gray’s life — the Canal Street subway station, the upstairs neighbor with the blasting stereo — when he has to decide whether or not he should take a stand. From the pleasures of Thailand’s thriving sex industry, we go to the pursuit of success in Hollywood.
Gray’s words transform it all into vivid pictures, and as we listen we simultaneously watch it on the big screen in our minds. The “real” scenes and the ones we’ve already seen in the film, the things that occurred elsewhere in Gray’s life, and the things that happen later are all carefully intercut. In fact, the whole underlying structure of the monologue is cinematic. Gray builds up each action-packed scene, then cuts away to another. The juxtapositions are unexpected. He rapidly pans the set, then zooms in to a tight close-up and holds it. Like the T-shirts on the Marines at Camp Pendleton that say “Skip the dialogue. Let’s blow something up.” Like the teak table in the Vietnamese Embassy with the carvings on it of elephants tearing down teak trees to make the table. These details become signposts.
Movies and television instruct us on what to expect, what to feel, and how to act in all the important moments — like war and love. But the real war and the movie about the war are not the same thing.
In his book Dispatches, Vietnam journalist Michael Herr writes:
The first few times I got fired at or saw combat deaths nothing really happened, all the responses got locked in my head. It was the same familiar violence only moved over to another medium, some kind of jungle play with giant helicopters and fantastic special effects, actors lying out there in canvas body bags waiting for the scene to end so they could get up again and walk it off. But that was some scene you found out, there was no cutting it […]. And even after you knew better you couldn’t avoid the ways in which things got mixed, the war itself with those parts of the war that were just like the movies […] just like all that combat footage from television.
In Swimming to Cambodia the inability to separate and distinguish between these two realities, and the actual disparities between