Читать книгу Performance / Media / Art / Culture - Jacki Apple - Страница 15

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 them, comes slowly into focus. In his last big scene it takes sixty-six takes in the 110F degree heat with eight thousand Thais in Cambodian military uniforms marching toward him, for Gary to get his lines right. It’s the scene where the Americans are evacuating. The Ambassador’s got the flag folded up, Schanberg is staying on to the end to get the story, and the helicopters are waiting. When Gray is in the helicopter he does not look out and think about the bombing and the human wreckage in Cambodia. He relives Apocalypse Now. As do the Marines at Camp Pendleton where they later shoot the helicopter part of the scene. They cheer and belt out the Wagnerian theme song, even though it is the day after the massacre of Marines in Beirut.

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