I finally saw the Spaulding Gray documentary I had mentioned before. Soderbergh does a great job in slicing and dicing archival footage of Gray’s performances for what essentially amounts to a “new” monologue about his life as a whole. The documentary stays pure Gray, no other new footage (e.g. interviews) is used.
But what tangled mess Gray’s psyche was! I saw movies of a few of his monologues years ago and, yes, they were twisted and autobiographical and wildly imaginative, but I had no idea just how autobiographical they actually were. Gray’s childhood may almost rival Augusten Burroughs’.
As he says in the documentary, his basic approach to the monologues was “poetic journalism,” i.e. reality filtered through his imagination. His public solo performances turned into swinging and flying psychopathological trapeze acts without safety nets. They were cathartic events in which he tried to come to grips with the psychological issues that plagued him.
Three things really stayed with me from the documentary: one, the incredible craftsmanship that went into the monologue performances. What comes across as him just showing up on stage and telling stories off-the-cuff, were instead very carefully developed and structured stories. Two, the frail looking images of Gray at the end of his life after having suffered severe hip and brain injuries from a car accident in Ireland. He never was the same again. In one shot he calls himself, when he was at his most helpless and needed constant care, a “half-dead spectator.” The third thing is just such a sad leitmotif in his life. The relationship, or lack thereof, he had with his mostly uncaring and unbalanced, if not psychotic, mother who also committed suicide clearly traumatized him. The documentary shows that he longed for some form of “mothering” for the rest of his life. At some point, he mentions that wherever he is, he always tries to ground himself by his physical location to the sea. “The sea,” he says, “is the mother.” Of course, given his apparent suicide by ‘sliding’ into the East River, this turned out be oddly ironic and prophetic. However, in the movie there is no reference of the suicide. Instead it ends with a series of photos of Gray as a young boy – the final photo is of him in the arms of his mother.