And Everything Is Going Fine

“I like telling the story of life more than living it.”
- Spalding Gray

One of the highlights of this year’s SXSW was seeing “And Everything is Going Fine,” a film about late performance artist Spalding Gray.

Editor Susan Littenberg and director Steven Soderbergh weave together the story of Gray’s life in his own words, artfully selecting and arranging clips from his performances and interviews from over 90 hours of footage. The depiction of Gray’s life that emerges is moving and poetic, and reveals that telling personal stories on stage was Gray’s way of keeping the chaos of the world at bay, if only for 60 to 90 minutes at a time. I related strongly to his journey to finding his artistic voice, and to his comment that writing was so hard because unlike performing, you didn’t get any feedback; I wonder what a Spalding Gray blog might have been like.

We’ll never know, of course, because in 2004, Gray killed himself. The film extensively foreshadows Gray’s suicide, but fails to reference it outright, and thus undermines the integrity of an otherwise brilliant portrait.

We see that Gray’s obsession with death began in childhood; that he had vivid suicide fantasies; even that he accepted a role in Steven Soderbergh’s “A King of the Hill” only after the director explained that the character he wanted Gray to play was “ruled by regret to the extent that he kills himself.” We learn, too, that Gray’s mother killed herself, and – in one of the most chilling moments of the film — that she asked him how she should do it.

Gray describes how painful it was that in the aftermath of her death, no one would use the word “suicide,” instead conjuring rumors of cancer, among other avoidance tactics. Spalding himself was the first to make the manner of her death public, after exploring it in one of his early performances with the Wooster Group.  Given this, it’s outrageous to me that the filmmakers would avoid direct reference to Gray’s own suicide; this decision is fundamentally disloyal to the artist’s story.

I had the opportunity to ask Littenberg about this decision after the SXSW screening, and her answer was disappointing. She explained that the rest of the film is told in Gray’s own words, and there was no way to reference his suicide without diverging from that artistic choice. Weak. If you want to honor a man (and I believe that’s what these filmmakers set out to do), your obligation to the truth and to telling the story in a manner that honors his legacy trumps adherence to narrative consistency; and really, showing a brief epitaph at the end of the film would hardly have felt disruptive – on the contrary, its absence felt disruptive.

Littenberg also said something to the effect of, “If you know, then you know. And if you don’t, well, you can look it up.” I don’t think good storytelling relies on people looking up key events that you leave out of your film.

Not to mention: Gray abdicated the right to tell his own story when he took his life. Maybe he thought that killing himself was a way to script his death, the way he’d scripted the story of so much of his life. He was wrong.

Thanks to Alison Byrne Fields for telling me about this film, and taking me to see it. She rocks.

Related Links:

• Variety‘s review of “And Everything is Going Fine”
• Good article about Gray in New York magazine