Spaulding Gray’s Perfect Moment

Spaulding Gray’s Perfect Moment
by Daniel Tucker

I found Spaulding Gray’s monologue Swimming to Cambodia, directed by Jonathan Demme in 1987, surprisingly provocative for such a stripped-down format. In truth, it was not so simple as man at a table with a glass of water and a notebook. It was a highly produced video with multiple camera angles, lighting effects, soundtrack, alternating backdrops and most certainly multiple-takes. Gray utilized a wide range of story-telling and performance techniques which appear simple because they are effective, but most certainly are the result of years of training. He build tension like the best novelists and screenwriters do, by establishing the groundwork and introducing an inciting event - in his case, it was auditioning for a film about Cambodia - from which the story arch is built up and brought back into resolution. In this project there were certainly many subplots and tangents, but he brought them all back to his story of being in this film. My favorite scene was the one where he proposed that he could not leave the film shoot without having a “perfect moment”, suggesting that all exotic trips need a perfect moment to be complete. Check out the clip here: