Chuck Klosterman On Media And Culture by Chuck Klosterman

Author:Chuck Klosterman [Klosterman, Chuck]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

If the appreciation of reality-based entertainment can be broken into two classes—and at the moment, it seems like everything in America is destined to be broken into two classes—there is no clearer schism than a movie like Swimming to Cambodia and a TV show like MTV’s The Real World. On the celluloid of the former, you find a darkly insightful, tragically neurotic, blue-state intellectual trying to explain why his own life is unfathomable. On the videotape of the latter, you find drunken red-state coeds who allegedly represent the totality of their generation. They seem to derive from two totally different places; many of the people saddened by the death of Spalding Gray wouldn’t even know who Real World cocreator Mary-Ellis Bunim was (and certainly not that she died earlier this year). Yet the philosophical dissonance between these two is less than logic might dictate; both found entertainment within the banality of everyday life, and both saw meaningful drama in the ostensibly undramatic.

Gray may not have invented the monological art, but he certainly did it better than anyone else who tried. He was just an odd man talking about his own trivialities, but it sometimes felt like a person twisting (and ripping) his subconscious mind in public. He was never enigmatic about his potential for suicide; he wrote about those increasingly dark fantasies as overtly as possible. In 1997’s It’s a Slippery Slope, Gray superficially wrote about learning to ski but mostly wrote about the affair that ended his first marriage; early in the monologue, he finds himself pacing around Washington Square Park and thinking about the woman who would eventually become his mistress. But even those thoughts inexplicably turn morbid: “Should I call her?” he wondered. “Should I ‘touch base’ with her? Drop in for some tea? And I’m dwelling on the fact that I’m going to turn fifty-two, and I’m thinking about Mom, and how she committed suicide at fiftytwo, and did that mean I was gonna do it, too?”

As it turns out, Gray lasted ten years longer than his mother, ultimately plunging off the Staten Island Ferry in January. Retrospectively, the conditions of his suicide seem so predictable they almost feel unoriginal. Yet—somehow—it was still a shock to hear that this had happened, and that Gray had actually done what he always suggested; for days after his disappearance, people optimistically speculated that Gray was merely researching his next book and would emerge unscathed. And this is the fundamental paradox of Gray’s life and death: no matter how intimately an artist expresses his own unhappiness, we always assume he’s still a character. Spalding Gray’s genius was that he could make his external monologues sound like internal dialogues; his genius derived from his authenticity, and that authenticity was the reason he could sit behind a table and talk solipsistically for ninety minutes without ever seeming dull. It was his authenticity that made him entertaining. But it still didn’t make people believe what he was saying. It didn’t matter how many times Gray stared into the eyes of his audience and essentially said, “I am going to kill myself.

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