“Are there any secrets that I have?” Gray asks the camera at a much earlier point in Soderbergh’s documentary, “Are there stories I don’t tell?” Gray poses these questions while standing in front of a tombstone, perhaps his mother’s grave. “Yes,” he replies curtly and turns away. In such moments, And Everything is Going Fine hints at how little we knew of the man who made his life a public performance. “I’m afraid of life,” Gray tells an interviewer elsewhere in the footage, “because everything is chance. Doing the monologue is making it up: giving structure to what is normally chaos.” The artist’s admission that creating his life story involves fabrication (“making it up”) leads him to wonder if the process is “making him too extroverted, perhaps even pandering.” At the end of this clip, he laments the predicament that self-based performance has brought him: “No living; just writing.”
     Gray did not finish writing his last monologue. Nor did he write a suicide note. Instead, he carried out some puzzling last acts. On January 9th, 2004, he was spotted riding the Staten Island Ferry, and was removed from that vessel for acting suspiciously. The following afternoon, January 10th 2004, Gray took his sons to a movie, Big Fish. That evening, he told his family he was going out for a drink with a friend. Hours later, Gray called his apartment from the ferry terminal. His son Theo answered, and Gray said he would be back soon. “Love you,” he reportedly said.² 
     Not unlike Gray, Soderbergh uses music to express what words cannot. Among the most emotionally searing scenes in the film is a clip from the end of Morning, Noon, and Night (1998). Here, Gray uses a bright yellow boom box to reconstruct a spontaneous family dance that he enacted at home one night with his wife and kids. Loud, ebullient music by the British band Chumbawamba fills the room. Gray looks positively goofy as he struts across the stage, first shimmying and pirouetting, then dancing like an Egyptian. Yet for once, he is clearly a man in love with people outside himself. The tears of grief that Chumbawamba’s “I Get Knocked Down” solicits are for a moment that did not last.
     Powerful music again fills the theatre as Soderbergh’s end credits roll. This time, the music is a haunting rock requiem written by Forrest Gray, the teenaged son of Kathie Russo and Spalding Gray. Electrifying, tender, and raw: that is how I remember Forrest Gray’s tribute. A perfect match for the spirit of Soderbergh’s documentary, which is complexly affective: at once sad, moving, frustrating, and surprisingly funny. The film raises many questions. What is truly refreshing is that And Everything is Going Fine does not try to answer them. Instead, viewers are left remembering and filling in the blanks. 

_{² Wood, Gaby. “Profile: Shades of Gray.” Guardian Unlimited 26 Dec. 2004. Guardian.co.uk. 1 May 2010.
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_{Related Articles from The Fanzine:}

_{Review of Soderbergh's The Informant}

_{Alex Segade on When Marina Abramovic Dies}

_{Oscar B. De Alessi on Youth Culture, Representation and Suicide}

_{Image on page two courtesy of artist Ali Hossaini. Learn more about his work here.}  

_{Also thanks to John Boland, who maintains the Spalding Gray website.}