A meditation on Craig Gilbert and Me

By almost any standard, "An American Family" is one of the most important documentaries to be made in the history of television, and was proably the edgiest PBS ever got to boost its ratings, but a beautiful artistic edge that they've never been able to duplicate. So, how is it possible that Craig Gilbert never made a documentary again!

The best answer I could get was from watching a surprisingly good HBO movie about the making of "An Ameican Family," and Craig Gilbert gave the impression that art had mixed with life in ways he couldn't imagine when he embarked on his project, and he was shattered. "An American Family," became a suprise zeitgiest, and landed on the cover of Newsweek, so I'm sure Gilbert got a lot more attention than he imagined, and the thing about fame is that no one knows how they are going to react when it happens to them. But I think what brought Gilbert down is that the "Loud's," the family he chose to represent in American in '71, knee deep in the glam years, got as much criticism as they did from America, and really drawing a line in the sane over their morals, or lack of them. They were a classic upper middle class Santa Barbara nuclear family circa '71, and were on the verge of divorce, a reality that happens in the course of the shooting, so the family breaks up and America picked sides. Specifically, Gilbert was charged with egging on the divorce so that his 'documentary' would have a story, but he denies sleeping with Pat Loud.

I'd like to think that the genre defining brilliance of "An American Family" overwhelmed the auteur, and he had created something much greater and larger than he imagined when he embarked on the project, and I think this really happens in art all the time, and could be persuaded to argue that if it doesn't happen the art probably isn't great, and will serve more as entertainment than anything to be remembered. "An American Family" was truly the opposite of this, and somehow took on a life of its own that drowned Craig Gilbert in implications worthy of a crime in the court of the occult, or setting loose the demons out of a Pandora's Box. Clearly, it's the kind of work that couldn't be repeated or improved on, and yet artists go on in spite of achieving this, so why not Gilbert? I don't really know, but I feel a lot like him lately, even though my story isn't exactly the same. I've written more books than "If So Carried by the Wind," and all but started an art movement called "Bagism" that has yet to be released upon the world, but it's no a massive resume, and could just as easily end where it began.

I think Gilbert got hung up on the impossible to answer question of the effect he was having on people in real life, and how he was hurting them. He saw the ramifications of his art splayed back on a family that he'd become close to over the course of a year, and broke a few ethical grounds to get some footage (short of cheating), and so altered the results for art. More than that, Gilbert had to wonder to what degree his film had broken up a family, and how true he was in his anthropological rationale to be an accurate ethnographer, and how an ethnography ultimately alters the ethnographer, so he takes on the sins of those he's observing in order to better understand them, and is changed. At the very least, Gilbert and his skeleton crew of cinema verite idealists, made a masterpiece that all but changed how Americans looked at art, or TV, and to prove it "An American Family" has now become cited as a major influence on reality TV, but when I was growing up it was anthropology. To be honest, I'm not sure anyone knows what it is and that's what makes "An American Family" such an enigma that I never get tired of immersing in. Sure, some of this may have to do with me being raised in Southern California near the Loud's, and there's no doubt the art that mirrors our own actual life will touch us closer, or more intimately, than that which paints a foreign land, that makes us dream.

So, why do I feel like Craig Gilbert? Well, I've written a book that is a little like his movie. It's about an actual family in California, and it's also like an ethnography of a tribal way of life, and explicitly not a work of fiction. I was also told not to publish it because it hit too close to the bone, and would reveal people who didn't want to be revealed, unlike the Loud's, clamoring for attention. I was told it would be sacrilege to publish it even though it was eminently publishable, and that I'd pay a price in the occult realm, where the enemies of art toy with each other over the artist's soul. It's almost like I had the same wide eyed admiration Gilbert had except it was among my mentors and heroes in the realm of art, an elite few, who decreed many things on my behalf. Sure, Gilbert had the American public breathing down his throat, but the idea being someone was breathing down his throat, and that's a hard position to be in. I could also imagine some people begging for such attention, but to others it's too much to take, and they crumble under the pressure of scrutiny, and how their actions are affecting not only their earthly life, but possibly how they'll be judged by God. It's my belief that a work of creation can only elicit this feeling if it's truly worthy, and that it does so on its own volition, with a little help along the way.

It's very possible that with the publication of "If So Carried by the Wind," I will make almost no forward movement in art, and wallow in the implications of what I've done, but I'm not saying that as an over-romantic twenty year old! I really think I've done that one work of art people dream of and the implications are far bigger than I could even glean, even though I've been gleaning them for about 18 years now, and may spend the next 18 doing the same. Like "An American Family" I never get tired of reading this story, and I don't feel that way towards anything else I've written. It has literally been a fount of endless inspiration to me with no easy answers at the end, and every time I re-read it I see it in a new way. Sure, I get sick of it sometimes, but if I let it sit for a year or two and pick it up it's there for me all over again to prove my life as a writer was worth it.

I had a lot of crazy feelings when I was first told how good it was by Casey and Stan Rice. The first was pride that I'd done what I set out to do when I started writing at about twenty, and that I really had amounted to something. The next feeling was anger that I was being told I couldn't publish it, and that if I had a soul I wouldn't. I reveled in the irony for years of how the one important thing I had written, was unreadable, and that there was a metaphysical lock on it, while mediocrities all around me rose to the heights of fame on almost no discernible achievement, save they were entertaining, or pretty, or smart. To make matters worse, I'd done a few rewrites that gutted all the poetry out of "If So Carried" and put the project on hold indefinitely, not to mention giving me a dose of paranoia that the Gods really had it in for me, and that I'd never get the manuscript right. At the same time, I didn't really want to 'get the manuscript right' because I was forbidden from publishing it, and even if I did it would define me, like Casey in the pages of "If So Carried." I didn't want to go against his teaching, and become defined as a Beat historian, or something silly like that, but we become what we hate, or so he taught me, and it may be a blessing in disguise that it has taken me this long to birth my beginning and end. If I had done this when I was younger, I may never have been a Bagist with Seaside Johnny a few years ago, during Obama's reelection campaign, and the world would've been denied a great series of paintings on bags, but that's another story.

It wasn't surprising Craig Gilbert gave up on filmmaking after "An American Family." Everything else would've been so horribly second rate it would've been only mercenary, so I guess he didn't need money. Or maybe he became a pizza delivery driver like me. I hope he got over the guilt of what he did to that family, or what he documented, and that God won't judge him too harshly, but none of us know how God is going to judge us, and it's true some of us live much larger than life lives and have a lot more to be judged on, than others. I'd like to think that Craig Gilbert's contribution was greater than his judgment, and that he's doing enough reflection to justify his success.