A Gray State
“Gray State” tracks Crowley’s evolution from a typical young Midwesterner, who grew up playing army games and carrying guns through becoming a soldier in Iraq, where he saw people killed and began developing deeply distrustful views toward the U.S. government.
In the U.S., he fell for a Texan Muslim dietician named Komel, who apparently converted to Christianity. Crowley had expected to stay home with his new wife and thought his military service was through, so he was shocked when he was told he had to go to Afghanistan. There, back in the war zone, he had what is commonly referred to as a “breakdown.”
When he returned to civilian life, she worked while he went to film school; they had a daughter named Raniya. Politics didn’t bring him into filmmaking; rather, his dark government suspicions may have colored “Gray State,” but his aspirations were typical of film school grads. But after seeming surprised by how strongly people reacted to his trailer, which began playing on local TV news shows around the country in 2012 and got millions of views online (his conspiracist ideas not exactly obscured by dialogue like “The Gray Column will be filmed”) after that, anyway he started spending more time with the right-wingers who supported him. Though it seems his aim remained Hollywood.
He drove West hoping to turn his screenplay and social media success into a $30 million movie; two executives liked him and seemed set on getting behind him (one calls him a straight up good guy: “bright” and “articulate”). In the film Nelson plays an audio tape on which Crowley outlined plans for seducing them in the pitch meeting (shocking them: “Manipulative,” says one exec; another: “Insane”).
But no movie got made over the next several months. Instead, Crowley grew more estranged from friends and family, though his mental spiral new occult interests among its events apparently included Komel: When her sister drove up from Texas because she hadn’t heard from her worried sister the drive took 17 hours Komel wouldn’t come out of the house.
Then there’s this bit of home video: Raniya, standing in front of the camera, says, “I’m going to show you something. The walls are going to bleed right now.” An interviewee sees it and says, “It’s definitely like ‘Redrum, ‘redrum’ ‘The Shining.’” Another offers another apt cinematic analogy: “Sid and Nancy.”
Yesterday I was down in lower Manhattan near where an apparent ISIS-inspired terrorist killed eight people before being shot down himself; later I told a friend that such incidents once virtually unknown, now almost weekly occurrences here often reflect what look like media generated collective fantasies spread by lone nuts suffering through some era of selfies toxic narcissism syndrome. “A Gray State” captures much of this in one real-life tale that is as unsettling as it is precisely current.
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