After military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, David Crowley spent two years creating a concept trailer for Gray State, posting it in 2012. A montage of FEMA raids, government surveillance, RFID implantation and social collapse, the Gray State trailer depicts a near-future America imagined by right-wing militants, complete with a noble resistance mounted by gun-loving white patriots in camo gear. The trailer successfully embodied the desire of the Infowars adjacent for a clarifying moment — a cataclysm after which the guns can finally come out to play and the enemies can be shot. The subsequent crowdfunding campaign was a massive success. Now all Crowley had to do was make the actual movie.
Three years later, Crowley put a specially-prepared playlist on repeat, killed his wife Komel and their daughter Raniya, then wrote “Allahu Akbar” on the wall in his wife’s blood before shooting himself. The murder-suicide became a rallying point for online conspiracy theorists, who preferred an alternate explanation: Crowley and his family were killed for getting too close to the truth.
This is, of course, complete bullshit, easily dismissed in the new documentary, A Gray State, which briefly turns to two moronic “citizen investigators.”
“I don’t give a crap about credibility at all. Credibility means nothing to me,” one says.
Then this, from the other: “I’m not in law enforcement, I don’t have a background in detective work, but…”
A Gray State isn’t really about them. And while the “what” is definite — Crowley shot his family and himself — the “why” is much more impenetrable.
One of the most powerful recurring images in A Gray State is Crowley’s outline, pinned to one wall of his house, yes, exactly like an obsessive’s conspiracy theory. A diehard believer in Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, Crowley agonizes over exactly where to place the various waypoints of the Campbellian hero's journey. “The third act twist, there has to be a little bit of willingness to be killed at the end. She’s basically becoming a martyr,” Crowley says to himself. Ultimately, he’s not plotting the movie, but his and his wife’s own end. “Don’t resist by taking out a gun, resist by letting them do it. But when she dies, he lets her go, spiritually understanding that she got out. And he will too.”
There’s a moment about halfway through A Gray State, largely composed of footage shot by Crowley himself, that will probably feel familiar to anyone fixated on the current state of U.S. politics. Back to the camera, laptop on the desk in front of him, Crowley watches and reacts to Alex Jones — gesticulating, nodding, yelling “that’s what I’ve been saying!” — acting the wise pundit with the correct perspective, performing the truth he knows and that all the idiots are too blind to see, for himself, to himself. I was watching A Gray State in very nearly the same condition, my laptop on the coffee table in front of me, and felt a chill of familiarity, as if an invisible camera was pointed at my back, had caught my exasperated gestures, had captured forever me yelling at a dead man for being so wrong.
But there’s at least one major difference. In the next scene, Crowley is being interviewed by that very same Alex Jones. “The reason we call it Gray State, or one of the reasons, is it’s a division of reality,” Crowley tells the supplements swindler and performance artist. “So we have people who are living in the Alex Jones world, who know what’s going on, and the people who simply don’t.” Crowley finds himself both victim and creator of conspiracy theories, his darkest musings and persecution complex systematized, endorsed and made real, added to the collective tumor of online paranoia throbbing inside the heads of tens of thousands of like-minded Americans.
Also, I wasn’t watching with a rifle cradled in my lap.
It’s in this larger context where A Gray State feels a little adrift. Director Erik Nelson, best known as producer of the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man, keeps A Gray State tightly focused on Crowley himself. As A Gray State searches Crowley’s personality, looking for explanations independent of his beliefs and the context in which they flourished, Alex Jones and Ron Paul rallies become background noise.
“I think when you have a target audience of that nature, they’re going to respond the way they always do. They’re going to not believe anything. They’re going to dig. Kind of like comic book movies. If you get something wrong the diehard comic book fans are going to attack you for this, or attack you for that. These people are actually legitimately insane though, that’s the difference,” one of Crowley’s friends says.
If you’re already aware of the difference between a Proud Boy and a Three Percenter, maybe you’ll know exactly who is being referenced here. But within the bounds of the movie, it’s not always clear who comprises that “target audience” and who these “legitimately insane” people flocking to Crowley’s banner exactly are. But for such an extremely online story, his paranoia validated and literally funded by an entire political subculture, A Gray State is stubbornly analog.
In some ways, this is a wise move. Not every Paul Joseph Watson wannabe is going to kill themselves and their family, so it makes sense to focus on the specific emotional experiences of this confused man, who returned from military service adrift and bitter. But in preferring personal answers, A Gray State leaves the effects of Crowley’s strange fame — the mastermind of a project onto which an entire community projected its fears and fantasies — unexamined, except by the people in his orbit. Many of A Gray State’s subjects are people who saw Crowley as an artistic visionary and political lodestar. Their commentary about him sounds like missives from within a cult, obscuring as much as they illuminate (the same is not true for Komel’s friends, whose voices quake with confusion and deep sadness).
A Gray State’s least convincing explanation for his appeal is its insinuation that Crowley was some sort of arch-manipulator or pop culture sociopath. The documentary opens with an audio recording of Crowley, in which he plans, word-by-word, how to present himself to Michael Entertainment Group, a pitch he believed was his path to Hollywood. “Projecting power, confidence, talk fast, easy and project,” Crowley tells himself, “shift to sincere.”
We return to this recording later, where it is played for the Michael Entertainment Group executives, who are shocked, Shocked!, that anyone would be so devilishly sociopathic as to plan out their rhetoric in advance of a pitch. While there are other indicators Crowley exhibited the superiority complex and need for control typical of someone with an antisocial personality disorder, this particular argument feels forced and phony. Had Crowley’s project, Gray State, become a real movie, especially one with a $30 million budget, no one would begrudge him the audio tape equivalent of a psyche-up session in front of the mirror. Evidence that cuts both ways, that can bare opposing interpretations, can’t amount to a convincing explanation.
A Gray State is much better when it’s not searching for a specific answer. Late in the film, Crowley’s paranoia, fueled by his wife’s visions, untethers from right-wing militant paranoia and drifts into formless occultism. No longer able to fit his manic, depressive and angry mental states into the conspiracists’ matrix of sinister, New World Order globalists, Crowley and Komel began to imagine their home under spiritual attack. Overwhelmed by the pressure of expectations placed on his in-development movie and the oppressiveness of his worldview, Crowley’s problems became too large for a temporal frame and retreated to an indeterminate one, where the threat was more than an evil government, but an evil universe. “The world is an inverse perversion of light, we are made of it and its weakness, a flashlight in the mind of Satan, but I am darkness.”
This is where A Gray State most finds itself as a documentary, not in explaining why Crowley killed himself (or why Komel seemed so ready to die at his hands), but by embracing the final unknowability of his mindset. Exploring the enigma of their deaths is nearly an occult project in itself — a quixotic attempt to understand the mysterious and obscure. Like Crowley’s sprawling screenplay outline, only so much order can be imposed from the outside on interior chaos.
