Though he’s best known for playing George McFly in the megahit Back to The Future, it’s Crispin Hellion Glover’s more offbeat roles that have earned him a special place in my dark heart. I love his weirder characters- like the high-strung stoner teen in River’s Edge or the creepy Cousin Dell who shoved cockroaches into his pants in Wild at Heart. There’s something genuinely amusing about Glover’s whole geeky gonzo persona. Especially that notorious David Letterman show when he nearly kicked the host in the head with giant platform shoes. He was also able to court mainstream playing a hair-sniffing villain in Charlie’s Angels and the rat-loving anti-hero in the popular remake of Willard.
But what really has fascinated me about Glover is the fiercely personal crackpot movie he worked on for 10 years called What Is It? An underground epic made up almost entirely of actors afflicted with Down syndrome. The holy grail for cinemaniacs it was beginning to achieve the legendary “unattainable” status of Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried– set in a concentration camp- that’s supposedly locked away in Lewis’ desk, never to be seen. But What Is It? finally had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and was the closing night selection of The NY Underground Film Festival. The resulting event was met with conflicting opinions: scorn, praise, derision, bewilderment and in some cases, joy. Most people stumbled out of the theater looking as though grenades had been set off in their heads. What the hell exactly was it? The Battleship Potemkin of underground movies or just a pretentious piece of shit?
It’s neither, actually. But it sure is bizarre. According to Glover the film is about “the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are snails, salt, a pipe, and how to get home, as tormented by a hubris-filled racist inner psyche.“ Many snails are killed in the course of the film- by hammers, knives, or with salt. Mostly, however, the film revolves around a young man (Michael Belvis) who wanders through a Dadaist landscape where mentally challenged people have sex in cemeteries; black-faced minstrels inject snail guts into their cheeks with syringes; Shirley Temple, wearing full Nazi regalia, floats by on cottonlike clouds; and a naked woman wearing an ape mask pleasures a man with cerebral palsy (who looks a lot like actor Geoffrey Rush) while he reclines naked in a giant clam shell. There’s even a Punch & Judy puppet show. And presiding over all of this is a long-haired Crispin Glover in a fur coat, sitting on a throne in a set that resembles Pee Wee’s Playhouse by way of Joel-Peter Witkin. The whole thing is surreal and darkly comic and unfathomably weird. What the hell it all means is anyone’s guess. But the strange thing is for the film’s entire 72 minutes, it’s all of one piece- not some poseur crap. What Is It? feels genuine, the product of a true crackpot, and insanely beautiful in its own oddball way.
When I first saw the antinarrative works of avant-garde directors like Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Jack Smith, I appreciated their aesthetics but longed for a real, transgressive version of storytelling- something Hollywood films failed to provide. Then, after viewing features like David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, or James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus I realized it was possible to realize ingenuity with plot and a perverse personal vision. It was thrilling to peer in at the unrestrained id of an artist in full frenzy, unafraid to mount on the screen what others would judiciously edit out. Glover’s film, with its racist, imagery and freakish nature, is like that: the fever dream of a crazy person. Delusional, fantastic, baffling, frightening, and, in its own way, special. it was like getting a well-deserved injection of vitamin B-12- laced with Ketamine.
Glover traveled from city to city exhibiting the film, much the same way master exploitation king Kroger Babb used to travel with those roadshow “birth of a baby” films in the 1940s. That to me is so cracked it’s fabulous.
During the lengthy, and amusing, final credits it’s also revealed that What Is It? is part of a proposed trilogy.
The second part of Crispin Hellion Glover’s “Lord of the Rings for Lunatics” trilogy is It is Fine! Everything is Fine! based on the screenplay and sinister musings of the late Steven C. Stewart (who stars in the film), afflicted with severe cerebral palsy. Steven plays wheelchair-bound Paul, who meets a divorced mother (played by Fassbinder goddess Margit Carstensen) at a dance who introduces him to her family (particularly her sexy daughter who takes a shine to him). Paul is obsessed with long hair and The Sound of Music, but when his offer of marriage to the mother is rejected he reacts in homicidal rage. Leave it to Crispin Glover to remake My Left Foot as an avant-garde horror movie. Glover’s co-director- David Brothers’ art direction creates streets and apartment interiors of hallucinatory luridness. That, mixed with the thunderous soundtrack of Grieg and Tchaikovsky give the movie a relentless nightmare quality that often resembles the Italian “Giallo” film which also reveled in kinky sex and murder. Actress Lauren German plays a handicapped girl who Paul meets and tries to woo, but she dreams of dating someone not using a ramp. The only clues cops have to Paul’s series of murders are the bent sippy straws. There is also a graphic sex scene that will keep this movie from ever becoming an event screening at the Special Olympics. Compared to Glover’s first film: What Is It? (2005), this surreal fantasy is marvelously macabre and narratively more cohesive.
What Diane Arbus was to photography, Crispin Hellion Glover is swiftly achieving as a filmmaker. Training his sardonic eyes on the strange and afflicted he achieves a mad dark poetry on celluloid.
Jesus.