who is being brushed?
On Friday night, Clayton, Leslie and I shelled out twenty bucks apiece to arrive forty-five minutes late to Crispin Glover's screening of his first film, What is It?
Lucky for us, when we crept into the dark theatre peering around like owlets for a triad of open seats, Mr. Glover was still rocking full-bore on his aptly-named Big Slide Show. We caught the last hour of the pre-film production, in which he not only read his books, but performed them with such well-practiced nuance and abstract, disarming humor that I could only sit there grinning in the back in the dark and realize that this is one of the greatest things I've ever seen.
The film itself was an insane, abstract cerebral journey Home involving snails, salt, swastikas and nude women wearing money masks feasting on smashed watermelons. Strangely, it was exactly as I imagined it to be.
After the film, Crispin came out again for the usual Q&A, fielding and parrying some intense questions that lasted for hours. One of the main talkingpoints of the film's controversy is the fact that most of the characters are played by actors with Down's Syndrome.
Crispin explained against accusations of exploitation that his intent was to prove that funding for such a taboo step in film production is something viable and important. He explained explicity that it isn't a film about Down's Syndrome, because the characters played by the actors do not have the disease. He talked about typical roles of Down's Syndrome actors in Hollywood, about how they are only cast as characters who have Down's Syndrome and, in effect, they are put into a cutified stereotype of what the scriptwriter percieves as personifying the disease.
He views that as the true exploitation.
He was also accused of having deep-seated racism, hatred of women, and fascist ideals. Glover, of course, fielded this accusation as he did all of them; with a certain calm, madman relativist logic that is simply irrefutable.
"But, in the film, you have all of these concubines..."
"Yes, but, that was the character I was playing."
Cue the STFU.
This uppity sophomore-English major type tore into him with pseudointellectual garble and weird hand gestures, saying that there was simply no point, that the narrative does not succeed, that Crispin must be responsible for this imagery that he uses.
The fact that he tours with his film for the purpose of the Q&A is the best form of responsibility. It's blatantly obvious that he cares so passionately for the film that he puts true value in audience's reaction, equally excited and stimulated by good or ill comments.
Finally, after the whole shitstorm was finished, Crispin looked out on the audience, many seats vacant from dropouts as the hours wore on, and asked so damn genuinely;
"What is it about this film that makes me a villainous person? How am I a bad man for making this film?"
No one had an answer.
It was just the kneejerk reactive outcry from seeing imagery that made the audience uncomfortable. Crispin described the film as something that is dealing with taboos that aren't readily dealt with in our society, and the discourse that it creates when we are confronted with them. What he wanted was a film that stimulated a thought process involving these themes, but placed within a story that never directly addresses them. People, I've found, react violently to the unexplained. I blame the innate trait of humanity, our perpetual need to think about the meaning of things.
We're cursed beasts of intellect and individual opinion.
Wearing onto an hour and a half, he at least succeeded in the discourse stimulus. We all lined up down the aisle for a book signing, another step that took quite a bit of time because Glover's a talker, and had an individual conversation with each posse that approached the table.
I couldn't afford a book. When Leslie and I went up there, he shook our hands and I presented him with a penciled portrait I'd done fifteen minutes before the three of us burst into the Friday night. Leslie and I had him sign printouts, and he kept my original. We talked about writing, and what he told me was exactly what I'd been needing to hear.
For Katie,
Thank you for coming to What Is It?
From Crispin Hellion Glover
Very good work! Keep being Creative!
Oh, I will, Crispin. You just watch.
Much of the rest of the weekend was spent on collaging for my Graphic Design project, and I couldn't have had a better time. A little stoned, sun coming in through the double windows, listening to Yardbirds records and carefully cutting out pictures of turkey vultures and shit-brown '79 Monte Carlos.
Tonight, however, I need to focus on Typography. Seems that no matter how much I dig out, there's a landslide anyhow. Had a brief Yellow House hiatus in which I drank a substantial number of Rolling Rocks and played Fatal Fury. When I got home and hauled myself to bed, I felt like I was in middle school again--that stage when I refused to fall asleep, lest my ears were graced with the throbbing exoticism of Godsmack's Voodoo. I listened to the radio on my yellow Sony cassette player, surprised that my fingers remember just how to maneuver the buttonpad in the dark. I'd forgotten how much I loved and missed radio, and hadn't realized there're more stations that I dig on than previously thought.