I want some of whatever Crispin Glover is smoking/sniffing/huffing

For two months now, I’ve been excited about seeing Crispin Glover present his feature film, What Is It? at the theater on Old Summer. The gig was delayed nearly a month, but finally, finally!, the spectacle actually occurred tonight, and holy shit. Holy. Shit. My brain was ill-equipped to handle the absolute insanity that confronted it and tried to put it in a full nelson and box its ears.

Here‘s a trailer for the film in question. Don’t bother trying to watch it at work; it’s quite saucy.

Let me try to lay this out as coherently as possible.

Lady Sarah Saint and I headed out to the old theater off of Summer shortly before 7. We could tell immediately which people milling about in the parking lot were meant for the Glover screening, even though, strangely enough, none of them had a lighter so she could have a fucking pre-show cigarette. A poor showing by the Memphis eccentrics, for sure.

Inside, the theater wasn’t necessarily packed, but it was heartily populated. We staked out a couple of seats near the middle and proceeded to cackle like insane witches high on endorphins until the lights dimmed and a stark red spotlight appeared, into which Crispin Glover slipped and announced that he was going to be reading from several (six or eight? I forget) of his books. Thus began a slideshow of printed book pages, scrawled notes, old illustrations, and impassioned declarations from Glover himself, narrating the stories and gesturing emphatically toward the screen. We laughed, we tittered, we wondered what the fuck the point was.

And that would become the theme of the night: What the fuck am I watching, and why? But to say that is necessarily to impart some sort of judgment onto what it was we witnessed, which is not necessarily what I wish to do. At least not so early in my analysis. At this point in the night, we were merely gobsmacked by the aching randomness of it all. And just as the randomness became tedious, it gave way to pure and sincere hilarity, as Glover — in his sixth or so book — inhabited the character of a man, an inventor of sorts, who had killed a young boy, caught up in some kind of courtroom drama in which he must plead his innocence. Oh, lord. I can’t possibly try to explain it. But I can tell you we laughed and laughed.

Anyway, book narratives completed, Sir Glover stepped aside and his feature film began playing. And our brains were, at that point, more or less, fisted. I don’t know. I’m not sure I can possibly explain what the movie is about, or what we saw, but perhaps I can break it down into sentence fragments, since I am far too stupid to have actually understood what I was watching: Snails voiced by Fairuza Balk, people with Down Syndrome pouring salt on snails, snails screaming, an old dude with cerebral palsy getting a handjob from a woman in a monkey mask, watermelons, Crispin Glover in a fur coat with lovely long hair and sharp features, people with Down Syndrome bonking each other on the head with various lawn tools, demi-gods, Shirley Temple, swastikas, a song called “Some Niggers Never Die,” a house key, an elderly lady smoking a pipe, a minstrel in blackface, Michael Jackson and Arnold Schwarzeneggar references, a puppet made out of a box of Tide … um … do I need to keep going?

Anyway, the film was absolutely hilarious in spots, and absolutely painful in others. I never quite understood exactly what I was watching, which, granted, might have been somewhat the point of the exercise, but it also meant that I never went from being a basic voyeur into being emotionally invested. Not that my emotional investment in a film matters a lick; I’m just saying, I had no idea what was happening nor did I particularly care. I was content to sit, slack-jawed, waiting on the next insane package of offensively comical imagery. Maybe that means I’m a cynic. I don’t know.

The Q&A after the film was quite a bit longer than I imagined it would be. I can’t say I learned much from it; Glover’s got a real chip on his shoulder about corporate constraints on modern mainstream filmmaking. He claims that’s what What Is It? is actually about; I suppose I’d need to watch it a few more times before I could actually even begin to think about what it actually means. Right now I’m still too stuck on the absolute absurdity of it all.

Which is why, when we all got to file into the hallway to buy books/take pictures with him, and he asked us if we had any preconceived notions of the film beforehand, I said, “Yeah, we watched the trailer and I had read some things and knew it was going to be weird and it totally was and it boggled my mind!!!” while Sarah, who has had something of a thing for Sir Glover since her adolescence, probably just stood there, wondering why I had to lame up the place. Well, the answer is this: BECAUSE I AM A FUCKING DISASTER AND CANNOT BE TAKEN ANYWHERE. We spent all of thirty seconds with this eccentric man, me speed talking our way through it because I am neurotic and actually felt bad for having not bought one of his $25 books for him to sign, and assuming that he hated us for our lack of purchasing power. Still, he was gracious with a firm handshake and a generally sporting attitude. See? First Sarah.

And then me. (He totally thinks we’re related, hyuk!)

Oh my god, I am framing these pictures as soon as I get some printer ink.

We promised him we’d be back when he screens part two of the trilogy — It is Fine. Everything is Fine!. And we totally meant it, Crispin, you insane, beautiful man. We will be there.