Crispin Hellion Glover’s It Is Fine. EVERYTHING IS FINE! (with co-director credit given to the film’s production designer David Brothers) depicts the slightly surreal, imagined fantasies of Paul Baker, a wheelchair-bound man afflicted with cerebral palsy played by Steven C. Stewart who scripted the film and who actually had cerebral palsy. (Stewart died in 2007 one month after principal photography was completed.) At first, It Is Fine seems like a simplistic script and on a particular level it is: a man with a debilitating degree of cerebral palsy inexplicably captures the attention of one voluptuous woman after another and then proceeds to murder each one with his bare, twisted arms. But in the hands of Crispin Glover, Stewart’s script transcends to aesthetic and thematic levels that leave indelible and wholly original altered impressions of the disabled not unlike how David Lynch’s Blue Velvet undermined and decimated the popular, innocent, Mayberry notions of small-town life.
It is Fine is first and foremost an aesthetic treat similar to Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo ’66 in that it revels in the look and feel of an early ‘70s low-budget arty exploitation film, and both Glover and Gallo seem to be inspired by the Andy Warhol-produced Paul Morrissey films. (Incidently, Glover is apparently a fan of Warhol whom he lovingly portrayed in all his eccentric freakishness in The Doors [1991].) The ‘70s low-budget exploitation feel is furthered by the presence of what I surmise are actual porn stars in the many female roles sprinkled throughout the film. The film’s audio also seems intentionally low-budget; it possesses that audio-dub effect in which the sound seems wholly disconnected from the visuals, a subtle aesthetic trick that was also used to great effect in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [1998] to elicit a midnight movie, grindhouse feel. Add to this the eccentricity of actors such as Crispin’s father Bruce Glover who has wallowed in the outposts of Hollywood film and television for decades and German actress Margit Carstensen, and you have a veritable stew of weird, arty crudeness. Many scenes contain a garish color palette, sumptuously tacky furniture, and flat, shadowy lighting, which is a reminder of Glover’s penchant in the late ‘80s for clothing from the early ‘70s—a time when Glover was publicly playing with his Andy Kauffman-esque alter ego, Rubin Farr (a character whose zenith was the infamous 1987 appearance on David Letterman in which Glover almost kicked Letterman square in the face with his platform boots and in the 1991 cult film Rubin and Ed directed by Trent Harris; Harris also directed Glover in the American Film Institute-produced short film The Orkly Kid [1985]).
The film’s aesthetic alternates between a low-budget arty exploitation film and amusingly artificial sets that seem to be inspired by the plastic set design and unnatural lighting of American television from the ‘70s. In some scenes, you almost expect Peter Falk as Columbo to step out, squint, and gruffly inquire as to what the hell is going on. In fact, Steven C. Stewart’s inspiration for the film’s narrative, according to Glover, was probably rooted in T.V. movies-of-the-week that were popular during the ‘70s—a past-time that mostly likely was the result of Stewart’s being confined to a wheelchair in a state-run hospital for the mentally disabled for a good portion of his life (even though cerebral palsy is not a mental disability—Stewart was of perfectly sound mind). As a curious side note, Glover stated in a live performance of It Is Fine that he wanted the film to have an expensive look. Perhaps this was a provocatively amusing understatement, or perhaps achieving a low-budget look is an expensive proposition.
Beyond its aesthetics, It Is Fine is a subtle yet deeply disturbing glimpse into a fictional character’s fantasies that primarily involve meeting gorgeous, hyper-sexual women who indulge his hair fetish and who die at his hands from strangulation. According to Glover, Stewart’s initial drafts leaned towards a straightforward T.V. movie-of-the-week thriller, but the resulting film is at once rooted in that genre and so far beyond it—imagine Luis Bunuel having directed an episode of Murder, She Wrote. It Is Fine is captivating on several different thematic levels. First, the film is an effort to show that people with physical disabilities can be as flawed and as rotten as those without disabilities; this is refreshing given that those with physical disabilities are too often portrayed as saints with their saintliness almost the direct result of their disability. Any healthy dose of the Hallmark Channel will illuminate that fact. The film is also an effort to show a character with cerebral palsy in a normal sexual light—to the absurd point that almost none of the female characters in the film even notice his disability. But the film goes well beyond a normal sexual light to the point that Stewart’s character, Paul Baker, has the unbelievable sexual luck that would only befall a fantasy stud in a porn film. Ultimately, It Is Fine’s cerebral-palsy serial-killer porn stud story synthesizes into a subtly surreal collage of imagery and sensory experiences that are jarring and shocking (yet shocking in a slow, surreal, pornographic train wreck sense).
But in perhaps the film’s most edgy layer, It Is Fine is an effort by a real film director (Glover) to allow a real man with cerebral palsy (Stewart) to fulfill his life-long desire to star in his own script and to have what arguably appears to be actual onscreen sex with at least one of the female actresses. To establish an artificial environment and grant a physically disabled person their deepest artistic and de facto sexual fantasies seems, in a meta sense, even more avant garde than what’s happening with the fictional character in the fictional narrative. What personally connects Glover to this thematic material beyond its obvious avant garde nature is an interesting exercise in cinematic theory. I could not help but think of Glover’s obvious real-life social awkwardness when looking at Stewart’s twisted physical body lying in flagrante delicto with an incredibly voluptuous woman. Given Glover’s real-life penchant for one beautiful, curvy sex bomb after another, the parallels seem obvious. (One of Glover’s ex-girlfriends actually appears in the film and is a former Playboy Playmate.) I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to theorize that Stewart’s physical disabilities are a metaphor for the social/emotional awkwardness that lie beneath Glover’s artistic genius.
Beyond Glover’s theoretical kinship with Stewart’s physical disability is the film’s context, which may be the ultimate key to understanding It Is Fine: Glover’s apparent adherence to the Surrealist movement. The Surrealist movement was at its core a revolution of philosophical and social ideas that were communicated through various forms—one form being art. Andre Breton defined Surrealism in the 1924 Surrealist manifesto Le Manifeste du Surréalisme in the following ways:
SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.
ENCYCL. Philos. Definition of Surrealism from Manifesto: Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought. It leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution of the principal problems of life.
There is evidence that Glover’s films are artistic manifestations of the Surrealist doctrine. In an interview, Glover commented extensively about the racism, Nazism, mentally disabled, and other taboo thematic elements present in his film What is It? [2005] and how the film was an attempt to persuade viewers to not have any preconceived moral notions about what one is seeing; so much of what cinema patrons see and how cinema patrons are supposed to react, Glover commented, is manipulated and controlled by the ever-larger media conglomerates. These two comments could be perceived as direct references to the Surrealist definitions of being “outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations” and “the absence of all control exerted by reason.”
In addition to moral preoccupations and the control exerted by reason, Glover’s cinematic work seems to support the Surrealist notions of “the omnipotence of the dream” and “play of thought.” The majority of It Is Fine seems to be all in the head of Stewart’s Paul Baker. This notion is communicated not only through the film’s narrative logic but through the realistic cinematography and realistic settings that mark the beginning and closing scenes of the film, which are in complete contrast to the fantastical look of the film’s body of scenes. The beginning and closing scenes show a mundane, everyday existence in which Paul sits in his wheelchair watching the often humiliating conditions of his fellow nursing home patients. The body of the film sandwiched between the opening and closing scenes is the world to which Paul escapes. This world could be interpreted as the “the omnipotence of the dream” that Surrealism addresses. Paul’s interior fantasy narrative is the “disinterested play of thought” to which he escapes from his dibilitating condition.
At the same time Glover creates films in the Surrealist vein, he also uses his Surrealist films as a self-proclaimed criticism of contemporary corporate media. (The definition of Surrealism speaks of a general sense of control exerted, while Glover speaks of a control exerted by the corporate media.) However, Glover’s indictment of corporate media may be invalid when considered in a strictly Surrealist framework. Any suburban teenager in our video-game culture can enjoy copious amounts of torture porn such as the Saw and Hostel series at their local multiplex—images filled with so much sadism and human degradation that it is amazing that they are distributed at all much less through the mainstream commercial marketplace. Setting aside for the moment the quality of the films’ content and whether their content is depraved or not, I think it is safe to say that the corporate media conglomerates that put out these films do not want anyone to have any moral (or aesthetic) preoccupations with its images of abduction-and-torture-as-entertainment. They just want to reap the profits without any significant controversy. (And given the films’ continued financial success and the relative lack of public protest, I think corporate media has succeeded).
However, if Glover is not criticizing corporate media against the tenets of Surrealism and is, rather, criticizing the corporate media on the neutered nature of its content, then, again, one has to only see the Saw or Hostel series to see that the content is no longer neutered—anything goes. You want to see a naked, innocent young lady dangling upside down and gutted while a women lying below her bathes in the young lady’s blood? Well then, grab your honey and head off to the movies for a fun-filled afternoon matinee. When compared to that kind of fare, Glover’s taboo images almost seem tame in comparison. If, instead, Glover is commenting on the corporate media’s lack of avant garde artistic exploration, then, well yes. The corporate media does lack that, but every media-savvy citizen knows that by now; there’s really no revelation in that fact. Glover would better serve his films by not couching them in trite notions about the homogenized, assembly-line nature of corporately produced culture especially since everyone knows that and it has been proven that authentic cinematic culture can be crafted outside the mainstream. David Lynch has created comparable surreal works of cinematic art for years with artistic visions that have becoming increasingly uncompromising, and has done so outside the mainstream American film production system. Harmony Korine has as well; Gummo [1997] and Julien Donkey-Boy [1999] are two of the most uncompromising American films I have ever seen.
But if Glover is criticizing corporate media against the strict interpretation of Surrealism’s definitions, in general, corporately produced cinema may actually inadvertantly align with the tenets of Surrealism. Consider it: Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations…The belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought—sounds like almost every artificial and illogical science fiction, fantasy, torture porn, and action movie out there. Ironically, Hollywood blockbuster director Michael Bay may be just as surreal as Crispin Glover—if not more so.
Justin Baker