It’s a waste of your fucking time. And mine.

Watching What is It? is a lot like throwing rocks at retards; it’s fun for the first fifteen minutes, but it soon wears out its welcome when the retards don’t even put up a fight. I feel qualified to say this, as What is It? contains what must’ve been fifteen minutes of retards having rocks thrown at them, throwing rocks at each other and having rocks inexplicably rain down from the sky and hit them on the head. Did I mention the shovels? They spent a lot of time hitting each other over the head with shovels.

I saw What is It? at the Bloor Street Cinema in Toronto. It was one of the final events of the Rue Morgue Festival of Fear and I was eagerly looking forward to it. A friend told me about Crispin Glover’s performance art shows, and having tremendous respect for Glover as probably the best young actor to come out of the eighties, I was anxious to see What is It? I’d heard all about it, how it was a labour of love and how he accepted parts in Hollywood films to help finance it. I admire that kind of devotion, so I was hardly in what one would call an antagonistic state of mind when I sat down in the darkened Bloor Street Cinema, after standing roughly an hour in a line that stretched nearly two blocks. Glover took the stage to vigorous applause that quickly died out and turned into to boredom as he spent a nearly forty-five minutes trying to get his Apple mini computer to work with the theatre’s projector. He then proceeded to read ten books of poetry he created that ranged from clever and subversive to stupefying and indulgent. At the very least, I can say that the stupid and indulgent poems prepared me for the film to follow.

There is no real way to describe What is It?, nor would there be any point for that matter. The film is a poorly assembled mish-mash of empty symbolism. Since there is no plot, or point, to What is It? I will simply list some of the heavy-handed symbolism Glover shat upon the screen in a scant 72 minutes. In addition to the already mentioned rocks and shovels:

Crispin Glover as the “hubristic, racist, inner psyche” of a mentally handicapped man, with heavily made up Down syndrome afflicted, cherub sex slaves.

Crispin Glover sitting on a throne looking down upon naked monkey-headed women with huge tits as they smash watermelons on the ground and jump in and out of volcanoes in a very obvious studio set made of chicken wire and paper mache.

Shirley Temple as God, sometimes floating on a cloud, sometimes not.

Shirley Temple a Nazi shoving a whip into her labia.

Slugs being salted and squished, sometimes screaming, sometimes not. The screams, incidentally, are voiced by Fairuza Balk.

A giant clam opening up to reveal a palsied man lying on satin sheets, who is then jerked off by one of the aforementioned big-tittied monkey headed women.

Two handicapped people making out in a cemetery, including a scene of one being fellated while leaning against a tombstone.

A puppet show with a Tide box as the main character. This was actually pretty funny.

There’s more, but you get the picture.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for symbolism in films. The problem with Glover’s imagery was that it is so repetitive that it ceases being provocative and starts boring the shit out of the viewer. Worse yet, Glover fails to establish an internal consistency that would give the images actual meaning. David Lynch managed this brilliantly in Eraserhead, where the imagery was surreal and the plot non-linear, but the imagery seemed like it belonged with what had preceded it, and what would follow. Each cut in What is It? seems designed to get a reaction, regardless if it makes sense in the context of the rest of the film. It’s not like this approach can’t work, but the director needs to have something to say. All Glover seems to be saying here is “I made a movie”, and to be perfectly honest, I doubt he’s even that cognizant a director.

Glover claims Buñuel, Fassbinder, Herzog and Kubrick as influences, yet lacks any of those directors’ understanding of misè en scène, symbolism, or their sure directorial hands. He lacks even just the basic filmmaking craft that most first-year film students have down pat. I have seen few films projected in a theatre as technically inept as What is It?

Near the end of What is It?, Glover begins repeating symbolism from earlier in the film, but divorced from its earlier context and devoid of any new context. Glover stated that although it stars people with downs syndrome, it is not about Down syndrome. Fine. Then there must be a statement being made in the casting choices. Try as I might, I could not find any workable analogy to account for the casting. I must conclude, then, that Glover’s choice in casting mentally handicapped actors is a puerile decision intended to provoke a reaction (Anger? Laughter? Sympathy? I doubt even Glover can answer that one) in the audience. It’s exploitative and mean, especially with some of the things he subjects his actors to.

My final analysis

What is It? is the biggest practical joke, waste of time committed to celluloid this century. I have seen few films as inept on so many levels as What is It? After hours of trying to deconstruct the images in What is It? I came to realization that they don’t mean anything beyond the visceral response they create in the viewer. In fact, I feel like a chump trying to assign meaning where there obviously is none. I’ve given this film far more thought than it deserves.

Following the screening, Glover opened the floor to questions. I had hoped the Q&A period might shed some light on Glover’s intentions in making What is It?. I was sadly mistaken. Glover talked a lot about the road to making the film, the trials he had to endure, including a processing lab that held on to his film for nearly five years before finishing work on it. That was all pretty interesting, but when the discussion turned to discussion of the film itself, Glover was infuriatingly obtuse. He actually had the gall to claim this to be a “narrative film”, and the pretension to claim that there is a “very distinct plot line” to the film, but that he’d be “taking something away” from the audience by revealing it. That’s the point where I got up and left.

Fuck you, Crispin. I wish that processing lab had destroyed every last frame of your piece of shit. They had five fucking years to do it. Not managing to is probably the only example of incompetence more heinous than your directorial debut.