Upsetting Day: What Is 'What Is It?' Is It 'It?'

Welcome, friends and investigative journalists looking for clues as to where the bodies are buried (Hint: did you know that strong smell Cinnabon pumps out can cover anything?). This week the column is back to basics and in touch with my roots, groping tendrils that in their fleeting youth sought sustenance and found only Wake in Fright, reached and wriggled to find the light only to discover Jan Svankmajer’s Alice where a childhood should go. It was much like being raised in a Skinner box, except all the walls were TVs and Skinner was in reference to the animated principal. This is the result of such an upbringing.

From the TWISTED MIND of Michael Swaim comes yet another lurching abomination:

It’s not a VHS tape in golf ball-sized hail…

It’s not a Bluray getting snowed on…

It’s…

Anyone who’s seen the Letterman interview where Crispin Glover kicks a lot, essentially doing Hannibal Burres’ bit from The Eric Andre Show, knows that the dad from Back to the Future is either trying to pull an Andy Kaufman thing or legit insane. After walking you through his directorial debut, What Is It?, I think you’ll agree that he is in fact neither, but rather a dangerous hack. Okay, maybe he’s also a little insane, but ultimately this movie has more in common with what you get when an incel befriends an edgelord and they brainstorm what to silkscreen on a tee shirt - 99% of the time, you’re gettin’ swastikas and guys in blackface. Often both! So hey, let’s put on our thinking caps and mental full-body condoms and dive in.

A warning up top: this movie is so pretentiously indie that it’s hard to find online, and since my Dad’s original Hi-8 tape of it long ago succumbed to that great tyrant Time (also Irrelevance), the quality is poor. Handily, “the quality is poor” is also a ready-to-go pull quote you’re welcome to slap on the poster when What Is It? gets a revival run in Crispin Glover’s mind as it shuts down.

If you’ve heard anything about it, it’s likely that the cast is almost entirely people with Down syndrome or cerebral palsy. Obviously, including human beings who otherwise so rarely get to act on film or be a part of a large-scale creative endeavor can come off as one of two things– awesome or exploitative. I won’t spoil which we’re in for, but watch out for subtle beige flags, like when a big-titty lady in a Hotline Miami mask jerks off a guy with palsy in a giant clamshell for the viewing pleasure of King Glover.

I don’t know for sure - I’m no philosopher - but I think you’re not supposed to do that? Not that anyone’s ever conceived of doing that before, which I find hard to imagine.

Jumping into chronology, the first big offer What Is It? makes is to anthropomorphize snails by giving them dubbed dialog and proper coverage, like they’re in a scene. This is compared to the film itself elevating actors who are - fuck, see, this is already so fucked up - slimy? Traditionally considered gross and weak? Fucking SLOW, is that really what you’re going for Crispin? Because Jesus effing C.

Anyway, next is a pretty brutal fight scene, because obviously if you’ve got differently abled people under your control, making them fight is like priority one. Gotta see who’s fit to rep Earthrealm when the time comes.

Film buffs will probably know Freaks, the 1932 Todd Browning movie that was super controversial because he cast people who really worked at freak shows. The story is sympathetic to them, but they’re also kind of used as horror monsters, and Browning dealt with accusations of exploitation the rest of his life. Interestingly, he even lived long enough to attend the premiere of What Is It? at the age of seventy-three, which led to him attaining the World’s Record for oldest film director ever to suicide bomb a movie theatre. Crispin, who could not attend himself as he was shooting Charlie’s Angels at the time, called it “a heartening sign.”

What you see above is a crossfade between a character smoking his mother’s old pipe to remember her and a flashback revealing that she actually smoked a crack pipe. What you cannot hear is the fact that in the background are the moist slapping sounds and moans of people fucking, turned up to 11.

Meanwhile, the brawl at the cemetery that, as far as I can tell, started for no reason has only escalated. Here we see a man with tied hands prepare to hurl a brick at an enemy, only to be foiled by a shovel blow to the back of the skull. This is intercut with a man showering love on his pet snail. “I’ve loved you my whole life” he says, and the actor is frankly nailing it.

Then he nails the next thing, which is only the first beat of what it turns out this movie is all about - BRUTAL SNAIL MURDER. If you’re a gardener who holds snails in contempt, this is your Django Unchained. And I mean that on two levels, because we haven’t even gotten to all the N-words yet.

The actor slams the snail against a wall repeatedly, crushing it as the overdubbed snail voice screams and begs for its life. The voice is also close-mic’d like an ASMR video, and the effect is truly disturbing. What’s even sadder is when the snail’s fucking family come to visit and catch the guy in the middle of trying to clue her back together. What follows is three minutes of the scene in Hereditary when Toni Collette finally finds the body in the other room. It sucks, guys. It’s honestly going to stick with me. Congrats Crispin, you did it - you successfully edgelorded.

Okay, blackface, let’s talk about it. One part of the movie I’ve been glossing over is the fact that many scenes have a semi-transparent layer over them of a guy doing a minstrel show. That means a white man in blackface dancing, if you didn’t know, which is kind of like the deaged De Niro CG man-puppet in The Irishman, in the sense that you can totally tell he’s white by the dancing. In case you couldn’t though, we also get at least seven jump cuts right to his stupid face looking straight down the barrel.

Those frames are all from scenes minutes apart from one another. Toward the end, the guy steps on a snail, sucks up some of the goo with a syringe, then injects it into his face. For some reason, this turns his frown upside-down, which it turns out increases his creep-factor tenfold.

“I’m the wildly offensive Joker, baby!”

And I don’t need to belabor it, but there are also hella swastikas, as if someone just typed “offensive” into Google and felt lucky. It makes sense that his middle name is Hellion, because that sounds like a portmanteau of “Hell” and “onion,” and this movie makes me feel like I’m in Hell, and also it stinks and makes me cry, then you cut into it to see the inside and it’s just layers of the same stuff all the way down (sorry, I write on a “one joke for them, one joke for me” system). Here’s those swastikas I mentioned, just to prove I’m not a liar. “I brought the receipts!” you might say, if you were a sassy gen Z Nazi on the go.

That last one is hard to make out, but it’s Crispin Glover on a throne holding a record with little swastikas on the arms of the throne. I really don’t want to talk about the middle ones, please don’t make me. I’ll just confirm that yes, it’s Shirley Temple and yes, if you zoom in the handle of the whip is penetrating her. How do I know? They zoom in.

[IMAGE REDACTED - Ed.]

I feel it’s also cromulent to note that the record he’s holding is played on a hand-cranked turntable with a Cabbage Patch doll DJ and a flag that has another little swastika on it.

The record is a recording of a twangy old country song about how Black people smell better dead than alive, which is both fucking shocking and totally in-line with American history. It uses the N-word a whole lot, as you might expect, and ends only when Crispin decrees “enough of this!” You know what, my liege? I agree! Almost too much, in fact.

Having absorbed the racist media, which I’m sure Crispin is trying to use to be satirical and artistic but it doesn’t come across that way at all, the trio of women at the foot of his throne are tasked with naming their King. “What do you call me?” he asks. They say the N-word a number of times, although with some chastisement he finally gets them to call him a “big F-word-for-gay-people-but-not-Festive-which-is-what-my-Mom-used-to-use-as-the-code-word-when-I-was-growing-up.” Ultimately, they land on calling the King character either “Shirley Temple” or “God,” which he says are one and the same.

I’m not going to post images of the handjob at you, but here’s the handjob-giver I mentioned crawling out of a crater and giving birth to a watermelon.

Many more snails are salted, scream as they dissolve into goo, then get injected into the racist man’s face. At this point, this is the normal to you. These snail killings are just those weak-ass speed bumps that are wider so you don’t have to slow down as much on the road to insanity.

Trigger warning: snailcapitation.

Yes indeed, the snail-killing “arc,” such as it is, reaches its grim conclusion with a profile shot of a snail getting its head cut off with a razor blade while an actor screams and gurgles.

Seriously, yawn. To jumpstart the column again, here is a cemetery blowjob they suddenly cut to with no context whatsoever.

This leads to a post-coitus round of “Tombstone Kombat” between a mantis and a snail.

The mantis comes out on top, and I mean beyond any reasonable expectations a young mantis might have of themselves.

He fucking broke out of the ring and killed the ref, bro! It’s the biggest upset since something analogous happened in the WWE, a reference we both know so well that I don’t even need to explain it! The violence spins out of control, conflagrating with the background brawl already in progress, and everyone wilds out and murders each other to wrap up the plot, which I think technically makes this movie a YouTube sketch. This is evidenced by the final shot in the sequence, a man getting his head caved in with a rock while an unrelated third hand reaches in from out of frame to salt a snail.

Thought you’d get away in the nick of time, eh buddy? No one escapes Crispin Glover’s What Is It? my friend, not even the Big Man Himself.

Which is nice. Handjob man takes his rightful place on the throne and a beautiful, curly blond wig lowers from the ceiling on fishing line by way of coronation. And lo, as it was foretold by our elders, many a watermelon was birthed on that fine day.

Wait, where did his wig go in the wide? A continuity error? In What Is It? In Crispin Glover’s What Is It? Truly disturbing stuff. Here is a veiny doll mouth that I couldn’t cleanly tie into the rest of the column.

Thankfully, we’re done now and can return to our lives, albeit forever changed.

Aw, fuck! And he calls it his “It” trilogy, so there’s actually three. Fucking shit. A’ight, see you next time for part two I guess. Until then, remember: Crispin is always watching.

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