The Silver Screen Behind His Eyes: Crispin Glover and His IT Trilogy

Abstract

Although Crispin Hellion Glover is recognisable to many as a Hollywood character actor, his body of work—which encompasses directing and writing, in addition to performance—has received little critical attention. This thesis investigates Glover as a “romantic cult auteur” (Mathijs and Sexton), simultaneously working within and against the Hollywood system. Glover’s IT trilogy is the primary text through which his creative practice is brought into focus here. To date, he has only completed two of the films in this planned trilogy: What is it? (Glover, 2005) and It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE (Glover and David Brothers, 2007). He states that the third and final film, IT IS MINE, will not go into production for “many years.” The three films are connected not by narrative but theme—each one an exploration of taboo subject matter. Glover has chosen to distribute the trilogy via unique and exclusionary means: for more than a decade, he has toured with 35mm prints of the two completed films, screening them across two nights at arthouse cinemas the world over. These screenings are multimedia events, hosted by Glover himself, where each film is preceded by a dramatic reading of his experimental prose, and followed by an extended Q&A. There is no way to see either What is it? or It is Fine! outside of attending these events. I therefore approach the IT trilogy in my thesis not as an incomplete film series but rather as a multimedia cult project—ongoing, ambitious, and fiercely independent. More than the films themselves, it is the trilogy’s architecture—its conceptual basis; its means of exhibition and distribution—that is of interest to me as an expression of Glover’s creative identity. While the existing criticism of Glover’s work generally begins and ends with the idea that, like the man himself, it is “weird,” this label functions to impede analysis. I argue that an “aesthetic of discomfort” runs through Glover’s body of work, the trilogy standing as the most substantial example of this auteurist mode.