Everything Is NOT Fine!!!
Along with his directorial debut, What Is It?, Crispin Hellion Glover is presenting It Is Fine. Everything Is Fine! at the IFC Center in NYC. The second of the It Trilogy (perhaps to generate hype for the eagerly-anticipated It Is Mine), It Is Fine. Everything Is Fine! is a heartwarming tale of a wheelchair-bound man afflicted with cerebral palsy whose sexual hunger leads him on a murder-necrophilia spree the likes of which the world has never seen before. Or since.
It sounds uncannily like an episode of Les Assassins Des Fauteuils Roulants, the fictive taskforce of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: wheelchair-bound Québécois separatists who murder their enemies in manners most foul. Wallace’s invention of the AFR is just another darkly hilarious fixture of his fiction, but no, It Is Fine. Everything Is Fine! has a separate handi-capable serial killer, although many young lovelies do nevertheless “hear the squeak.”
Written for the screen by Steven C. Stewart who was himself afflicted with cerebral palsy, Stewart starred in the film as the disabled Don Juan, luring woman after unsuspecting woman into his blanketed lap, and having sex with them before and/or during and/or after murdering them by strangulation and/or rolling back and forth over their necks with his wheelchair. Todd Solondz, who built his career on taking controversial subjects too far, lightly broaches the subject of cerebral palsy and sexuality in Storytelling, but I think we can all agree that Glover trumps Solondz in the area of taking things too far, especially given a climactic scene that features Stewart fully naked save for a pair of white Hanes tube socks, and fully …AHEM!… aroused, whilst a “co-star” performs oral sex on him. And they show it. Have I mentioned that Stewart penned this scene knowing he would perform in it? I did. (Also worth noting here that Stewart died shortly after Everything Is Fine wrapped shooting.)
Stewart cites a desire to portray the disabled as three-dimensional humans, complete with sexual desires and violent thoughts, and Stewart does fairly shatter Hollywood’s Pollyanna-paradigm onscreen. But the power dynamics of this experiment have increasingly interesting implications when given Glover’s excessive interest. His film What Is It? features a cast largely composed of persons with Down Syndrome who co-starred with talking snails. Though directors like Harmony Korine and Todd Solondz have cornered the market for “shocking” and “disturbing” films with similar elements, how are we to judge who is being innovative and who is being exploitative? Is Glover the Diane Arbus of our time, dedicated to telling the stories of the people who lurk in the underculture of America? Or is he gawker, orchestrating a glorified freakshow?
You tell me.