Many would call actor, director and author Crispin Glover “eccentric,” but the term doesn’t bother him in the slightest.
“I do not view eccentric as a negative term and I am not particularly concerned with what someone calls me as long as I am accomplishing my own films that I am passionate about,” Glover said in an email.
With roles in films such as the 2000 Charlie’s Angels reboot, Beowulf, and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, Glover said he acknowledges a pattern.
“Many of the characters I have played can be called eccentric,” he said. “My own films and books can be called eccentric. I find all of this fine.”
Glover made a two-night appearance at the Mayfair Theatre Jan. 27-28 for a screening of What Is It? and It Is Fine! Everything is Fine. The two films are part of a trilogy, which explores the auteur’s own interpretation of media content and corporate control. The third film will be called It Is Mine, but will not be completed for a few years due to other projects Glover’s currently working on, he said.
Glover’s films may not be palatable for all audiences. They explore deep, hidden urges, perhaps motivated by unconscious drives, he said. The films’ main character’s “fascination of women with long hair, the graphic violence, sexuality, and the revealing truth of his psyche from the screenplay were all combined.”
“Anything that can possibly make an audience uncomfortable is necessarily excised, or the film will not be corporately funded or distributed,” he added.
Above all, Glover said his works serve to demonstrate the importance of questioning the corporately funded and distributed media.
“Questioning could become even more restricted or less restricted,” he said. “It sort of depends on how much people become concerned about the restrictions.”
The lack of transparency and the sneaky ways media convey meaning without the audience being seemingly aware of the corporate agenda — his film is a reaction to that.
Following the screening, audience members asked specific questions about past roles, his films and Glover even delved into his mysterious visit to the Late Show with David Letterman in 1987.
Glover had dressed in clothing from a thrift store to promote a character he had been working on, which never came to fruition.
Glover explained that since the 1980s, late night talk shows have been manipulated by such aspects as pre-interviews and entirely planned conversations.
After the interview, Glover removed the wig he was wearing and told Letterman it was a joke.
“I have never seen anyone look so angrily at me as he did,” he said.
This type of stunt is underlined by Glover’s overall goal for the audience: “I would like people to think for themselves,” he said.
Crispin Glover recommends:
Anything by Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick made some of the most beautiful, thoughtful and questioning cinematic films ever in the corporately funded and distributed studio films system. He is fascinating to study. The culture ebbs and flows and waxes and wanes in terms of how much questioning can happen in media. We are in a particularly restrictive time right now with what will be corporately funded and distributed. Questioning could become even more restricted or less restricted. It sort of depends on how much people become concerned about the restrictions. Most current media that are corporately funded and distributed now are designed to make people not question.
A Clockwork Orange and Midnight Cowboy
In the 1960s and 1970s films like A Clockwork Orange and Midnight Cowboy were given the X rating in the U.S. At that time, it was easy to control if children were able to get in to a single screen theatre or not. When multiplexes came in to being and X was changed to NC-17, the corporations that ran the multiplexes became concerned that a child could walk down the hall and easily enter in to an NC-17 film and they could be sued. So they stated that they would not show films rated NC-17. Being that multiplexes had become the main source of recoupment for the film distributors, it was no longer viable to distribute NC-17 films.
Without viable distribution of an NC-17 rated film, no corporate entities would fund films they cannot recoup on. So at this point in time corporate funding and distribution entities in the U.S. will only fund films that are rated G, PG, PG13, and R. R means under 18 accompanied by an adult . . . There is certainly nothing wrong with films that are specifically made for children, but it certainly is questionable when there is not a corporately funded film company that will fund and distribute films that are specifically for the eyes of adults.
Edward Bernay’s Propaganda
Unfortunately, the corporately funded and distributed films industry currently has a hugely propagandizing effect on the U.S. population at large. It is an enormous topic. The book Propaganda was written in 1925 by Edward Bernays. Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and utilized his uncle’s understanding of the subconscious and became the literal founder of the “public relations” industry. Bernays came up with the word combination “public relations” to replace the word propaganda. The book is not an expose but an instruction manual for the monied and privileged class through psychological public relations/propaganda techniques to get the lower class masses to serve the privileged class with the disguise of democracy. This book should be mandatory reading for everyone in high school so people in the U.S. would have a better understanding of how things genuinely work in the media.
