Wasted Potential & Velvet Buzzsaw

Velvet Buzzsaw, in the context of 2019 horror cinema, is a desperate cry for originality within the genre, while critically failing at nearly every tear it sheds. The film is filled to the brim with what should be one of the most creative plots and story structures for a horror movie in this decade. Unfortunately, inconsistent acting, poor pacing, awkward editing, and the overlooked use of genre tropes, bog it down like a ball and chain in an Olympic sprint. Despite this, Velvet Buzzsaw is still worth analysis. By wading through the imperfections in its final release, genre fans will find a unique horror-mystery story with interesting characters and surprises. Furthermore, the central idea which the film revolves around raises important questions about the role of art in a desensitized world. Velvet Buzzsaw seeks to critique the worth people place on beauty that is not theirs to value. 

Writer and director Dan Gilroy was riding off the high of his 2014 hit Nightcrawler, his directorial debut. Gilroy had had a long career as a screenwriter before 2014, writing The Bourne Legacy (2012), Real Steel (2011), and The Fall (2006), none of which were well well received by critics . Nightcrawler turned his career around almost immediately. He began writing his next two scripts; Roman J Israel, Esq. (2017) and Kong: Skull Island (2017) (Collider, 2019). The former, which he directed, was described by Odie Henderson, reviewer at Roger Ebert, as “Prime Oscar bait” and was given 1/4 stars (Henderson, 2017). This was despite a leading role from Oscar winner Denzel Washington and supporting actor, Golden Globe winner Colin Farrell. Kong: Skull Island was co-written by Gilroy and ended up being a very well received action-comedy, if not slightly forgettable two years on with the fizzling-out of the Universal Dark Universe (Godzilla (2014), Kong (2017), the Mummy (2017)) (Chapman, 2019). Gilroy revived the plot for Velvet Buzzsaw after tabling it since 1998. Then, he had been writing Superman Lives, which was scrapped by Warner Bros. over a year into pre-production following a $190 million budget request. Gilroy continued writing through the 2000s, and did not get the chance to produce Velvet Buzzsaw until 2018, when Netflix reached out to him following the success of Nightcrawler (Collider, 2019). Netflix was able to attach some big names to the project as well, including Toni Collette, Natalia Dyer, and John Malkovich. Gilroy also brought on Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo to play the leads, having worked with both in the past as leads in Nightcrawler. Along with a generous $21 million budget, Gilroy had his film, 20 years in the making. 

Sadly, the film was not well received. It was panned by critics for having unusual pacing, inconsistent acting, and falling victim to genre tropes, of which will be explored further in this paper. The film currently sits with a 65% aggregate score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 5.8 user score on IMDb with 28,000 reviews. It is also worth comparing Velvet Buzzsaw to Bird Box (2018), the most ambitious film produced and distributed by Netflix, which happened to also be a horror with big names attached, and came out just two months prior. Bird Box was generally liked by both audiences and critics, sitting at 62% on Rotten Tomatoes and 6.7 on IMDb user reviews. The film was actually made with a budget of about $2 million less than Buzzsaw, yet was shot much more creatively, and had a more consistent lead (CFC, 2017). In addition, the story was simple, and had fewer characters, compared to Buzzsaw’s eight major supporting characters. Bird Box is the most successful movie in Netflix’s history, with over 45 million viewers in the first week (Alexander, 2018). Alongside a knockout trailer, viewers had high expectations for the next Netflix-produced feature film, which may have played a role in the disappointing critical and aggregate responses.

Yet the film still has a lot to offer. The narrative is simple, if not a bit laughable at points. An art curator finds a dead man in her apartment. Upon inspecting the man’s unit, she finds hundreds of paintings, all of which are haunting, and portray the mind in pain and turmoil. Despite the artist’s wishes to have them destroyed, she takes these paintings and passes herself off as a representative of an anonymous artist. The paintings then end up being - literally - haunted by the dead artist, and their new owners are killed off, final destination style. The lead named Morf (Gyllenhaal), an art critic who finds himself infatuated with the paintings. He and his fellow critics and curators are among the victims. The film looks to question whether it was right of the woman, Josephina, to take the paintings (Gilroy, 2019). Should she destroy the paintings after finding out about the wishes of the deceased, or should she share them further to show the world the man’s talent - and make herself rich in the process?

There is a lot to take into consideration when looking at Velvet Buzzsaw through a psychoanalytic lens. Immediately, Sigmund Freud’s 1908 essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming comes to mind. As the plot summary suggests, art and creative expression play central roles in the story and character’s interactions. Freud suggests that artists draw upon daydreams from their childhood for inspiration, and combined with aesthetic technique, is what creates art. Childhood daydreams are left in the sub or preconscious until adulthood when it is acceptable for them to be revived, realized, and made physical (Freud, 1908). This concept was exactly addressed in Buzzsaw. Upon the discovery of the artist’s work through Josephina, Morf researches the artist. He finds that the artist, named Vetril Dease, grew up in an abusive household, to the point where he eventually rebelled and murdered his father. While the film does little to show this through its characters, the prop artworks used were designed to show scenes of despair and agony. Eyes are often either wide, showing shock and/or disgust, or shut tight as to avoid something, or more effectively, to scream. The painting much of the first half of the film focused on shows a young girl screaming with her hands in the air, while a boy, slightly older, punches a man who is just trying to defend himself. While a bit too on-the-nose, the production designers showed the artist’s inspiration through his work the same way Freud would have predicted, even without Dease ever saying a word. Furthermore, the application of Creative Writers and Daydreaming’s ideas here revolve back to the idea Buzzsaw is attempting to critique. Who is the viewer to experience one’s subconscious? Regardless of whether or not Dease wanted the paintings destroyed, showing any piece of art gives insight into the artist’s mind. Do the buyers of the paintings deserve to experience this? By killing off these characters, Dan Gilroy thinks not. 

When speaking of art in a psychoanalytic context, it is safe to take into account Sigmund Freud’s On Transience. Transience is the state of being impermanent. This can be applied to anything, from a person who will die, to a painting that will eventually be destroyed somehow, to the Earth itself, which will be consumed by the sun millions of years from now. Art plays a huge role in Freud’s original 1915 essay. In it, he describes a scene where he is walking with his friend, a poet. The poet, an artist, is disheartened by the realization that everything is prone to death (Freud, 1915). 

Transience plays a big role in Buzzsaw for similar reasons. The central conflict is between Dease, and the curators. Dease, having wanted his works destroyed, lives with the knowledge that everything will end. The curators, attempt to defy and rebel against this. Freud acknowledges both these perspectives in his paper. Dease is on the side of the poet; unable to see beauty because of its impermanence. The curators are on Freud’s side, that being, transience increases the worth of beauty. Of course, like in any horror movie, the rebellion against nature comes with consequences, even if Freud and the Curators are the optimists in this case. Hence why those defying the wishes of the dead, and in turn the laws of nature, are killed off. 

As explained previously, Velvet Buzzsaw uses death as a means for revenge on behalf of Vetril Dease, as well as a way of arguing against placing value on beauty you don’t have any right to. It only seems natural to take into consideration Freud’s 1918 essay Our Attitude Towards Death. In this paper, Freud examines general reactions by populations to deaths. These include death of a loved one, enemy, stranger, and those who commit suicide. For example, when examining reactions to death of enemies, man remains unconcerned. That is, unless they themselves are tasked with doing the killing, in which moral judgement would play a greater role (Freud, 1918). 

The ideas from this paper are most present in the events following a character’s death. The death of the art curator, Gretchen (Collette), stands out in particular. The scene begins with Gretchen, alone, in the City Gallery, the most popular gallery in the area. The lights are off, with the exception of a single spotlight over one exhibit. The work is a chrome sphere with three holes in it. The viewer puts their hand in one of the holes, and the “art” is what you feel inside. Supposedly in the near future, technology allows us to create any texture or crude object we want. 

As she approaches the sphere, the viewer is shown one of Buzzsaw’s few artistic choices with depth. The camera follows closely behind Gretchen and centers on the sphere for a moment, opposed to Gretchen herself. The sphere, being chrome and mirror-like, gives the viewer a fisheye look of the scene behind them, encompassing the whole of the gallery space. This choice makes clear that she is alone. So much so that not even the camera can be seen in the mirror. 

Before the action, there is a cut to one of Dease’s paintings on the wall. The camera pans in slowly on the faces of two faceless children, and eyes appear. This was used earlier in the film in another death scene, and is representative of the artist’s spirit coming for the sinners. Another cut brings the viewer back to the sphere, but inside a hole this time, looking out. Gretchen looks in, such that the shot is only of her face. This further emphasizes the unknown properties of the sphere and what is inside.

There are few cuts back and forth between her hand sliding further in the hole, and figures in Dease’s paintings (his works have a very distinct style using thick brushstrokes, so it is easy to tell when a new painting shown is his). Gretchen’s arm is now shoulder-deep in the hole. She is tugged a few times, and her expression changes. Finally, a light underneath the sphere turns red, and her arm is shredded like a wood chipper. She screams, and collapses. 

Where Freud comes in, is in the aftermath of her death. The gallery opens the next morning, but nobody is phased by Gretchen’s body, or the massive pool of blood around her. People are seen walking around her and the sphere, as if to analyze and critique it. A group of children on a school field trip are even seen stepping in the blood. The twist: that visitors thought Gretchen’s body was a piece of art. 

Freud’s paper, Our Attitude Towards Death, speaks to this scene immensely. It’s fairly obvious what the film is attempting to say with this scene. First, that Americans are desensitized to death and violence, and second, due to a bit about trending on social media following the incident, that people find value in shock- or going to extremes. Freud’s identification of different reactions to death fits this scene because of the relationship between the audience and the art. Unlike with the death of a loved one, the death of a stranger incited as much of an effect in primitive man than with the death of an enemy. According to Freud, the death of loved ones are the roots of guilt and ethical codes. The death of a stranger, however, can be as conceptualized by the primitive mind as the death of oneself can be conceptualized. Therefore we can infer that humans inherently go through the same thought process regarding the death of a stranger as when thinking about their own death; inconceivable by the subconscious (Freud, 1918). The viewers did not react to the body because, apart from the theme desensitization, their minds cannot conceive the death in that instance. Furthermore, this scene critiques the critics for misplacing value, as the scene is seen through the lens of those with a knowledge of ethical rights and wrongs in this situation; the audience themselves. 

Velvet Buzzsaw may be one of the most complicated films on Netflix’s platform. On one hand, the film is aesthetically shallow, is a bore to sit through, and ruined any strand of greatness with awful post production oversight. On the other, it is unapologetically creative. Director Dan Gilroy took a risk with this film. He made a horror movie with bright colors, colorful characters, and an emphasis on art itself as the subject of discussion. Leads Jake Gyllenhaal and Zawe Ashton portray unique victims, struggling with the decision to fight libido with morals. It is doubtful another horror of this calibre will grace the pages of Netflix for years, and yet when it is all said and done, it is hard to argue that that is a bad thing.

References

1. Alexander, Julia. “Netflix Says over 45 Million Accounts Watched Bird Box - Here's What That Means.” The Verge, The Verge, 30 Dec. 2018, www.theverge.com/2018/12/30/18161741/bird-box-netflix-45-million-accounts-statistics-views.

2. California Film Commission. “Film and Television Tax Credit Program .” Los Angeles , 20 Nov. 2017.

3. Chapman, Matt. “Here's What's Going on with All of Universal's Monsters.” Digital Spy, Digital Spy, 25 Jan. 2019, www.digitalspy.com/movies/a829209/universal-dark-universe-the-mummy-bride-of-frankenstein-the-invisible-man-trailer-release-date/.

4. Freud, Sigmund. “Creative Writers and Daydreaming .” The Interpretation of Dreams, 1908.

5. Freud, Sigmund. “On Transience .” Das Land Goethes, 1915.

6. Freud, Sigmund. “Our Attitudes Towards Death .” Reflections on War and Death, 1918.

7. Gilroy, Dan, director. Velvet Buzzsaw. Netflix Inc., 2 Feb. 2019.

8. Henderson, Odie. “Roman J. Israel, Esq. Movie Review (2017) | Roger Ebert.” RogerEbert.com, Brian Grazer, 17 Nov. 2017, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/roman-j-israel-esq-2017.

9. Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. Edited by Ronald Dean Nolan, 7th ed, 2012. “Velvet Buzzsaw: Dan Gilroy and Zawe Ashton Interview.” Collider , Complex Media, Park City, Utah, 3 Feb. 2019.