Velvet Buzzsaw

Imagine being at a party. I do that a lot because I don’t get invited to any. A man gets a reputation if he pulls an upper-tanker every time the booze runs out, and he gets taken off the RSVP list. Joke’s on the party-throwers, though, if they think they can stop me from pulling upper-tankers. I do them at home any time I want.

Anyway, so you’re at a party where you don’t really know many people, and have nothing in common with them. In fact, the only people you recognize are these assholes--a group of guys who always yell at you to stop barfing in the park’s frisbee golf baskets. Maybe they should stop throwing all those frisbees at me while I’m doing it.

You stand in the corner at this party, keep to yourself and drink as much Rumchata as I can before someone stops me, like a model party guest. Then a small group joins you and starts talking about how much they hate frisbee golfers. They point out which ones have tiny dicks, which ones are also furries, and they have some of the best damn frisbee golf jokes you’ve ever heard. And you’ve heard a lot.

Q: How do you kill a frisbee golfer?
A: However you damn well please.

You’re having a good time, laughing your ass off, and even considering telling them not to use the powder room because you made a preemptive strike in there. There is no feeling as great as finding kindred souls, people who hate the same strangers as you. Maybe these can be your new friends. Maybe your best friends. Maybe your only friends.

Then you finally recognize the people around you, the ones slagging frisbee golfers. They’re the rollerblading assholes who try to jump over you every time you pass out under the Garrison bridge. Their jumps are only successful 50% of the time. Your mouth and mind fill with the bitterness of being in league with assholes. By laughing with them, you too are an asshole.

That’s exactly how I felt watching Velvet Buzzsaw, a snide satire/horror playing on Netflix, which the neighbor kid Carlos gave me his password to because I gave him an old Playboy (don’t worry, I cut out the boobs out of all the pictures before I did; I can still look at those). This is a wannabe nasty movie, and fuck knows I love nasty. But nastiness is nowhere near as fun when it comes from the perspective of someone no better than the target. Then it’s just catty bullshit and bitchy teenage girls catfighting on Instagram.

Velvet Buzzsaw aims to satirize the modern art world, primarily its commerciality and the people hoping to get rich, richer or famous off the backs of the artists. All these hangers on and opportunists don’t love art so much as the glow of being near it. This is not exactly a fresh idea, and the art crowd has already been skewered plenty. That doesn’t stop writer/director Dan Gilroy from barging in with a slew of undeveloped and unlikable characters to say it all again. He’s got a pretty good cast, and why not? Hollywood’s elite love doing shit they think will be perceived as biting satire, but which is in actuality, totally safe. It’s so damn obtuse that nobody important will ever see a portrait of himself on screen.

Velvet Buzzsaw tries to add horror to its attempted satire. It kills off a shitload of people in ways I assume Gilroy thought were clever, maybe even artsy, but are actually unintentionally silly and not at all frightening. Amateur-hour boos.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Morf (no relation to Mork from Ork), an influential art critic. We’re told he’s nasty, and maybe he is. But his ripostes are pretty fucking tame compared to anything the Harelip might say about modern art. Morf’s opinion can boost or kill the career of new artists, and he knows it. He wields his power like a giant swinging dick, the same way I swing a giant inflatable dick I got out of the trash after a bachelorette party once.

Renee Russo is Rhodora, an old school punk, now art dealer, who has tattoos memorializing her DIY roots, but who will cut your dick off to make a fortune off the next great painting. Her assistant, Josefina (Zawe Ashton) stumbles across a trove of undiscovered and tortured art after her hermit neighbor dies. The man had explicitly asked for his art to be destroyed upon his death, but none of the greedy fuckers can resist turning him into a sensation whose entire output and story they can control.

This is apparently an art dealers’ wet dream. Mine usually involve Candy Bottoms’ and Cleveland Steamers, but to each his own. The artist is dead, meaning he can’t make any more art or molest a child and dilutes the art’s value. Rich fuckers fear they won’t get a piece before it’s all gone. More, they fear someone they know will get a better piece. The dead man is virtually unknown, so they can manufacture and control his mystique. And, he gets none of the proceeds; those all go the dealers.

While Morf, Rhodora and Josefina (Yes, there are a lot of affected names in this movie – it is pompous horseshit, after all) scramble to exploit a dead man against his wishes, the rest of the art world watches jealously and hopes to sabotage them. Maybe there’s a story in that, especially if the characters weren’t such caricatures, such as a rival art dealer named Jon DonDon who confuses a pile of trash bags for art. Gilroy doesn’t really have enough to say to tell that story, though. All he really wants us to know is that there’s a lot of superficial people in the art world.

Instead, it turns out the dead man’s art is “haunted.” Boo! Those who try to profit from it are killed. Not in any logical manner, such as the greediest or worst person first. No, the man’s ghost is rather random, which seems strange. If you’re a metaphysical force that can be anywhere and inhabit anything, you’d probably also have the power to kill the people who piss you off the most first. Unless, of course, you’re actually controlled by a screenwriter who isn’t good with logic.

First, the paintings kill a handyman who happens to be transporting the art. Monkeys in a schlock painting come alive and maul him. Next is an art dealer who is somehow convinced to climb a ladder to mess with a flickering lightbulb and then hung. A couple more people die at the hands of other artists’ work. Stupidest of all are when Josefina gets overtaken by the paint in graffiti art, squealing as the colors run up her legs. And she ends up in the mural! Or, a small tattoo of a saw on Rhodora’s neck comes to life.

These deaths are bad horror, too silly, mannered, belabored and obvious to scare or thrill. They aren’t ironic enough to be fun, either. What they are is shitty art, which is a fucking shame. It’s hard to be effectively catty about the art world when you do such a bad fucking job of making art yourself. I should know.

As I said before, the characters are all unlikable, not because they are greedy, but because they are so transparent and flat. They don’t feel like humans so much as chess pieces pushed around the board by a director who thinks he has a game plan, but really doesn’t. The nastiness isn’t fun, and their motivations are often vague, or temporary.

I just couldn’t figure out why a bunch of details had been put in this movie when they were irrelevant to the story. Toni Collette is useless as a museum curator turned art advisor. John Malkovich appears as a formerly drunk artist who lost his muse once he sobers up, but he is totally tangential to the story, and completely out of rhythm with the horror elements. A private investigator joins the story briefly for no good reason. Similarly, the dead artist’s backstory, which could be some real meat, comes and goes, and can be summarized as, “He had a shitty life.” Why his paintings kill strangers wasn’t clear to me. I guess we’re just supposed to buy the idea and not ask questions.

The acting is hammy. I think Gilroy wants us to think everyone is having a blast sending up the art world. “Oh! It’s so naughty!” But all I got from it was that Gyllenhaal sweats a lot and that Gilroy is less interested in telling us an engaging, funny or scary story than he is in whispering secrets he thinks he knows.

Except none of it’s a secret. Velvet Buzzsaw is the sort of movie first-year art students might really, really love, because they believe Gilroy. They might quote bad lines from it as though they were now in on the secrets too. When they grow up, though, they’ll realize how stupid they sounded, and how little knowledge they had. Like when I would whisper to other kids my senior year of high school that I knew where babies really came from. If they asked, I told them. “The vagina.” It was true, but it was only thrilling to me. Two Fingers for Velvet Buzzsaw.