“Critique is so limiting and emotionally draining.” So laments Morf Vanderwalt, the chin-stroking art critic portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal in the new Netflix thriller Velvet Buzzsaw. He then progresses into some highfalutin gum-flapping about “origin and essence”, but the instant memehood of this particular snippet from the trailer suggests that those first words resonate with the critical press back on Earth. To find success as a critic, you’ve got to have skin in the game, and Velvet Buzzsaw flays that skin from the bone in gory, over-the-top fashion. Morf has invested so much of himself in art that he lets it literally kill him, and anyone mad enough to commit their being to the craft of criticism has felt a metaphorical approximation of the same.
While the film has its shortcomings, Dan Gilroy’s latest gets at a dimension of the critical mentality that many onscreen depictions of the profession haven’t. By building the film around his perspective, Gilroy reserves a measure of sympathy for a character who doesn’t inspire much of that in the people around him. In moments, Morf can be as contemptible as any of the more thinly written dream-destroyers ginned up by resentful creators, but at least we can see a human being behind the cutting bons mots.
The dominant illustration of the typical critic originates from an artist’s defensive crouch. Haughty, pretentious and often objectively wrong, they provide a slate on to which anyone who’s ever felt misunderstood or personally wronged by a reviewer can project their aggravations and insecurities. Following the mixed response to The Village in 2004, M Night Shyamalan inserted the fatuous Harry Farber (played by Bob Balaban in a clear nod to legendary scribbler Manny Farber) into the script for Lady in the Water, a critic who constantly misreads the symbols left by genius author Vick Ran (portrayed by Shyamalan himself, in case his vendettas hadn’t been made clear enough).
The very worst scene of 2014’s Birdman – excepting the one in which Michael Keaton must sneer through the word “viral” – comes when a vicious theater critic confirms all of actor Riggan Thomson’s worst suspicions and admits that she wants only to see him fail. When she furtively tells him that she had readied her pan before seeing one minute of his new play, she confirms all of the worst suspicions artists hold for their loyal opposition. In my personal experience alone, I have discovered that a truly bewildering number of performers and directors believe this same thing: that critics are nothing more than wannabe directors who desire nothing more than to destroy the art that they couldn’t make themselves.
We land somewhat closer to the mark with the great Addison DeWitt, who pairs the acidic qualities of the screen critic with the expertise and wit of his real-world counterparts. With 1950’s All About Eve, George Sanders earned the Academy Award for playing the role as jury and executioner to Broadway, the kind of critic so influential that one word could make or break a career. (Morf also wields this degree of absolute power over his field, though it made a bit more sense in the pre-internet era. No amount of searing takedowns will stop Jeff Koons.) He’s a talented, rigorously studied stylist with words – and fundamentally evil, blackmailing ingenue Eve with her own ersatz past in order to keep her under his thumb.
For all the scheming and malice, the most accurately written critic in the annals of fiction has to be Jay Sherman, our protagonist in the short-lived but cult-beloved 90s sitcom The Critic. He bears a far greater resemblance to reality as my esteemed peers and I understand it today: he’s unattractive, unimportant, neurotic and prone to the occasional fit of grouchiness. But his seeming misanthropy comes from a deep-seated love of the cinema, a disgust stemming from being forced to watch an industry capable of great things slum it. This show grasps a higher truth that continues to elude so many actual artists: that surveying the full breadth of a medium necessitates harshness and negativity, if only to keep bona fide excellence in perspective.
Devotion connects Jay Sherman to Morf, and the actuality of the critic’s work with the artist’s impression of it. While Morf may be wealthier and more implausibly handsome than any critic working today, he’s defined by his obsessive relationship to the work. Everywhere he goes, stung subjects of his past essays spit his most withering lines back in his face; to the extent that Velvet Buzzsaw is a horror movie, it is about the horror of being consumed by the very thing a good critic must let themselves be consumed by. The most harrowing scene traps Morf in a soundbooth, where he’s plagued by auditory hallucinations of cutting wordplay from past reviews. (“The biggest waste of metal since the Titanic,” goes one.) Fellow critics, who among us can honestly say we haven’t been haunted by our own words?
