The Reel Critic: Buzzard

Joel Potrykus’ Buzzard is a comedy about the kind of adults who have toy lightsaber battles in their parents’ basements, and it is surely the most unsettling movie ever made to feature such a scene. Its hero is a man named Marty who appreciates the comforts of frozen-pizza sandwiches stuffed with Doritos and mayo, and whose main hobbies are heavy metal, video games and getting free things by using obscure coupons.  He’s a slacker with vaguely anti-corporate ideas. You almost certainly know someone like Marty, and you might not want to be stuck in conversation with him. Buzzard looks more closely at a Marty-character than we do in our daily lives, and the more we see of Marty, the more we understand the extent to which he is emotionally damaged.  His life and the movie around it are both horribly funny and horribly sad at once, tinged with a constant sense of something dreadful approaching.

I must say that I’ve done Marty a disservice by naming him a typical slacker. He’s always occupied and plotting something, but he does so with the logic and ambition of an adolescent. He whines that his menial temp-job is bogus and that he could make more money anywhere, but even he can’t really believe this. Shortly after he finishes his pizza sandwich, he blasts heavy metal and sets out to turn his video-gaming glove into a weapon. He cuts his hand while putting knives on the glove’s fingers, which seems accidental at the time, but he cuts himself again, re-opening his wound with scissors multiple times throughout the movie. Whatever has been ailing Marty is clearly getting worse. Still, life makes room for small joys like clipping a hot pocket box for coupons or a potato-chip throwing contest with a friend (a “work friend” only, Marty announces).

Marty’s obsession with petty scams inevitably goes too far. He begins to cash some checks he has stolen from his temp job, and paranoid as he is, Marty decides to go into hiding from the police.  He stylizes this drama into an escapist fantasy equivalent to his Super Nintendo. Marty clearly finds pleasure in the gravity of his situation, but can’t comprehend the consequences of his actions. His first stop on the run is his friend’s basement where the lightsaber battle occurs. These two men dueling is a funny spectacle, but Marty is taking it too seriously. He starts to use his video-game claw with real knives – the tone of the film remains the same, but we understand how wrong this could go. It makes us reconsider our laughter. How did Marty end up like this, and shouldn’t we really be more worried about the guy?

Buzzard understands the balance between using characters as vehicles for jokes and making characters into jokes themselves. This is a ridiculously funny movie, but none of the people in Buzzard are laughing at themselves or each other. Potrykus presents his characters without judgement and often without thematic intentions towards comedy or tragedy in a given scene.  In a similar vein, it’s easy to see Buzzard as a warped social-commentary, but these notions never come by way of gratuitous symbols or overt narrative devices. Marty sometimes wears zombie masks in public, for example — we can say something about Marty’s identity from this, certainly. But rather than existing solely as a symbol, the mask feels simply like a piece of Marty’s personality.

Even without considering the specific content of Marty’s life, you feel like you’re learning something about human nature from the way Buzzard observes him and his habits — this is true of all great character studies. Buzzard may have a thesis that addresses the state of modern adulthood, but Marty isn’t bothered by any of this. Perhaps he represents a philosophy, but he certainly doesn’t have a philosophy himself  — he’s just doing the best he can to get by, stealing checks from his company and hot pockets from his friends.