Welcome to ‘Gubler Land’
With Criminal Minds facing the end of its 15-season run, a tribute to the actor who crafted whimsical worlds behind the camera
The structure of nearly every episode across the fourteen seasons of Criminal Minds follows a seemingly consecrated formula: brutal murder, FBI de-brief, tumultuous investigation, and climactic — often fatal — arrest. And as any die-hard fan of the CBS crime series can confirm, there are two ways to accurately distinguish between seasons: a particularly twisted psychopathic killer and Matthew Gray Gubler’s hair.
The dynamic styling of Gubler’s unruly locks has gained such notoriety among the show’s viewers that seasons are frequently described according to his hairstyle of the moment — everything from “the long-hair phase” to “the boy-band cut.” Catching onto the trend, Gubler made a hand-sketched guide outlining “7 Seasons of Really Weird Hair,” a comically accurate portrayal of the best and the worst looks he’s worn on screen.
Gubler himself is likewise an artist of equal variability. In the show, he plays Spencer Reid, a young prodigy recruited by the FBI for his acumen and eidetic memory. Reid is both charmingly innocent and tragically broken; the traumas from his childhood, along with his mother’s schizophrenia, surface to expose a side of him that is far more damaged than his childlike demeanor might initially reveal. Since taking the role in 2005, Gubler has yet to portray another character with similar demands of depth and complexity. His straightforward comic talents were tapped in his breakout role as Paul in the award-winning rom-com (500) Days of Summer and in a number of fatuous and comedic secondary characters he’s played in other feature films. Meanwhile his darker side was drawn out in his lead role in the black comedy How to Be A Serial Killer and the supporting part he took in Life After Beth, a comedic zombie movie.
While his filmography is an odd assemblage of niche genres and project mediums, Gubler’s full artistic portfolio — as an artist, actor, filmmaker, and director — is an even stranger mix of dark humor, parodic comedy, and dramatic satire. In fact, much of his creative work is done off-screen, taking the form of sketched comics and paintings. He maintains a bizarre webpage titled “Gubler Land,” where he features his art and writing in a format that — by the standards of most professional web designers — might be considered amateur. Yet it manages to evoke a bizarre world of its own.
Entering Gubler’s website, I imagine, is the closest equivalent to stepping inside his brain. Eccentric characters, all of whom are hand-drawn on what appear to be torn pieces of paper, clutter the homepage. It’s as if a child drew their wildest fantasies, animated them, set them to music, then strewed them in chaotic array across the computer screen.
But the comic persona on his website also has dark undertones. He frequently makes reference, with comic flair, to diabolical clowns and serial murder. There’s a link to a recording of him reading Edgar Allen Poe’s grim lyric poem, “Annabel Lee,” with the tag that this is “…one of the most beautiful poems ever written. Perfect for November.” One of his recent Instagram posts features an image of him dashing down a hallway in a lab coat wielding an axe, appropriately captioned “me at 12:01am on October 1st.” When asked about the design of his page, Gubler responded, “I’m not the biggest fan of technique. I wanted to do a simple, honest, hand-written webpage.” This comment was meant literally, as there are handwritten notes addressed to his “few dedicated fans,” dated and signed among his portfolio of entertainingly eccentric art.
The complex character Gubler projects through his website and on social media is rarely reflected on screen. Many of his roles seem to stifle him: watching him play the “dumb cop” in Life After Beth is disappointing if you’re at all familiar with the unconventional wit and comicality he displays behind the scenes.
In fact, Gubler never intended to become an actor. When asked about his role in Criminal Minds, he gave an unexpected and somewhat doleful response: “My family and friends sort of chastised me. They’re kind of upset that I’m on the show, to be honest, because it wasn’t what I set out to do. I would hopefully be directing movies now or writing them.”
Gubler had every intention of standing behind the camera rather than in front of it. He studied filmmaking at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts before he was recruited by a modeling agency who happened to be looking for — as he explained — “emaciated weirdos who look like Muppets.” Following an internship with Wes Anderson, he landed his first acting role in Anderson’s 2004 film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
But this diversion in his career path hasn’t prevented him from exercising his directing skills. As one might expect of someone with his sense of offbeat humor, he’s produced a series of self-deprecating “mockumentaries” where he plays a dramatized version of himself and satirizes the lifestyle of many Hollywood actors.
Some of the best and more widely acknowledged examples of his work behind the camera are on the very show that propelled and sustained his acting career. Gubler has directed eleven episodes of Criminal Minds, and they expertly handle the show’s morbid grittiness while simultaneously elevating these gruesome narratives with nuance and complexity. And while the premise of the show remains undoubtedly grim and sinister, these episodes are some of the most visually and cinematically gripping, testing the boundaries of the framework the series operates within.
“Mosely Lane” — consistently ranked as one of Criminal Minds’ eeriest episodes— offers a sinister twist on the children’s fable, “Hansel and Gretel.” The episode centers around a pair of especially diabolical killers: a child-immolating elderly couple who place captive children in a large incinerator. As if the mere act of roasting children alive weren’t chilling enough, the elderly woman sings each child a lullaby as they are sedated and slowly wheeled to their death in a home-style crematorium.
While this might sound like the plot of any number of recent macabre horror films — M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit comes to mind — Gubler’s directional style imbues scenes with a sense of subtle disturbance as opposed to graphic intensity. Rather than amplify the horror through raw images of gore and bloodshed, he imparts feelings of fear and dread through what is intentionally left unseen.
It’s a technique that writer Joyce Eng expertly defines as a “trademark quirky, whimsical yet creepy Gubler style,” one that’s “low on the blood and violence…and heavy on leaving things to your imagination.”
He focuses on creating what he calls “visual dichotomy,” a style he came to admire during his time working with Anderson. It features a crafted balance of whimsy and realism, one that is intentionally jarring and strangely intriguing. The contrast created by placing a fantastical image on a realistic backdrop or within a familiar framework has a powerful destabilizing effect.
Gubler describes his own visual aims for his films as an odd, idiosyncratic mashup — “like the idea of Santa living in a really harsh environment where you’re used to seeing dead cactuses and dirt,” he explained in an interview, “but then punching it up with the most surreal coloring and kind of make it pop in ways that you would never expect is sort of what I was going for.”
After seeing the success of this first directed episode, Criminal Minds’ executive producers were more than willing to let him run away with his cinematic vision. And many of the episodes he’s directed since have worked through a similar process of defamiliarization: traditional images, fables and storylines are distorted, demanding a skillful and perspicuous eye to convey the truly menacing nature of the unknown.
In “The Lesson,” the un-sub or “unidentified subject” is a serial killer with a severe case of Peter Pan Syndrome, a psychological disorder that renders him trapped in the mind of a child. Kidnapping people and subjecting them to deadly doses of paralytic drugs, he acquires a cast of human marionette dolls which he hangs intricately from the ceiling of a ramshackle theatre house, conducting dance performances using a complex engineered pulley system. The corpses of his victims are found eerily posed in public spaces, left seated on playground swings and park benches.
But the most chilling moment in the episode focuses not on the limp bodies suspended above a hollow stage, but rather on the audience at the play’s conclusion. As applause erupts from the crowd, the camera centers on the un-sub’s jubilant, almost tearful grin. Suddenly viewers are unwillingly drawn into a feeling of sympathy for this lethal antagonist, a feeling that only intensifies when the camera slowly pans away from his face to the rows of theatre seats no longer occupied by a human audience, but by a variety of posed stuffed animals and dolls. The applause fades, but the un-sub remains lost in the delusion.
When developing scenes like this, Gubler admits he likes to take risks. “My favorite thing as a director,” he said, “are things that ride the line of it could be really terrible or really stupendous.” And so far, his strategy hasn’t failed.
His skillful construction of scenes—conjuring moments that are both eerie and engrossing, provocative and repulsive—seems to emerge from the same place as the magnetic idiosyncrasies he dramatizes on his website and in his art. Gubler, as a writer and artist, is absurdly contradictory. He’s a goofy comedian with a penchant for dark, disturbing narratives; seeing Gubler’s work is like walking into a carnival funhouse, peripherally amusing but also profoundly disturbing.
He aims for a complex tone — one that makes him the ideal director of a series with surprisingly high demands on its directors. “When the network heard that I was directing this [episode] and they knew that the last one I did was slightly strange and worked, they gave us the go-ahead,” Gubler shared. “I felt I had a little favorable treatment since the last ones I’ve done have been odd but effective.”
When asked about his future as a director, he made it clear that directing was where he had his mind set all along: “It’s what I’ll do one day when the show slows down or gets canceled.”
CBS recently announced that Criminal Minds is, in fact, approaching its end. The show will have run for fifteen seasons, making it one of the longest-running drama series on television — a testament to the show’s sustained appeal and to the experimental, risk-driven work of contributing artists like Gubler.
Even as the show inevitably reaches its finale, fans can be comforted by the assurance that Gubler has no intention of hitting pause anytime soon. “I try to stay constantly busy,” he admitted. “My fear is that if I stop working I’ll, like, die.”
The question of how, exactly, is best left up to Gubler’s imagination.
