Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay on David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, not a review, therefore many crucial plot points are revealed for the purpose of analysis.
A treasured volume in my library is a hardbound copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology, gifted to me by my sweetheart countless birthdays ago. This entertaining, exhaustively encyclopedic collection of classical Greek and Roman myths (with the mysteries of the universe interpreted and scaled to human dimensions) is something of a folkloric map to the stars itself. Here, the inexplicable is named, given human form, and all that is mysterious and random in the galaxy is attributed to the capricious whims and petty rivalries of an incestuous clan of demigods and goddesses holding forth from their thrones in the heavens. At their core, these ancient fables are operatic family dramas and morality tales about overindulged gods & goddesses with too much power and too few boundaries. Leading insular lives of emotional inertia, these mythical deities manipulate the elements (e.g., fire and water) for amusement, and are not above creating chaos out of boredom.
The unfettered moral license of these gods (who have the
power to reward favored mortals by turning them into constellations) leads to
the marrying of siblings; the abandoning of their temperaments to fervid jealousies
and rivalries over imagined slights; and, more often than not, the sort of violent and bloody
final-act retribution that gives Greek Tragedy its name.
All of this filled my mind and fueled my thoughts while
watching David Cronenberg’s brilliant Maps
to the Stars. A modern mythological family tragedy set amongst the flawed, emotionally
disfigured gods and goddesses of contemporary pop culture (movie stars) from
the airless heights of that insulated Mount Olympus known as Hollywood.
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| Julianne Moore as Havana Segrand |
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| Mia Wasikowska as Agatha Weiss |
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| Olivia Williams as Cristina Weiss |
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| John Cusak as Dr. Stafford Weiss |
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| Robert Pattinson as Jerome Fontana |
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| Evan Bird as Benjamin Weiss |
Havana Segrand (Moore) is a Hollywood falling-star suffering
the first pangs of impending obsolescence, and, consequently, lives in a
near-constant state of naked desperation. A desperation not quelled by yoga, meditation,
narcotics, age-regression therapy, or “purpose fucking” (sex with well-placed industry
types for the purpose of their putting in a good word for you when they can). In a town where the question, “Isn’t she old?” ‒ the definitive
dismissal ‒ is asked in relation to 23-year-olds, Havana literally clings to her
prominently-displayed Genie (Canadian Film Award) while discussing dwindling
career options with her pragmatic agent, whose name is, oddly enough, Genie.
Hungry
for career rejuvenation, Havana fixates on landing the starring role in Stolen Waters, a reimagining (Hollywood-speak
for remake) of a 60s cult film which starred her late mother, actress Clarice
Taggart (Sarah Gadon) who died tragically in a fire in 1976. Havana’s desire to
be cast in a role that would in effect have her playing her mother, is an
obsession unabated by claims on Havana’s part that she was a victim of her
mother’s physical and sexual abuse as a child. Nor the distressing fact that
her mother – abusive as ever – has begun to appear to her as a ghost.
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| Clarice Taggert in Stolen Waters This film within a film, which gets its title from the biblical proverb "Stolen waters are sweet, bread eaten in secret is pleasant," figures prominently in the lives of several characters in Maps to the Stars. The film itself, which seems to be about a seductive, schizophrenic patient at a mental institution, not only carries allusions to the character of Agatha (Wasikowska), but reminded me a great deal of the 1964 Jean Seberg/Warren Beatty film, Lilith. In that film, Seberg plays a schizophrenic patient in a mental institution and Beatty a therapist who's doomed by his obsession with her. In Hebrew mythology, Lilith is the name for a female demon representing seduction and chaos. |
Astronomy maps may reveal the gravitational interlink of
star clusters in the heavens, but the boulevards and intersections on those geographical
maps to the stars’ homes sold on Los Angeles street corners can’t begin to chart the inbred network of aligned interests
and commingled gene pools that make up Hollywood. In Maps to the Stars, Havana’s central storyline is orbited by a cast
of characters whose lives at first seem unrelated, but later reveal themselves,
in almost Altmanesque fashion, to be just as incestuously interconnected as
everything else in the City of Angels.
First, there’s Benjie Weiss (Bird), the obnoxious child star
of a lucrative movie franchise. A recovering drug addict at thirteen, Benjie is
already beset by the fear of being replaced by a new and younger model, and his
nights are haunted by visions of the ghosts of two dead children. His ambitious
stage mother (an anxiously flinty Olivia Williams) dotes on him as one would a valuable
commodity, while his narcissistic father (Cusak) is too busy managing his
career as the nation’s best-selling self-help guru (“Secrets Kill!”) to be of much help to anyone beyond his
high-profile clients.
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| The Magical Child The ghosts that appear to Benjie are those of the drowned child of a rival (another of Havana's manifest wishes - like the fiery death of her mother), and a cancer victim whose body in death is adorned with tattoos of maps to the stars. Tattoo patterns that look unsettlingly similar to Agatha's disfiguring burns. |
The mysterious catalyst for joining these individuals is Agatha
(Wasikowska), a schizophrenic teenage burn victim of mysterious origin who
comes to town to, in her words, Make amends,” but serves as the narrative’s uniting
thread and unwitting agent of chaos. Representative of the interrelated nature of this city of beautiful grotesques itself, Agatha is biologically linked to some characters, spiritually linked to others.
Agatha’s journey from Florida to Los Angeles by bus suggests a meagerness of funds contradicting her engagement of the film’s final character, Jerome Fontana (Pattinson), the limousine chauffeur with the celebrity-ready name, to escort her to a particularly significant Hollywood site upon arrival. Fontana, like everyone else in Hollywood who isn’t already actually in the film business, is a wannabe. In this case a wannabe actor/screenwriter hired to drive the chariot for someone who turns out to be this modern myth’s angel of doom/redeemer.
Agatha’s journey from Florida to Los Angeles by bus suggests a meagerness of funds contradicting her engagement of the film’s final character, Jerome Fontana (Pattinson), the limousine chauffeur with the celebrity-ready name, to escort her to a particularly significant Hollywood site upon arrival. Fontana, like everyone else in Hollywood who isn’t already actually in the film business, is a wannabe. In this case a wannabe actor/screenwriter hired to drive the chariot for someone who turns out to be this modern myth’s angel of doom/redeemer.
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| A cast-out *angel surveys the ruins of Mount Olympus (aka the Hollywood Hills) *After I posted this screencap, my partner brought my attention to the fact that the holes in Agatha's top create "wings" on her back (or the scars of the wings lost after breaking the rules of heaven)...how did I miss that? |
Written by one-time Hollywood chauffeur Bruce Wagner (who
penned 1989s rather awful but marvelously titled, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills), Maps to the Stars has the wittily bilious
tone of the work of a Hollywood barely-insider: someone close enough to get the
details right, but not so favored by the gods as to have been ensnared and
blinded by the intoxicating siren song of fame, wealth, and status.
Less a Hollywood satire than a fame culture fable with
elements of magic realism, Maps to the Stars
is my kind of movie…which isn’t the same thing as saying it’s a slam dunk
crowd-pleaser I’d recommend to everyone. Like a great many of David Cronenberg’s
films, your appreciation of it has a lot to do with how comfortable you are
being made uncomfortable.
But like the dream fantasies of Robert Altman (Images, 3 Women) or Polanski’s raw glimpses into the dark nature of relationships
(Venus in Fur, Carnage), Maps to the Stars
is an exploration of the condition I find most compelling in films: humanity in
extremis.
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| Worshiping at the Altar of Fame |
Whether a genuine part of Cronenberg’s vision or merely a
projection born of my fondness for Greek mythology (I suspect it’s a little of
both), I love the idea of Maps to the
Stars being something of a modern take on the classic Greek tragedy.
Hollywood, with its temporal gods and goddesses engaged in
hollow conflicts in pursuit of ignoble victories, makes for a terrific modern-day Mount Olympus, just as the town’s self-centeredness and overabundance of
swimming pools suggest the reflective springs of Mount Helicon which seduced (and
ultimately drowned) Narcissus.
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| Wash Away My Sins Plagued by guilt and the burden of secrets, Cristina suffers an emotional breakdown. The dual elements of fire and water - to either purify or destroy - are recurring motifs running throughout Maps to the Stars. |
In the interwoven stories of the protagonists, all the elements of Greek tragedy are there: Secrets, ambition, incest, jealousies, violence, ghosts, visions, morality, purification through self-immolation, redemption, liberation, and the godlike summoning of the elements of fire and water.
Agatha, whose name means “good” in Greek, arrives in
Hollywood dressed in a manner to conceal the scars from burns suffered in a fire she started as a child. Among the Hollywood trendoids, she looks as if she's from another planet. In fact, when asked where she’s from, she responds, “Jupiter.” We know she's been institutionalized for arson in Florida, so we take it to mean she’s from the city of Jupiter, Florida. But Jupiter
is also the name of the Greek god who married his sister, Juno. And as we later
learn, Agatha is a child born of incest.
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| Carrie Fisher as Herself A central theme of Maps to the Stars is the incestuous nature of Hollywood. Havana Segrand is an actress haunted (literally) by her actress mother, yet longs to play her in a film. Carrie Fisher, daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds, wrote Postcards from the Edge, a semi-autobiographical book and film about the troubled relationship between an actress and her considerably more-famous mother. The presence of Carrie Fisher in the film can't help but also evoke thoughts of Star Wars and all those incestuous Leia/Luke/Vader familial subthemes. |
PERFORMANCES
Maps to the Stars
reminds me so much of those 70s films that made me fall in love with movies in
the first place. Of course, a major selling point from the getgo is the absence of
anything Comic-Con suitable in the narrative, but I really found the characters
and the film’s attempt to say something real about our culture incredibly fascinating. It's a funny, frightening, ugly, sad, brutal film that is ultimately very moving (and touching). And the film earns bonus points for doing so in a way that refuses to spell everything
out.
Best of all are the performances of the uniformly excellent cast. John Cusak oozes smug menace, Evan Bird’s repellent child star shows the wounds
of neglect, and in the film’s least-developed role, Robert Pattinson (this is
the first film I’ve ever seen him in) is so good you wish he’d been given more
to do.
However, Maps to the
Stars really belongs to the women. Oscar-winner Julianne Moore gives one of
those totally raw, risk-taking performances that's likely to divide audiences. Me, I've met my share of Havana Segrands in my time, and Moore seriously nails it in her willingness to “go there” in her searingly naked depiction of the ugliest aspects of what it has come to mean to be a movie star.
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| False idol? Havana's Genie award plays too significant a role in her life. Incidentally, director David Cronenberg is a five-time Genie Award winner |
I first saw Mia Wasikowska many years ago on the superb HBO series, In Treatment. She impressed me then, as she does now, with her natural presence on the screen. A calming presence that nevertheless has an edge to it. An edge bordering on mystery, vulnerability, and a lurking sense of something perhaps unsavory in her nature. She's quite hypnotic here, appearing open yet as closed off as a clam.
Love how when we first see her she is cloaked in a souvenir crew jacket for "Bad Babysitter," Benjamin's endangered movie franchise. Of course, we later discover find out Agatha herself was the ultimate bad babysitter; almost killing her brother when they were children and he was left in her charge.
Love how when we first see her she is cloaked in a souvenir crew jacket for "Bad Babysitter," Benjamin's endangered movie franchise. Of course, we later discover find out Agatha herself was the ultimate bad babysitter; almost killing her brother when they were children and he was left in her charge.
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THE STUFF OF FANTASY
A major asset to any film is having a director in control of
what message they’re trying to convey. Like many films set in the world of privilege
and power, Maps to the Stars is an indictment of the malignant allure of wealth and fame and its potential to foster
delusions and corrupt the soul. But Canadian-born David Cronenberg - this is
his first film [partially] shot in the US - succeeds where Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street so miserably failed:
he’s able to depict the excesses of extensive wealth without simultaneously glamorizing
it.
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| On the Rodeo Road to Recovery Havana (seen here with brand-new personal assistant, Agatha) self-medicates by spending $18,000 on clothes at Valentino |
As a longtime LA resident who’s worked for many years as a
personal trainer in the same peripheral capacity to celebrities as Map to the Stars’ interchangeable chauffeurs
and “chore whores” (personal assistants); trust me, there’s nothing satiric or
exaggerated about the details of celebrity life depicted in this movie.
The grotesquely oversized homes feel sterile and devoid of inhabitants; the children who act like adults, the adults who like children;
entire identities are invested in one’s desirability or employability (often one
and the same); and everybody feels so guilty for living lives of such undeserved
privilege they seek absolution in self-serving spirituality, health foods, narcotics, holistic drugs, and alcohol. Better
than any film I’ve seen in recent years, Maps
to the Stars captures the isolated, bubble-like existence of Hollywood’s
rich and famous. A space so airless and devoid of perspective or self-awareness
it actually could be what so many already assume it to be…another planet.
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| Stafford Weiss, self-help shaman-to-the-stars, guides Havana through one of her body's "Personal history points." *Note the barefoot shoes - an instant douchebag signifier |
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Maybe it’s just me, but movies set in Hollywood seem to take
on a mythological quality without even trying. The stuff of Greek tragedy: fate,
love, loss, retribution, redemption, ambition, hubris, abuse of power – sounds
like your typical studio pitch meeting!
What makes Hollywood so ripe for mythologizing is the city, in
its present incarnation anyway, represents something of a Paradise Lost. It's a place blessed by the gods with ideal weather and sublime vistas, yet it's also a community
of artists with the potential to globally elevate and inspire (figuratively
speaking, people in the film business make dreams for a living). But what is Hollywood
in reality? A place where everyone has smiled into the face of the devil
and allowed themselves to be blinded by the golden glare of fame and wealth.
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| Inner Peace Movie stars tend to use spirituality as a means to justify self-absorption and rationalize materialism. Here Havana's tranquility takes a major hit with the news that she's lost out on a coveted movie role |
David Cronenberg, master of the “body horror” genre, parallels
Agatha’s external disfigurement (which she goes to great pains to conceal) with the internal spiritual decay of Hollywood’s beautiful people (which they make no
effort to conceal at all). Agatha’s arrival is disruptive because her desire to
make amends really means forcing others to confront and/or expose their secrets.
Just as Havana’s regression therapy is a means of confronting her past through the reliving of it; Agatha ritualistically recites Paul Éluard’s poem, Liberty, while one pair of siblings ceremoniously restages the wedding of another pair of siblings (their parents), in order to free themselves from the toxic damage of that bond. To free themselves from the chain of addiction, cycle of abuse, legacy of mental illness, and the curse of ghostly hauntings.
The burning of Los Angeles is a vivid metaphor of purification in Nathanael West's classic novel, The Day of the Locust. In that book and in the brilliant 1975 film, West depicted a Hollywood devoid of love and undeserving of redemption. David Cronenberg finds contemporary Hollywood to be at least as monstrously grotesque as West did back in 1939, but he also posits the possibility that it is a city capable of reclamation.
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| Dressed for A Date With Destiny |
"Love is Stronger than Death"
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| On my school notebooks On my desk and on the trees On the sand and on the snow I write your name On all the flesh that says yes On the forehead of my friends On every hand held out I write your name Liberty |
Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2015
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