David Cronenberg is one of the undisputed masters of the
Hollywood body horror movement. He knows
how to emphasize the grotesqueries of the human form to make points about the
human condition and just generally wig us out.
However, Maps to the Stars is
a change of pace for Cronenberg, as his focus shifts to a direct analysis of
the souls of Hollywood denizens, and the parallels he draws are problematic to
say the least. And yet, when his film
hits the mark, it does a decent enough job, even if the insights he portrays
are nothing new in criticisms of Hollywood culture.
The cast of characters is representative of relevantly
modern Hollywood archetypes: the aging infantile actress who cannot live up to
her mother’s black-and-white era acclaim (Julianne Moore, who has just been on
a roll lately); a child star who has been morphed into a drug-abusive,
egomaniacal bully; a mentally ill personal assistant whose history has been
swept under the rug by parents with celebrity-adjacent careers too important to
lose. The performances are well executed
and nuanced, and what emerges is a tale of children, whether they be literal or
simply emotionally stunted adults. All
of these children are subject to abuse in one way or another, an abuse that is
allegorical to how Hollywood’s allure of money and fame has the capability to
destroy a person’s capacity for empathy or decency, thereby perpetuating a
system of abuse.
This type of story has been told before, but never with
Cronenberg’s overt attraction to the grotesque.
However, his attention is drawn in problematic ways this time. While his characters’ tendency to see the
literal ghosts of their pasts rings a little trite, their compulsive attraction
toward incest is new, yet has subtext that I find more than a little
disquieting. Much of the film’s
portrayal of incestuous relationships is within the context of child abuse: a
rapist stepfather, advantage taken over a mental ill sister, various other
instances of interpersonal violence that creates the Hollywood cast of damaged
humanity. And while those instances of
abuse are demonstrative of the point the film is trying to make, I take issue
with the film’s assumption that incest itself is a producer of inbred
psychopathy. Two of the film’s
characters are the admitted product of a consensual sexual relationship between
siblings, and the film seems to point to that as a reason for its characters’
doomed psyches, as if they were denied a chance to be healthy by virtue of
their very existence. Though this makes
an adequate point about the chance for normalcy that child stars have in the
Hollywood system, it paints an unfair portrait of children of incest that makes
me more than a little uneasy.
That major issue aside, however, Maps to the Stars is an adequate enough film for what it is trying
to accomplish. Stabs at Hollywood excess
and cloistered idiocy are nothing new, and Cronenberg’s disgust with the human
condition is nothing new, but putting the two together provides for a unique
spin on an old product. Some of its
philosophical underpinnings are, in this critic’s opinion, fundamentally
flawed, but taking the film’s premises on abuse as true makes it thematically
rich and overall pretty decent. I would
just encourage viewers to keep in mind that despite the film’s conflations,
abuse and incest are not inherently analogous, and treating the human products
of incest as inherently damaged is dehumanizing, even when making a point by
analogy.
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