David Cronenberg – 2014 – Canada
Maps to the Stars finds veteran Canadian auteur David Cronenberg in an unusually strong satirical mood. It’s rare that time and place are so punctuated in a Cronenberg film, but here we have frequent references to real celebrities and events that unequivocally place us in Hollywood circa 2014. Nevertheless, Cronenberg’s subject is not the movie business but – as it has always been – human nature. The tone of satire in the first half of the film is in some ways a red herring that gradually makes way for Cronenberg’s longtime preoccupation with mental illness; specifically the ways in which human beings pay a terrible emotional price for fabricating a world to replace reality with one that conforms to their own desires. This is the case not only for the famous but for anyone living in an industrialized society, where the ability to memorialize the everyday trivia of one’s life is inextricably tied to self-worth and identity, to the extent that actual achievement dwindles in importance. In Maps to the Stars, everyone is deeply invested in some New Age fad, motivational pop psychology, meditation, psychiatry, medication, etc., all for the purpose of assuring them that they are wonderful and worthwhile. The real effect of this cushioning from reality, though, is that they are all the more emboldened to behave reprehensibly to everyone around them; acquaintances and strangers alike. An easy criticism of the film is that this kind of barbed expose of Hollywood’s moral bankruptcy has been done well enough – never better than by Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) – but the surface milieu is no more the true subject of the film than Cold War era China was in Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly (1993). The director’s portraits of madness are starting to outnumber the physical aberrations that populated most of his early films. In Dead Ringers (1988), Spider (2002), A History of Violence (2005) and A Dangerous Method (2011), characters experience severe, often self-willed breaks from identity and sanity. What Maps to the Stars adds to the equation is the idea of an entire nuclear family infected with madness. Ghosts appear to people in the film, and – as in real life – they are not paranormal manifestations at all but personifications of individuals’ guilt and anxiety. And just as the viruses in Cronenberg’s early films had their own happy endings, so insanity has its way here; suggesting that humanity’s modern pretensions may only receive their cure by the violent tug of nature back to a state of mind that we would find less civilized.
Maps to the Stars finds veteran Canadian auteur David Cronenberg in an unusually strong satirical mood. It’s rare that time and place are so punctuated in a Cronenberg film, but here we have frequent references to real celebrities and events that unequivocally place us in Hollywood circa 2014. Nevertheless, Cronenberg’s subject is not the movie business but – as it has always been – human nature. The tone of satire in the first half of the film is in some ways a red herring that gradually makes way for Cronenberg’s longtime preoccupation with mental illness; specifically the ways in which human beings pay a terrible emotional price for fabricating a world to replace reality with one that conforms to their own desires. This is the case not only for the famous but for anyone living in an industrialized society, where the ability to memorialize the everyday trivia of one’s life is inextricably tied to self-worth and identity, to the extent that actual achievement dwindles in importance. In Maps to the Stars, everyone is deeply invested in some New Age fad, motivational pop psychology, meditation, psychiatry, medication, etc., all for the purpose of assuring them that they are wonderful and worthwhile. The real effect of this cushioning from reality, though, is that they are all the more emboldened to behave reprehensibly to everyone around them; acquaintances and strangers alike. An easy criticism of the film is that this kind of barbed expose of Hollywood’s moral bankruptcy has been done well enough – never better than by Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) – but the surface milieu is no more the true subject of the film than Cold War era China was in Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly (1993). The director’s portraits of madness are starting to outnumber the physical aberrations that populated most of his early films. In Dead Ringers (1988), Spider (2002), A History of Violence (2005) and A Dangerous Method (2011), characters experience severe, often self-willed breaks from identity and sanity. What Maps to the Stars adds to the equation is the idea of an entire nuclear family infected with madness. Ghosts appear to people in the film, and – as in real life – they are not paranormal manifestations at all but personifications of individuals’ guilt and anxiety. And just as the viruses in Cronenberg’s early films had their own happy endings, so insanity has its way here; suggesting that humanity’s modern pretensions may only receive their cure by the violent tug of nature back to a state of mind that we would find less civilized.
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