I Would Like to See It: Maps to the Stars (Patreon)

Celebrity is a noxious enough concept taken by itself, a process of folding an overabundance of meaning and emotion into a single human receptacle until inevitably the constructed reality collapses for both viewer and icon, resulting in a total meltdown of individual identity as well as a cataclysmic shift in public attitude. Factor in not just the alternately enabling and cannibalistic pack of ghouls that is one’s fellow celebrities but a huge cultural apparatus designed to sustain individual celebrity as an endlessly exploitable resource for high-end quack therapists, boutique home decorators, and the unscrupulous parents of child stars to parasitize endlessly, and that baseline monstrosity becomes something both far more dangerous and far less human. Take child star Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird), fresh out of rehab at age fourteen and trying so hard to restore his image that after an interview he vomits from sheer stress. His parents, agent/manager Cristina (Olivia Williams) and superstar quack therapist Stafford (John Cusack), are brother and sister, a fact they learned only after getting together but which did not dissuade them from their plans of founding a Hollywood dynasty. His sister Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) is a schizophrenic disowned and institutionalized by their parents for burning their house down and nearly taking herself and Benjie with it.

Benjie’s life as someone simultaneously painfully alone and far too empowered by wealth and status is a harrowing spectacle of dead, empty affect and petty cruelty. He terrorizes his young co-star for upstaging him, alternately sneers at and fawns over the parents who exploit and ignore him, and both yearns for and deeply fears his absent older sister, with whom he once played ambiguously sexual games of marriage and servitude. Incest and fire run through Maps to the Stars like twin nervous systems, connecting nearly every character. Washed-up and dysfunctional actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) makes tearful talkshow admissions of the childhood sexual abuse she suffered at her mother, Hollywood icon Clarice Taggart’s (Sarah Gaddon) hands. Taggart died young in a fire of ambiguous origin, and Havana’s feelings of abuse are sourced in “recovered memories” the film subtly implies her celebrity therapist, Stafford Weiss, may have pushed onto her in an attempt to build up his own fame. One wonders why Stafford, who so resolutely ignores both the incestuous secret of his married life and its echo in the lives of his children, would choose to manufacture a story so gruesomely similar. Perhaps the collective subconscious of Hollywood’s elite has nothing to offer but fire and rape.

Cronenberg shoots all this sickly, self-involved insanity with a cool, clear palette ranging from bright natural lighting for outdoor scenes to the almost submarine blue-green of his interior dusk and night shots, frequently accompanied by water reflections on static surfaces. Shot in both Toronto and Los Angeles, the film has an uncanny internal divide, a sense of placelessness embodied by the blank, impersonal architecture of the homes of the super-wealthy. Identity slides off of machined surfaces and slick, reflective glass. Characters often recite or read from Paul Éluard's poem "Liberté", mythologizing both their own struggle to be known and the act of projecting onto others. From various tongues it appears alternately romantic, desperate, wild, but the truth it reveals is that when any of these people looks at someone else, all they see is their own reflection staring back at them.