Hollywood has been disemboweling itself onscreen since the waning days of the studio system: Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) tells of a once-glamorous silent actress now sealed in amber, and Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1951) exposes an unscrupulous producer. Blake Edwards convinced his wife, Julie Andrews, to go topless in S.O.B. (1981), about a director who convinces his wife to go topless in his new movie, and Robert Altman set a new standard for anti-Hollywood bile with his star-studded mystery The Player (1992), about a studio executive being harassed by a vengeful screenwriter. But you’d have to look to literature—Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust or Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays—to find a tinseltown dystopia as nihilistic as David Cronenberg’s showbiz horror flick Maps to the Stars. Movies about Hollywood are invariably propelled by raging egos, but Cronenberg makes them the stuff of nightmares.
The other monstrous ego in Maps to the Stars is Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), a spoiled movie actress well past her expiration date, and like Benjie, she’s never had a childhood. Her mother was a Hollywood starlet who sexually abused her, yet Havana, desperate to keep her career alive, hopes to play her mommie dearest, who died in a house fire in the 70s, in a new remake of the cult movie that made her famous. Maps to the Stars is heavily populated by ghosts, and at one point the mother, Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon), visits Havana to castigate her for “your shitty tits and your used-up cunt.” There’s a great medium shot of Havana, in a meditation pose, as she struggles for composure but finally goes to pieces as a phone message from her manager reveals that she’s lost the part to a younger actress. When that actress pulls out of the project—her young son has drowned in a swimming pool—Havana dances around on her patio, singing “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.”
Directed by David Cronenberg
