Maps to the Stars

Originally published on 18/03/23 on Letterboxd

Makes perfect sense that at his most perversely horrifying, Cronenberg would also be at his funniest. Perhaps not as ornate as the jagged poetry of DeLillo in Cosmopolis, but the unadulterated bluntness of Wagner’s screenplay is so much more brutal when contextualised against the flat, chilly sterility of Suschitzky’s images. Even when this is at its mundane it is so deeply unnerving- the blocking is always just slightly off-kilter, the tones of someone’s skin just slightly too saturated. Much like its Hollywood-insider counterpart The Canyons, it utilises plasticine, glossy digital surfaces to cheapen the ostensible grandeur of any gatherings of obscenely wealthy socialites or the appearance of one (1) Carrie Fisher.

Beyond how hauntingly sorrowful-almost elegiac, in spite of the brutal corporeality of what’s happening-the ending is, I’ve been thinking about this a lot because it’s maybe the only film I’ve seen that reflects, in all its horror, the bottomless black hole that is Bret Easton Ellis’ prose, moreso than even any direct adaptations of his work. Of course, the effect of Wagner and Cronenberg’s satirisation of Hollywood is one of revulsion rather than Ellis’ unwavering affectlessness, but the hauntological spirit of Chandler and Nathanael West, of the rich irony of Sunset Boulevardseeming an almost romantic vision of la-as-graveyard of dreams, of the baroque violence that seals one’s social status in blood, of the cosmologies of exploitation submersing themselves underneath the epidermis of the rejected as a parasitic entity waiting to break free- all of this has burrowed its way into my mind ever since I read Less Than Zerolast year, and since then it has only been through the generational despair of Cronenberg’s poison pen letter to Hollywood that the sentiments of that novel and the rest of Ellis’ work have emerged somewhere outside of the pages of his novels: that things aren’t going to get better, that someone will always have to suffer for you to succeed and that the only way to rid yourself of the ghostly wailing that won’t stop is to accept a death that was never in your hands anyways.

“On my school notebook, on my desk and the trees, on the sand and 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.”

-Maps to the Stars, David Cronenberg

“I’m drinking a glass of water at the empty hotel bar at the Principe di Savoia and staring at the mural behind the bar and in the mural there is a giant mountain, a vast field spread out below it where villagers are celebrating in a field of long grass that blankets the mountain dotted with tall white flowers, and in the sky above the mountain it's morning and the sun is spreading itself across the mural's frame, burning over the small cliffs and the low-hanging clouds that encircle the mountain's peak, and a bridge strung across a pass through the mountain will take you to any point beyond that you need to arrive at, because behind that mountain is a highway and along that highway are billboards with answers on them-who, what, where, when, why- and I’m falling forward but also moving up toward the mountain, my shadow looming against its jagged peaks, and I’m surging forward, ascending, sailing through dark clouds, rising up, a fiery wind propelling me, and soon it's night and stars hang in the sky above the mountain, revolving as they burn.

The stars are real.

The future is that mountain.”

-Glamorama, Bret Easton Ellis.