Maps to the Stars: Hollywood Babylon

David Cronenberg is a treasure. I’m not breaking any new ground there, but I had the pleasure of watching his (criminally underrated) Maps to the Stars (2014), his Mulholland Drive (2001), if you will. Lynch and Cronenberg, whatever some may say, don’t have all that much in common, of course. Maps to the Stars is not about (not precisely anyway) a young woman chasing her dreams in Hollywood. But it is a trenchant, animated takedown of all things show business, and especially Hollywood. The great Babylon shovels into its maw and spits out half-chewed.

Maps to the Stars understands that to undermine our myths it must go big. What many reviewers take for an unwanted silliness, I interpret as the proper tone. How else to handle behemoths? More importantly, this is what our titans are like. Is it so hard to believe a washed-up actress might celebrate a child’s death if it means getting a part or that a New Age author and stage parent might want to shunt away his problem child? Is it so odd to see Julianne Moore screaming during a bodywork session about her mother’s (potentially fake) abuse?

Cronenberg mixes real names with fake ones, even bringing Carrie Fisher into play as herself. “Harvey” comes in for mentioning more than once. The result is a heightened reality, a hyperreality if you will, in which the backroom deals, sexual favors, rampant abuse, and mental degradation take perhaps their only worthy form: laughter. What can you do but laugh at a society so enamored by the broken and the deficient? How else to make sense of the mess we’ve made?

I’ll leave it at that. Watch the movie. Best the plot remain unclear. Just follow the map.