Maps to the Stars (2014)

Maps to the Stars arrives as a black comedy of Hollywood cannibalism, directed by David Cronenberg and written by Bruce Wagner, who clearly has scores to settle. The Weiss family runs on incest, pills, and the labor of a child star. Havana Segrand, an aging actress, is haunted by her dead mother and by the remake she wants to headline. Agatha, scarred and freshly released from a sanatorium, drifts through this ecosystem with a stolen wedding ring and a poem she recites like a prayer. Nobody here is well. Nobody here is meant to be.

For our purposes, the film registers faintly on a few cultural meters. It has a genuine interest in the misogyny that grinds women down in the industry: Havana is devoured by her mother's memory, and Cristina manages her son's career with the warmth of a talent agency. That earns a modest nod toward feminist critique, though the film is a bleak satire, not a manifesto. There is also a mild swipe at celebrity as commodity, at nepotism and the monetization of fame. But the target is narcissism, not the economic order. The commentary arrives through absurdism and gore, not through a lecture, which keeps the sermonizing to a minimum.

Everything else is absent. The cast is white, the concerns are white, and race goes unmentioned. No LGBTQ material appears; the transgression on offer is heterosexual incest. The climate is not a subject. Bodies are treated as sites of horror (burns, scars, menstrual blood, self-destruction), so there is no uplift to be found there. Mental illness is gothic pathology, not identity. History is not revised because history is not consulted. A somber vintage, this one. It bites hard and offers nothing to feel good about.