By Philipp Maier Stadel
In “Maps to the Stars” shows David Cronenberg, how horrible and abysmal it can go in Hollywood. He knows that movies always produce ghosts that you will never get rid of – his own.
The young woman because driving through the night, on the way to Hollywood, returns. Many years ago she had to get away from here, after a serious accident, even as a child, disowned by her family. The past few years she spent in a mental institution, but of which we see nothing. It all starts with their recurrence. When they had never sat anywhere other than in this remote bus, as they would be eternally driven through the night, as she had long since turned into a ghost.
This pale young woman, played by the very pale and very ethereal Mia Wasikowska wears, not coincidentally the name Agatha white. Where did they come because they will once asked, and she replied: from Jupiter. In “Maps to the Stars” will now haunt her family, who in turn has a lot to do with ghosts. Agatha’s brother, for example, a severely troubled 13-year-old child star who has just made its first drug rehabilitation behind him, will be pursued by the spirit of a deceased girl he had attended at a charity event in the hospital.
The father (John Cusack) is in turn a psycho-guru who collected money for it, drive out the Hollywood stars in dramatic seances demons. His best customer is an aging actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), who regularly appears her dead mother, since she will play the role in a remake that they once made famous. So she wants a certain extent even be a ghost.
An eternal, cosmic recurrence
David Cronenberg, it’s not just the return of the repressed in the city of dreams. He knows that movies always produce ghosts that you will never get rid of – his own: an eternal, cosmic recurrence. While Robert Pattinson was in Cronenberg’s last film, chauffeured by “Cosmopolis,” he says himself, this time as a chauffeur by Los Angeles. And Havana very physical Psycho-séances, in which it is physically battered and shaken by their memories and fears, remember the therapy session at the beginning of “A Dangerous Method,” Cronenberg’s penultimate film.
Cronenberg’s exploration of the violent influences and transformations of the body has reached its subtlest level – the level ghosts. Even with “History of Violence” he had left the carnal mutations and growths of his earlier films, so the re-combinations of humans with animals, video recorders or cars. Since then, he is more interested in the surface of the skin of his characters – and for the question to appear which mark their inner life, their identity on it
As slumbered about under the skin of the good family father in “A History. of Violence “at any time reactivatable instincts of a professional killer, marked the tattoos on the body of the Russian mobster in” Eastern Promises “at the same time the undercover agent at Scotland Yard.
” A Dangerous Method “, his film about Sigmund Freud and CG Jung, the torn interiority of his characters then was no longer visible on the bodies: These were shaken only in violent convulsions of the psychoanalytic “Sprechkur”, while the ultra-sharp, smooth, digital image had all the scars and cracks already sewn
And in “Cosmopolis” appeared to the many conversations over an increasingly dematerialized capitalism, which led Robert Pattinson in his limousine, the fetishized body of the “Twilight” – long since transformed Stars in a bloodless plastic icon to have while on the windows always outside held, virtual New York vorbeizog, a neoliberal universe, reduced to the virtuality of a screen.
Both “Dangerous Method” and “Cosmopolis” have Cronenberg’s critics accused pedagogically to demonstratively proceed only to repeat phrases about psychoanalysis and capitalism. When could a film about Freud and Jung seriously replace the reading of their texts, as it would need today a film adaptation of “Cosmopolis” in order to explain the nature of neoliberalism. In both films it was a lot more about how a discourse on a body, takes possession of him, formed him.
A pale ghosts scar on Agatha’s face
“Maps” seems a similar misunderstanding almost lie. Do we need this film to make us how horrible and abysmal it can go in Hollywood? No. Again and again, as a text that changes from one figure to another, a poem by Paul Éluard cited, “Liberté”. Chorus-like returns the passage “I write your name…” again, such as “… upon the absence without desire / to the naked loneliness / on the stages of death.” Cronenberg knows that in cinema the form, so the freedom of a letter with pictures come from any Content and any ideology, must be so exempt from this.
After two sprechlastigeren films so it’s now this of all invoked, elegant and discreet font, like a spirit pushing behind all the spirits in the body, it forms, as in his William S. Burroughs-adaptation “Naked Lunch”. Only this time not as plump Drogenphantasmagorie. The spirits of the dead seize the world head-on, bright and direct. They lie in the bathtub, talk to the survivors or through them. The picture is so clear and smooth like a starry sky. What remains: a pale ghosts scar on Agatha’s face, and blows, of which her brother once said that they would leave no traces
Maps to. the Stars , CA / D 2013 – Director: David Cronenberg, book: Cronenberg, Bruce Wagner. Camera: P. Suschitzky. With Julianne Moore, Robert Pattinson, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack. MFA, 107 min.
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