Pete July 6, 2017

Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, UK, 2014) and our Relationship to Cinema and Social Media.

Introduction

The film Maps to the Stars (Cronenberg, 2014) is a darkly dramatic tale about a seemingly random collection of Hollywood personalities and their families. It is categorised as comedy/ drama in the IMDb listing (IMDb, 2017) but in fact, there are elements of the horror genre as well, including ghostly scenes featuring the dead mother of the main character and some horrific murders. These touches echo Cronenberg’s earlier work in the horror genre and they illustrate one of his key cinematic aims, namely to use cinematic technology “to create unsettling and unreal effects in the consciousness of the viewer” (O’Neill, 1996). This essay considers some critical reactions and social network responses to the film, before reflecting on the nature and impact of the expanded possibilities that now exist for studying Hollywood in the light of our own personal relationship with the moving image and social networks.

Critical Reaction to the Film

Maps to the Stars (Cronenberg, 2014) was well received by the film establishment and received several awards, including Best Actress Award for Julianne Moore at the 2014 Cannes film festival. In the British press, the film was described as “a grotesque ghost story about the selective memory of the movies” (Collin, 2014), with some appreciation of the way it reflects and critiques the narcissistic nature of the cinema world in and around Hollywood.

A more critical view from America describes the film as “part satire, part soap opera, part ghost story, and totally moronic” (Reed, 2015), but this negative evaluation reveals a failure to appreciate the deliberate ambiguity and narrative complexity in this film. Reed (2015) cites a lack of logic in the actions of the characters, fragmented plot lines with unlikely twists, “name-dropping, sex orgies, cult-therapists and contrived eccentrics”.

These quirky and highly intertextual features are not evidence of weak cinematography, but rather they are hallmarks of the post-modern film, in which the spectator is invited to take an active part in a game with the filmmaker (Phillips, 2011). Spectators are invited to appreciate the deliberate disjunctions and ironic quotations from other films, other genres, and contemporary popular culture. Uncertainty is a device that is used by Cronenberg to confound the expectations of the audience, and make viewers “unravel the scenes for themselves” (Etherington-Wright and Doughty, 2011). Many viewers will enjoy filling in the missing connections and contributing their own creative understandings using their own experiences, analogies and expectations from a wide range of other sources.  This adds to the richness of the viewing experience and makes for interesting conversations between viewers who have had different past experiences of moving images. Viewers who expect the more linear storylines and consistent characterisations in the classical Hollywood film tradition will, however, be disappointed, and find the film very puzzling indeed.

Response to the Film in Social Networks

Personal responses to the film, as documented in social media comments and reviews, were also polarised, ranging from the uncomprehending “WTF is going on” (Agent SEPTEMBER, 2015) to complaints about the self-centeredness, and immorality, of the Hollywood location, and praise for the manic weirdness of the acting, as well as some appreciation of Cronenberg’s directorial style. Comments and questions about the musical score and the appearance of the actors also abound, as individual viewers follow up their own personal lines of interest.

There are plenty of references in the film that Social Media posts will eagerly comment upon, including a wonderful cameo role by Carrie Fisher, playing herself, which echoes the science fiction reference in the film’s title, but also picks up the dominant theme of the ageing actress who looks back on her, and Hollywood’s, glorious past. The notion of a “map of the stars” conjures up an intergalactic voyage, as well as a tour around Hollywood properties, spotting the places where famous people from the world of cinema are living, or have lived in the past. This preoccupation with celebrities and fandom blurs the boundary between film and reality, and Carrie Fisher personifies this duality and these multiple levels of interpretation in the film.

Reflection on Context in Which We Can Now Study Hollywood

The main conclusion that can be drawn from this brief analysis is that the explosion of new technologies, including new screen formats and new ways of distributing commercial cinema, has engendered a vast, and networked, viewing public that is “active, attentive and engaged” (Vernallis, 2013, p. 729). It is no longer just the act of going to the local cinema, or even hiring a video to view at home, that characterises film consumption, but rather there is a vast and digitally enabled viewing public that engages much more actively using social media. This results in a visual and audio aesthetic that reaches across different platforms and genres, and different periods of cinema history, through all kinds of formal and informal networks.

For the scholar of cinema, professional reviews by film critics now stand alongside reviews made by fans, or even casual film viewers. Online conversations, which may include multi-media parodies and pastiches, highlight the aspects of cinema that resonate with the wider public, and these may be very different from those that are emphasised in professional film criticism.  This film defies tradition, and models emerging ways of viewing Hollywood, its people, and its cinematic outputs. A key insight from Vernallis (2013) is that “Films now are not so much about story as about pathway.” In our hyper-connected world, people are dipping into and out of different activities, accessing social media while working, playing games or viewing videos in between short bursts of study, constantly sending each other messages and images, or posting comments and tweets so that daily experience becomes like a journey through a labyrinth of sensory input. Cronenberg’s film taps it to this postmodern “culture of stylistic surface rootlessness” (Cousins, 2006).

When we study cinema today, all of this complex interaction in relation to a film can be tracked and analysed, showing how meanings are interpreted, or rejected, or modified, or re-created, and exchanged by individuals in their different groups and networks. Failure to understand is also documented, along with the negative reactions of different segments of the audience. Studying these online phenomena offers new avenues for research into film, and promises to open up whole new theories and insights that would not have been possible in previous times, when cinema criticism was an activity carried out only by academic elites.

 

Biblography

 

Agent SEPTEMBER [YouTube comment from] (2015)Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsFnwgUlrxs [Accessed 7 July 2017]

Collin, R. (2014) Maps to the Stars, review: ‘tremendous’. The Telegraph (26 September). Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/11121111/Maps-to-the-Stars-review-tremendous.html [Accessed 4 July 2017].

Cousins, M. (2006) The Story of Film. London: Pavilion Books.

Cronenberg, D. (2014) Maps to the Stars. [film] UK/Canada: Prospero Pictures.

Etherington-Wright, C. and Doughty, R. (2011) Understanding Film Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

IMDb (2017) Maps to the Stars. Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2172584/ [Accessed 4 July 2017].

O’Neill, E. R. (1996) David Cronenberg. In G. Nowell-Smith (Ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 736.

Phillips, P. (2011) Spectator, audience and response. In J. Nelmes (Ed.), Introduction to Film Studies. Fifth edition. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 113-141.

Reed, R. (2015) Fresh from her Oscar win, Julianne Moore strikes out in ‘Maps to the Stars’. New York Observer (25 February). Available at: http://observer.com/2015/02/fresh-from-her-oscar-win-julianne-moore-strikes-out-in-maps-to-the-stars/ [Accessed 4 July 2017].

Vernallis, C. (2013) Accelerated Aesthetics: A new lexicon of time, space and rhythm. In C. Vernallis, A. Herzog and J. Richardson (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 707-731.