This Is What Its Like To Be Famous Today, According To 2014s Movies If were scouting out trends in movie releases, 2014 could be seen as the year Hollywoods intestines were splayed out for dissection and observation. Long accepted as an easy source for a satire, the film industry suddenly seems to have become one of screenwriters top targets -- a notion that goes hand in hand with how much the current cultural conversation is ripping apart the way the media discusses popular culture. A handful of this years top films -- most of the low-budget, prestige kind -- have skewered the notion of fame, particularly as it affects aging celebrities. Because imagine that: You spend the bulk of your life as a public figure and then, after being incapable of tamping scrutiny over your professional and personal choices, you feel rejected by the very people who put you on that pedestal. Sunset Boulevard famously tackled this concept in 1950, and other films have addressed similar concerns among Broadway stars (All About Eve, Being Julia). But if this years film-festival fare is any indication, the so-called contemporary culture wars have expanded past Pat Buchanans screeds and Gawker Medias jeremiads and returned to the place they allegedly began: within culture itself. The splashiest dismemberment of Hollywoods unkind treatment toward aging hotshots comes in Birdman. Alejandro González Iñárritus biting comedy finds Michael Keaton playing Riggan Thompson, an actor who cant escape the titular superhero he portrayed in three movies years earlier. As the movie tells us, Riggan turned down a fourth Birdman despite assurances that it would hit $1 billion at the global box office. With that decision, he also inadvertently turned down the chance to find respectable acting work. The public only wanted to see him don an avian bodysuit and prevent worldwide tumult. The meta nature of how this corresponds to Keatons history with Tim Burtons Batman movies (he and Burton turned down making a third, and the genre did nothing but proliferate after their exit) is only a piece of the puzzle that Birdman fits together. Even if Keatons own legacy werent tied up in the movies politics, half of Hollywoods would be ensnarled by its narrative. In order to capture an artistry hes been unable to hold onto after the media branded him little more than a box-office boon, Riggan adapts a Raymond Carver short story for Broadway. He also spars with a bloviating New York Times critic who says shell rip apart his play because hes nothing more than a celebrity, an admittedly unrealistic but no less caustic take on the way those whove been granted a byline -- and who hasnt these days? -- sometimes assess fame. Birdman alone might not merit much more than few chunky thinkpieces were it not for the Keaton tie-in, the devotion some grant Iñárritus movies (21 Grams, Babel) and, most important, the fact that Clouds of Sils Maria, Maps to the Stars and The Congress all tackle similar themes. In Clouds of Sils Maria, a much-lauded underdog of this years festival circuit thats due out in theaters next year, Juliette Binoche plays Maria Enders, an actress famous for portraying the younger of two women at the center of a well-regarded play. Years after her auspicious debut and the industrys increasing dependence on -- what else? -- superhero movies, she reluctantly agrees to play the elder character, even though she knows shell take a backseat to the young actress (played by Chloë Grace Moretz) cast opposite her. We watch as Maria struggles to accept her new position in the world of celebrity: haunted by recollections of headlining the same play in which she now plays second fiddle. Popular culture, again, is a cruel mistress to those who produce it. (And the trend could continue into 2015, with Al Pacino playing an aging actor in Januarys The Humbling.) Each movie implies that we as a culture did this to the celebrities, that their identities are man-made constructions about what fame means. And understandably so. It must be addictive, right? To be, at best, beloved or, at least, an object of popular affection? If any character this year knows that, its Julianne Moores in the David Cronenberg movie Maps to the Stars. Maria Elders offers the intellectuals take on the challenges of fame, but Moores super-famous but quickly diminishing Havana Segrand is a glimpse of the obsessives version. Never not anxious about The State of Her Image, Havana is the star whos certain she deserves worship. Her mania is refracted in The Congress, in which Robin Wright plays herself as an actress so fickle that no one wants to cast her anymore. She recoils when, 20 years after selling her digital image to a studio and promising never to act again, her likeness is used for a new technology in which anyone can turn themselves into her. In each of these cases, the actor or actress in question detects his or her own creeping irrelevance. Weve come to a moment in popular culture where those whove been granted celebrity struggle more than ever to ensure their continued value. Were quick to grant 15 minutes of fame, but even quicker to adjudicate when the clock has finished counting down. Mr. Turner, Mike Leighs biopic about 19th-century painter J.M.W. Turner, conveys the same notion -- and, despite its 1800s setting, the movie arrives at a particularly trenchant moment. When Turner learns of the invention of the camera, he recognizes that it will inevitably phase out the desire for the landscape images hes devoted his life to painting. But back to the fictional celebs: Their diminishing worth is just as much as product of their own mindframe as it is cruel Hollywood mechanics. The voice of Birdman taunts Riggan with devil-on-your-shoulder rumblings about his worthlessness. The youthfulness that threatens Maria Enders and Havana Segrand derives from the din inside their own egomaniacal heads as much as it does the chatter of the media and studio execs, who collectively view themselves as gatekeepers of modern fame. What stands out is how these movies converse with Mr. Turner and tell us that, as melodramatic as we know todays stars sometimes are, tying ones self-worth to mainstream consumption has always been a tenuous affair. For a group of privileged individuals who become all too aware of their own positioning within the world, 2014s movies suggest that fame is not only the harbinger of much adulation and a few headaches along the way, but a fickle beast with tentacles that will rip out the entrails of those who let it get the best of them -- that is, until they take off the bodysuit and learn to soar on their own.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 15:34:16 +0000
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