Hollywood's Black Mirror: Superstars and Self Loathing

Hollywood has issues. Serious self esteem issues. While to you and I it is an unrelenting dream factory, making children happy, blowing stuff up and keeping Michael Bay inexplicably employed, below the surface lies something much more sinister. Once the layers of stage make up are removed, you can find a confused, self-loathing monster at once ashamed of what it does to people but also desperate for the public's attention. Yes, when a director dares to shine the stage lights back at the industry, you can find some pretty damning, often downright savage portraits. You just have to know where to look. So here's where to look:

Singin' In The Rain (1952, Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly)

One of the greatest, most heartwarming, magical and just downright superb films ever made, elements of Singin' are not particularly complementary about tinseltown. Set around the birth of sound in films (the mid-1920s, film history fans), it deals with the cruel reality facing many stars of the silent era at the dawn of the talkie. This is embodied in Jean Hagen's Lina Lamont; a great face for silent pictures but possessed of a caricature 'Noo Yawk' screech in her voice, making her universally unsuited to sound. The film depicts how the industry chews up and spits out its stars, particularly the female ones. This is of course buried beneath one of Hollywood's sweetest romances between Kelly's Don Lockwood and new 'talent' Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds). The moral of the story: men can survive seismic shifts in the industry but women are more expendable. And we see this as a feelgood film? Tsk tsk.

The Artist (2011, Michel Hazanavicius)

Covering similar ground as Singin' but reversing the gender roles (only appropriate, given the modern day production), The Artist was a worthy Oscar winner. It's a simple, elegant tale in which Jean Dujardin's titular silent movie star finds himself unwanted and cast aside by an industry eager for the next big thing. Stuck in his ways, he needs the guidance of Berenice Bejo's irrepressible Peppy Miller to overcome the transition to talkies. The ease with which he is almost driven to suicide when the industry he helped create decided it didn't want him any longer is a subtly scathing swipe at the studios.

What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962, Robert Aldrich)

Never one to shy from the darker side , Robert Aldrich made brutal war movie The Dirty Dozen and nihilistic noir Kiss Me Deadly (often cited as the film that ended the noir cycle). Baby Jane is a creepy, often frightening tale of two sisters: one a former child star turned alcoholic nobody (Bette Davis' embittered 'Baby' Jane) and the other a successful but now crippled Hollywood actress (Joan Crawford's desperate victim, Blanche). Both having been churned up and spat out by the studio system, Jane is driven to madness by jealousy of Blanche's success, and the fact that nobody wants to see her any more. The final scene of Jane, on the verge of arrest for murder but thrilled at the attention she's getting for her insane dancing, is a sad indictment of the industry's ability to build and break in equal measure.

That the two stars reportedly despised each other in real life not only festered some brilliant performances, it further reinforces just what being a movie star can do to a person.

Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder)

Arguably the best film by one of Classical Hollywood's greatest directors (for me, up there with Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks) is perversely the one where he not only bit the hand that fed but took out a massive chunk and spat it on the ground. Covering similar thematic ground as Baby Jane, this is a dark, tragic tale of faded silent era star Norma Desmond (in a too-good-at-this-for-it-not-to-be-real Gloria Swanson). Driven so insane by her fall from fame, she engineers a fantasy world in which her comeback is just around the corner and where Hollywood hasn't forgotten about her.

Drawn into this web of madness is William Holden's Joe, and through his eyes we see indignity after indignity unfold: the studio only wants her for her car; her devoted manservant was actually her first husband; she believes the cameras that greet her arrest are actually filming her big screen comeback. This is a film whose depiction of Hollywood stardom is so dark and bleak that it's narrated by a dead guy.

Mulholland Drive (2001, David Lynch)

Another film where a character's failures in Hollywood lead to psychological breakdown (maybe). Where broken dreams of stardom cause the character's insane dreams, which actually compromise the bulk of the film (possibly...). Look, I have no idea what this film is about but the more 'narrative' aspects of it suggest that it's a pretty nasty critique on the Hollywood dream and, particularly when viewed alongside Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, how women are manipulated in the industry.

If you fancy trying to work out what this brilliant but baffling film is all about, the Wikipedia page has some brilliant information to chew on.

Maps To The Stars (2014, David Cronenberg)

No real surprises that this one slipped under the radar with minimal advertising, it sees the industry's other weird David not so much biting the hand that feeds but cutting it off and using it to wipe his backside. Satirical to the point where you struggle to believe the (universally brilliant) actors aren't as horrible as they appear. This features Robert Pattinson sending up his own career and those of many of his peers, and a fearless, peerless performance from Julianne Moore, whose desperate has-been is simply vile but in the hands of Moore, somehow worthy of pathos. That the only likeable character in the film is Mia Wasikowska's psychologically unstable, matricidal burn victim is telling: this is behind the scenes of both young fame and fading glory, and Cronenberg is telling us that it's rotten to the core. Don't let this put you off, by the way; the film is brilliant.

The Player (1992, Robert Altman)

In my opinion the most satirical film on the list and the one which takes the dimmest view of Hollywood is one of Robert Altman's many masterpieces. Tim Robbins' producer, desperate to stay ahead of the game, murders an aspiring screenwriter. Desperation for continued success drives a man to kill and then give in to a blackmailer in return for his freedom. The entire film is a joke on the industry and the skeletons in its wardrobe department. My favourite example of Hollywood's corrupting influence appears in The Player: Richard E. Grant's determined screenwriter pitches a legal drama with no stars and a depressing ending, a project he is passionate about and will not compromise on. The ending of The Player shows the final scene of his film: Bruce Willis rescues Julia Roberts from the gas chamber (with a shotgun, naturally) and carries her away with a pithy one-liner. Richard E. Grant, ecstatic with the result, becomes another artist compromised by the Hollywood money machine. A wonderful film, with no moral and nothing good to say about the industry which produced it.

It's telling, I think, that some of the greatest artists working within the studio system have produced such savage attacks on the very industry that gave them their medium. Some might cite bitterness or envy but I would disagree. It takes a great mind to criticise and tear apart from within and a particular talent to create art while doing it.