Celebrity and the Art of Self-Immolation: Part 1 (of 3)

Hollywood thrives when movie stars shine. So why do so many actors seem to resent their public?

This marks the first of a three-part series (available in full to paying subscribers) on the crisis facing celebrity culture. Though oft-maligned and trivialized by tabloid media like TMZ, “stardom” has long been a crucial component of the film business — especially with respect to financing and marketing.

In Part 1 we’ll look at the external and internal factors driving the current crisis, focusing on the relationship between celebrities and audiences, and the troubling trend of celebrity self-sabotage.

In Part 2 we’ll address “toxic celebrity” and Hollywood’s tendency to circle the wagons and throw up sacrificial lambs rather than address bad behavior and the longstanding cultural and systemic deficiencies that enable it.

In Part 3 we’ll lay out recommendations for solving the current crisis, and how to build a new foundation for a healthier celebrity culture to better serve audience demands, artistic needs and business expectations.

Wade

“You see, this is my life! It always will be! Nothing else! Just us, and the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!”
— Norma Desmond (as portrayed by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, 1950)

“…Americans who don’t travel, who 80 percent don’t have a passport, who are uneducated, are in their extraordinary naïveté.”
— Sharon Stone at the Turin Film Festival, November 24, 2024.¹

“Americans are very uninformed about reality... All of the biggest topics in the world, Americans have an appetite for a little bit of information. That vacuum is filled by the film industry.”
— Alec Baldwin at the Turin Film Festival, November 25, 2024. ²

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Hollywood movies about Hollywood are a curious bunch. For all their well-publicized narcissism, movie people don’t really enjoy looking in the mirror unless they’re wearing rose-colored glasses with Coke bottle lenses (Cherry Coke preferred). That’s why the handful of pictures that manage to capture the industry’s savage contradictions tend to be mostly reflections of the bitter experiences of their makers mixed with heavy doses of personalized nostalgia — an evocation of the vexing love/hate relationship with which almost all film artists struggle. Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), Frank Oz’s Bowfinger (1999), Christopher Guest’s The Big Picture (1989), the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink (1991), Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1953) and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) are among my personal favorites, each one a tile in an ever-expanding mosaic grasping at a complete picture. Billy Wilder’s 1950 Sunset Boulevard, however, may be the one film that captures it all — the majesty, the vanity, the glamour and the decadence that has both fueled and foiled Hollywood’s success from its inception. It’s also the only such film that fully grasps the nature and trap of celebrity.

Written by Wilder and Charles Brackett with the esteemed help of D. M. Marshman Jr., Sunset Boulevard’s savvy comparison/contrast between William Holden’s struggling young screenwriter Joe Gillis and Gloria Swanson’s aging silent movie star Norma Desmond unfolds like a morality play starring the Ghosts of Hollywood Past, Present and Future — except that it continues to remain relevant in whatever present it is viewed because Hollywood 2024 still wrestles with virtually all the same problems as Hollywood 1950. This is because “the biz” functions like a morally inverted Groundhog Day in which you wake up every morning to a new day, but somehow compulsively relive the same mistakes over and over and over without ever learning from them.

Bringing her own storied history as a former silent star to bear on her incarnation of Norma, Swanson famously created one of the most memorable (and oft-quoted) characters in movie history — hilariously camp yet chillingly real. What still resonates is how easily Norma’s celebrity perverts her perception of reality and subsumes her individual sense of self. The overrepresentation of Hollywood actors among people with chronic histories of addiction makes more sense once you appreciate that fame is the most addictive drug of all. In Norma’s case, the drug has proved transformative — the persona that was created for her, the fiction she once wore like rented red carpet jewelry, has so completely taken over her identity that her life has become an endless performance loop. The tragedy is that it’s a performance without an audience — and it’s that essential need for an audience that unites Joe and Norma across their vast differences in age, success, taste and sanity.

“You used to be big,” quips Joe upon their first meeting, zeroing in on the fleeting nature of fame which so haunts movie stars that it has made Hollywood the tip of the cosmetic surgery spear. Without missing a beat, Norma retorts, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” Further fueling her delusion of enduring celebrity is a constant stream of fan letters which, it is later revealed, are authored exclusively by Norma’s ex-husband-cum-manservant, Max von Mayerling (silent cinema auteur Erich von Stroheim), a once prominent silent filmmaker who long ago sacrificed himself, body and soul, to the ravenous needs of Norma’s monstrous, insatiable ego. The tragic culmination of Norma’s obsessions — and the film’s defining irony — is that only by murdering Joe and shattering the fragile walls of her make-believe world does she finally recapture the celebrity that had ceased to exist beyond those walls. As reality closes in, Norma’s tenuous connection to it dissipates — and with Max’s prompting she mistakes the invading army of police and paparazzi for a film crew, her conduit to “those wonderful people out there in the dark.”

The salient point here is that as stone-cold crazy as Norma has become, as disillusioned as she is with the state of movies in the sound era, the one external force she cannot and will not abandon is the audience, for without the adulation of a willing public, there is no celebrity. Norma doesn’t just need an audience — she needs to believe that the audience also needs her.