Interesting. I don't know if I think of these movies as making fun of those wanna-be starlet protagonists. I see many of them as specific variations on the classic "deal with the devil" story. These women---often hopeful and naive---come to Hollywood hoping to make a big break come face to face with the reality of how exploitative and rigged the system is. I think that X, for example, makes more fun of the wanna-be auteur boyfriend than it does of Mia Goth's character.
The auteur boyfriend was hilarious. Bless him.
I do see what you’re saying. The popular girl in high school is a good analogy. Maybe you’ve hit the nail on the head there. Maybe I don’t like it that they’re positioned as naive. I think it’s bit of a leap to assume that everyone with showbiz ambitions is naive (btw I feel
MaXXXine, which I watched just last night, is absolutely indispensable to this conversation). I would argue people who make it anywhere near showbiz (even the auditions) are far from naive.
I definitely agree that this subgenre is really prevalent. I think that it's not so much a moral judgement on the women themselves, but an acknowledgement of how desperate people are to be popular/famous… …I don't know. I think I will always be more critical of systems that drive people to desperate or wicked choices than the people who cave to that pressure, so that's the POV I bring to those kind of narratives.
That is a productive POV, can’t argue with that. Might try rewatching some stuff and framing it like that.
I should really think of better examples. The issue is that with a male protagonist the Faustian pact is explicit (partly because there’s a cultural context in which people are aware of Faust, I think). ‘You give me your soul, I make you famous.’ With female protagonists in these movies, there is an overarching vibe that they couldn’t have ever possibly made it, so they’re stupid to try (but why though? Hollywood was built on female movie stars, yes, it’s harder to do now, but why the assumption that it’s a pipe dream? (Again,
MaXXXine super-relevant here imo.) In this way, it’s an extension of your underdog showbiz movie which tends to have two variations: success story followed by drug indulgence and fall from grace or simply failure.
There is a movie I used to be quite fond of,
Excision.
WARNING: spoilers below
A teenager dying to be a surgeon, practises on people. In the end she performs surgery on her sister and her parents react with horror, the sister is assumed to be dead. I remember going on some message boards back then, and people were asking if she’d succeeded, with the inevitably arrogant type of reply, ‘Well obviously not, she’s a delusional teenager, obviously she just killed her sister and didn’t succeed at shit.’
A teenager dying to be a surgeon, practises on people. In the end she performs surgery on her sister and her parents react with horror, the sister is assumed to be dead. I remember going on some message boards back then, and people were asking if she’d succeeded, with the inevitably arrogant type of reply, ‘Well obviously not, she’s a delusional teenager, obviously she just killed her sister and didn’t succeed at shit.’
I dislike the assumption of the lack of success (maybe this is fair in
Excision, but by and large — I don’t know, especially when it comes to such not conventionally likeable female characters. This isn’t misogyny, this is the director judging them because they go about things the wrong way, so they don’t get to succeed, duh, you silly goose, of course not. I went to Google films similar to ‘Starry Eyes’ as it’s been a while since I saw all that stuff, and the summary of
Excision is ‘Pauline, a delusional teen, has aspirations of a career in medicine which has escalated into an obsession with the flesh.’ Who gets to assume if she’s delusional? Maybe she’d grow up demented a la Gregory House but also cure cancer? Quite often these protagonists make a rational choice to pursue the evil path to get to where they want to be (
Black Swan to an extent, etc). But I do see what you’re saying too; they may think they know what they’re doing but they ultimately don’t. That’s fair.
It’s a very strange vibe that they’re ’delusional’ and it’s fairly recent, I think. Try to imagine
Kill Bill through the prism of, ‘Oh, but she couldn’t possibly take all those scary men down, silly girl.’ (Actually that’s exactly what O’Ren tells the Bride, complete with ‘silly girl’, but the viewer isn’t meant relate to that sentiment). I think that’s an understandable vibe if you’re talking taking down a yakuza klan as a white girl, but if you’re talking about making it in Hollywood, well, what’s so impossible about that, you know? This is a super-interesting discussion either way.
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