Oct. 13, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:32
4225 A Star Is Born: Freedomain Movie Review
“A Star Is Born” is a perfectly constructed allegory for fame being the hide of bright armor that people encase themselves in when they are broken and hollow inside.The film is full of extravagant flash and dazzle – Bradley Cooper’s supposedly down-home country musician half-beating bluegrass to death with hard rock guitar shredding – Lady Gaga’s frustrated small-time waitress erupting into big time talent with a geyser of fiery shiny vocals - the one star rising as the other dims and dies, like an interstellar cycle of life and death. The predatory personalities that circle money gushing talent like the remora fish that feed on the scraps of shark’s meals, while ending up actually eating the entire shark - the proud father who jovially crushes his daughter’s talents because he never had the guts to follow his own ambition - the lure of moneymaking in art, the strange sexlessness of top-tier artistic achievement, and the constant temptation to trade one’s soul for the empty highs of money, fame, cheering crowds and crushing addictions.Bradley Cooper plays Jackson Maine – the main character, I get it – a half-washed up country blues singer who plays old songs to aging crowds. His deep back story emerges like sheet lightning flashes throughout the movie, and is consistently ignored by those around him. He grew up in the middle of nowhere, with an alcoholic father who roped him into being a drinking buddy as a child. Jackson Maine’s mother died in childbirth, his father also died young, and the boy tried to hang himself when he was only 13 years old.This is the horrifying and painful back story to his addictions - to fame, sex, alcohol, drugs, you name it – but the real addiction is to worshiping his abusive father. There is a titanic battle within Jackson - referred to by his older manager/brother - that Jackson reveres his father, but his father was a terrible human being. In one scene, Jackson goes to visit his father’s grave, on the old ranch, only to find out that his brother has sold the ranch. He goes and punches his brother, who tells Jackson that he should stop worshiping his father.▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
This film review will contain spoilers, but I'm not going to take you through the story itself, but rather highlight the themes which emerge from the churning waves of rampant talent eruptions like a shark fin appearing and disappearing in stormy seas.
A Star is Born is a perfectly constructed allegory for fame being the hide of bright armor people encase themselves in when they are broken and hollow inside.
The film is full of extravagant flash and dazzle.
Bradley Cooper's supposedly down-home country musician half-beating bluegrass to death with hard rock guitar shredding.
Lady Gaga's frustrated small-time waitress erupting into big-time talent with a geyser of fiery, shiny vocals.
The one star rising as the other dims and dies like an interstellar cycle of life and death.
The predatory personalities that circle money-gushing talent like the remora fish that feed on the scraps of shark's meals while ending up actually eating the entire shark.
The proud father, who jovially crushes his daughter's talents because he never had the guts to follow his own ambition.
The lure of money-making in art.
the strange sexlessness of top-tier artistic achievement and the constant temptation to trade one's soul for the empty highs of money, fame- cheering crowds, and crushing addictions.
Bradley Cooper plays Jackson Maine, the main character, I get it, a A half-washed-up country blues singer who plays old songs to aging crowds.
His deep backstory emerges like sheet-lightning flashes throughout the movie and is consistently ignored by those around him.
He grew up in the middle of nowhere with an alcoholic father who roped him into being a drinking buddy as a child.
Jackson Maine's mother died in childbirth, his father also died young, and the boy tried to hang himself when he was only 13 years old.
So this is the horrifying and painful backstory to his addictions, to fame, sex, alcohol, drugs, you name it.
But the real addiction is to worshipping his abusive father.
There is a titanic battle within Jackson, referred to by his older manager-slash-brother, that Jackson reveres his father, but his father was a terrible human being.
In one scene, Jackson goes to visit his father's grave on the old ranch, only to find out that his brother has sold the ranch.
He goes and punches his brother, who tells Jackson that he should stop worshipping his father.
Imagine being a young boy, stuck on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, no other children around, no mother, and the only way you can get any kind of human contact is to suck down alcohol with your drunken father.
Everyone else has escaped this hellish situation either by death or flight and you are stuck alone with a decaying and dying soulless alcoholic and the only thing you can possibly have in common is getting wasted together.
Vain, narcissistic and abusive people demand worship.
If you fail to deliver, they become vengeful gods out to shred and destroy your entire existence.
This is as true of abusive parents as it is of the mainstream media and petty academics and music managers, of course.
A child trapped with a drunken and abusive parent must mould his opinions to the demands of the parent as surely as the endless whiskey moulds itself to the dirty glasses.
You are never allowed to develop your own thoughts and opinions.
You are, in fact, endlessly punished for doing so because...
You must always feed the narcissistic need of your parent.
We always become what we worship.
Like plants grow in the direction of sunlight, we grow to inhabit the values we elevate.
Jackson Maine worshipped his lost, drunken, abusive father who drank himself to death.
So what happened to Jackson?
He repeatedly sings a song with the line, This is a message from his true self to his false self, the self he erected to hide the void and horror of his hollowed-out childhood.
Jackson demands that the crowd worship his drunken self as much as he worshipped his own drunken father, and he ends up The same way, after bypassing self-knowledge with drugs and booze, he ends up hanging himself in the garage, where his wife will come home and find him.
An act of rage and destruction, just like his father.
Now, I doubt it is conscious intention, but it is not accidental that Jackson talks about hanging himself at the age of 13.
From what? From a fan.
Why, fan? Simply because the word has two meanings.
A ceiling fan and someone who worships.
Fans kill him because they listen to his music, not his lyrics.
His lyrics are a cry for help, defied by his larger-than-life stage persona.
When great talent makes great money, people attach themselves to the money geyser and become quickly opposed to any conversation that might damn the flow of cash.
Why doesn't anyone sit down and talk with Jackson about his childhood, the true roots of his addiction, and why he worships his father so much?
Even when he goes into rehab and a therapist chats with him briefly, nothing of substance is said other than everybody seems to be really enjoying the alias reunion.
Jackson's true self is his creative force.
His false self must keep this youthful creativity drunken and drugged so it does not wake up to the true horrors of its childhood.
This mirrors his relationship with his father.
New, youthful creativity is a constant affront to nihilistic, decaying and aging personalities.
Jackson's father forced him to drink alcohol so that the child's beer goggles would not see his father clearly.
Jackson's creativity and stage presence perform the same function for his cheering audience.
The angry music comes from his father.
The sad lyrics come from his childhood.
When he wants to propose to his up-and-coming protege, Jackson fashions a makeshift ring by tying a guitar string into a tiny noose, another echo of the rope he is going to use to hang himself at the end of his story.
His talent Is suicidal, as talent and beauty and fame so often are.
It is an explosive distraction from the emptiness of the self.
A piece of drugged meat dropped to silence a dog barking at ghosts.
Everyone wants to take a picture.
No one wants to see inside.
Because the outside is famous, while the inside is torn and complicated.
Falsehood can creep into all our lives.
It has to be battled like age and entropy and laziness.
There is great danger in inattention.
Live a lie for too long, and you end up being unable to live without it.
After Jackson embarrasses his wife, at an awards show she tells her manager that she wants Jackson to tour with her.
When the manager refuses her request, she just tells him to cancel the rest of the tour.
Her manager then verbally destroys Jackson in a chilling display of sociopathic honesty.
He tells Jackson that his wife is going to leave him, that he is an embarrassment, that everyone has to keep cleaning up the messes that he makes, pulling down the entire edifice of self-congratulatory falsehoods that has propped Jackson up for decades.
I am reminded of the off-screen scene in The Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lecter talks a fellow inmate into killing himself.
Jackson... He stands in the way of his wife finishing her tour, which makes millions of dollars for her manager.
Of course he has to be surgically removed, like a tumor.
The manager profits from pain.
In the closing scene, Lady Gaga's character delivers a stunning performance based upon her dead husband's last song.
Just as every Taylor Swift fan looks forward to her next breakup album, easing the pain of creative artists is so often killing the goose, That lays the golden eggs.
If the artists are happy, their fans lose out.
Preying on pain is a foundational artistic contract between managers and artists, artists and fans.
I have a weakness, I think I share this with most of humanity, for stories wherein buried talent is found, encouraged and exposed to the world.
In the movie, Jackson Maine says that everyone is talented, which is just not true, but is appealing to the masses.
It will help sell the movie because it blurs the great gap between the average and the talented, which encourages the average to root for the talented, but it comes at great cost.
If you imagine that you are talented, but you are really not, you can torture and fritter away your life in random pursuit of the unobtainable.
Many years ago, when I used to sing karaoke, the karaoke host told me a long tale of the rock opera he was writing in his spare time.
It was terrible. It was never going to be finished.
It was a complete waste of time, but he was putting off having children until it was done.
There is a couple of souls that will never see the light of day because the vanity and the grandiosity of the karaoke host was the ultimate birth control.
Lady Gaga... It's 32 years old.
We assume her character in the movie is of similar age.
If you are a 32-year-old waitress who sings one song in a bar from time to time, you are not going to make it in the music industry.
These dreams of fame and fortune are dangerous and destructive to most people.
This echoes Tyler Durden's speech in Fight Club.
We've been all raised by television to believe that one day...
We'd all be millionaires and movieguards and rockstars, but we won't.
And we're slowly learning that fact, and we're very, very pissed off.
By definition, most people are average.
And that is perfectly fine.
Nothing wrong with it at all.
Riches and fame and beauty and talent do not make people happy.
Whether you are smarter or less intelligent does not matter much at all.
There is no clear relationship between joy and brains.
The happy life that we can make has to do with friendships and family and children.
Chasing talent and fame so often is just a lemming-like sprint over a self-delusional cliff.
Personally, I do not like fame.
I do not like being known, but I accept it as necessary for the spread.
Our philosophy, the real joys in my life, come from my friends, my family, and the thoughts that I can generate.
People addicted to fame find obscurity unbearable, but need non-famous people to buy tickets to their movies and concerts, and so they often pander to the average by pretending it is extraordinary.
To be happy in this life, you do not need to be famous.
You do not need to be rich.
You do not need to be wildly successful.
You need to be virtuous.
You need to be honest.
And you need to love and be loved.
If you pursue fame at the expense of family, the last third of your life will be filled with death and decay.
If you have children, the last third of your time in this world will be filled with life and growth and continuation.
Neither of the main characters in A Star Is Born have any children.
I write books and make shows, and I love doing it.
But those are my thoughts frozen in time, like a woolly mammoth trapped in a glacier.
They will not debate me.
They will not comfort me as I age.
They will not hold my hand as I die.
And they will not continue as life into the future.
Very few of us can make enduring songs, but most of us can create people who love us and live on.
The entire movie reminds me of modern Europe, talented, creative, self-destructive, and childless.
A star is born is captivating and scintillating and intoxicating, but its lineage dies on the vine.
A child is born That is a story we can all star in.
