entertainment
Love me, love my bruised ego: what the narcissist-artist film tells us about the fear of ageing
Bitter Christmas, Late Fame and The Christophers all depict geniuses aware of their waning acclaim and terrified it will end
TL;DR
- Modern entertainment culture's focus on "nowness" overlooks the concerns of aging artists, a theme explored in new films like Bitter Christmas, Late Fame, and The Christophers.
- These films feature male artists who exhibit selfishness, vanity, and spite, using egotistical behavior to cope with fears of declining creative power and mortality.
- Pedro Almodóvar's Bitter Christmas portrays a filmmaker using his personal life and others' tragedies for his art, reflecting his own career anxieties.
- Kent Jones's Late Fame focuses on a poet, Ed Saxberger, who enjoys being rediscovered by younger artists, indulging in the vanity of a belated artistic recognition.
- Steven Soderbergh's The Christophers presents a painter, Julian Sklar, who sabotages his legacy and isolates himself, using a venomous persona to hide his devastation over losing his muse.
- Despite their different careers, the artists' swollen egos are driven by the shared logic of confronting aging, creative stagnation, and the effects of time on talent and passion.
- The films question whether success, or the illusion of it, can truly alleviate deep-seated worries, suggesting that ego often acts as a defense mechanism against profound melancholy.
- Ultimately, the films depict artists whose egotistical behavior is understandable, if not always forgivable, as they grapple with the fear of irrelevance and mortality.