artistic obsession

Eve Harrington watches her idol from the stage door in All About Eve and sets about taking the part, the friends and the life. Sunset Boulevard keeps a silent star waiting decades for a comeback nobody is arranging. Nashville runs twenty-four people through five days of a music industry that needs about six of them. Making the work costs something every time, and these films itemise the bill.

That last group is the honest edge of the term. What unites the shelf is a person organised around a body of work, whether the work saves them or eats them. When the damage takes over and the work becomes incidental, the film is better read as Mental Health Struggle or Psychological Unraveling.