After the experience of reading Nathanael West‘s previous three novels, I went into The Day of the Locust anticipating the awful things he would put his characters through; however, in The Day of the Locust West carefully and slowly reveals the sordid nature of his somewhat archetypal characters. It is an undeniably Los Angeles novel, with a cast of characters featuring set designers, producers, actresses, stage mothers and a gambling midget, but shatters the illusion of a glittering, glamourous Hollywood.
It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the monstrous.
Tod Hackett has been in Hollywood for three months to work in set and costume design for the movies. He dreams of becoming a “serious” painter, and even as he is drawn into the world of his commercial art, he still finds inspiration in the landscapes and people of California. It’s a place that is defined by an eclectic mix of styles – of clothing, of architecture – that seem to be always out of place, never quite right for the environment and it comes across as almost grotesque. Tod is presented, at first, as the typical everyman character – a little bland, but not unlikable – but his visions, behaviour and thoughts take a disturbing and unsettling turn as the woman he desires, struggling actress Faye Greener, becomes more involved with another man, Homer Simpson. His behaviour seems to be solely driven by his need to get as close as he can to Faye, including taking care of her ailing vaudevillian father Harry, and going along with her on her dates with other men.
Harry groaned again, modulating from pain to exhaustion, then closed his eyes. Tod saw how skilfully he got the maximum effect out of his agonized profile by using the pillow to set it off. He also noticed that Harry, like many actors, had very little back or top to his head. It was almost all face, like a mask, with deep furrows between the eyes, across the forehead and on either side of the nose and mouth, plowed there by years of broad grinning and heavy frowning. Because of them, he could never express anything either subtly or exactly. They wouldn’t permit degrees of feeling, only the furthest degree.
Homer Simpson is equally strange – Tod catches him outside their apartment building one evening staring up at Faye’s window and he has a mechanical, detached way of living. His relationship with Faye, especially after the death of her father, is categorized by the two of them as a convenient business arrangement. In other words, Homer has money and Faye thinks she needs money in order to become a star. Their relationship gradually deteriorates, they act out before the relationship is actually ended, Faye becomes more malicious, Homer tries to make things up by being more generous. Faye disappears after a fight between a number of men over her, and Homer and Tod are left to fight for themselves in a brutal crush at a movie premiere.
All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?
Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash.
Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.
It really is a strange little novel, I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it. Obviously it’s a comment on the illusions offered by entertainment, but also by our own desires and needs, and how badly we react when we realize these illusions are false. The transformation of the characters is extreme, seemingly motivated by the invisible dark force of disillusionment. They’ve all come to Hollywood to find something, someone, achieve a dream, only to find their search fruitless and their dreams destroyed. Faye turns from the coquettish ingenue to master manipulator of men. Tod changes from a dreamy artist to a man who vividly fantasizes about raping Faye. Homer, too, changes from a quiet, meek man to being capable of committing an unforgettable act of violence in the final riot. Deeply unsettling.
