City of Pumice: John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust

The San Bernardino Arms is every apartment in Los Angeles to me. Stucco, patio, Al-Andalusian archways; a borrowed culture's architecture for mass production housing. I've always wanted to live in a place like this. The sprinklers dervish-whirl aquifer water in the morning--you crane your neck, try to conjure rainbows, no dice—but the Vaseline Heat Mist is compensation enough. Why can't I live in a place like this?

John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust has not been reclaimed by Film Twitter. No-one is doing Vulgar Auteurism for a man who remained steadfast to precarious humanity since his inaugural Draughtsman Meets Typist poetics in 1962. The man stuck to his guns, he stood cocksure, he kept waving the red flag long after those east of the Oder swapped Gorky for Kundera. Few consider Schlesinger an auteur, and sure, he'd probably consider the label “bourgeois egotism” or something. But facts are facts, and plain talk must spill Darjeeling; this is the most confident artistry I've experienced since I gape-mouthed my way through Ginsberg's Howl. Those with pretensions to auteur status must announce themselves, they must Hold Court. Schlesinger doesn't need to. He needn't bother himself with vulgar displays of power.

Tod Hackett and Faye Greener were doomed to intersect. One must not confuse this for “true love” or “they were good for each other” or even “they made the other reasonably happy.” No, what they have is more primal: an iridescent, unconquerable force of nature (Faye) and the Grasping Studio Creative (Tod) who convinces himself he's entitled to her because he attended Yale and is—not for nothing, the man possesses a genuine decency, but it often short circuits in the presence of anything resembling A Puncture of Fantasy—“a nice guy.” They live across from each other at the San Bernardino Arms. They're both young and hungry and grasping and cute. They were doomed to intersect.

I generally shun films about Golden Age Hollywood because they often mistake homage for interrogation, mass appeal for “this is how the average person related to The Dream Factory.” Everyone in this film, anyone who matters, is desperately poor. They live paycheck to paycheck, they rent or lease meagerly, they whip-pan-crane at the silver screen stars every night and transport themselves into celluloid; Mulholland Drive, Cecil On First Name Basis, breakfasts served by Chinese help, shoes shined by Delta transplants, starring in the airport novelization of their lives they've been scribbling in their heads since adolescence. Sordid dreams for deprived lives. The Depression will last 10 years and for that duration, Hollywood Hopefuls will jostle for bit parts and janitorial mugging. They queue in the exact same way those living under the ashen WORLD'S HIGHEST STANDARD OF LIVING mural—blonde incisor Packard brood mockingly cheery—slouch for tasteless “stew” facsimile. These people mime Al Jolson the way I mimed Stephen Malkmus.

This film would not matter without Karen Black. She does not “embody” Faye Greener. She does not “dramatize” a character from a lauded novel. She is her. Do you get that? The actress and the character are the same person. They always have been, always will be. There are so many ways you could dismiss this character: you could call her one-dimensional, you could call her “impossible,” you could condescend (through a sieve actively dodging the condescension slur!) by labeling her a Proto Pixie Dream Girl. You are allowed to do these things, but you would be wrong.

Faye Greener lives for herself. She has a dream, and she likes to have fun, and—for some insane reason—that short circuits folks' brains. She cogently, painstakingly lays out the Thesis of Her Being—that she wants to see her name up in lights, and in the interim, she wants to have a good time, get laid, slurp down ungodly amounts of ice cream—and this scares people. They won't be able to sleep until they can pathologize her into coherence, rationalize her as Screen Siren or Vaudeville Reprobate or Daddy's Mistake, but never quite “human being with gale force eccentricities, needs, self-actualization fantasies.” (All of which are perfectly legitimate. Why aren't working class women entitled to these?) I am willing to humor Faye possessing a mental landscape which is cruelly reduced to the word “borderline”—coincidentally, also a kickass Madonna song—a word I was diagnosed with last year. What I'm saying is I'm relating. I relate to Faye Greener so intensely because I look upon my tiresome string of miscarried love affairs and aborted friendships and go, “I think there's something severely wrong with me. I hope there's a pill for that.” (There are multiple pills for that!).

Faye Greener is an Empathy Test. In some ways, Schlesinger is daring us to loathe her. Many viewers, their hearts crusted over with a tincture of postmodern remove and neurotypical chauvinism, will be unable to bring themselves to love her. It's a pity.

Faye's father is Harry, a wilting wax ventriloquist dummy congealed from the combined taffy of Peter Boyle and Ernest Borgnine. He was Vaudeville at its best; wicked humor, ironic hustling, a desperate, needling desire to entertain. His heart is weak and his act has stagnated. This won't stop him from plying Beverly Hills. He visits mansion after mansion, completely shameless in his showmanship, dragging a little Tin Pan Alley before the Monocle Snobs. Harry Greener is more Tramp than Chaplin, more Brother Marx than the Gross National Product of Sylvania. He has to crack wise. He needs a comfortable tax bracket's approval. He is immensely, spectacularly funny. I loved Harry Greener. I wished he were my dad. He dies soaked in piss and is immediately misremembered by the residents of The San Bernardino Arms.

What about The Boys, the lovers, the cock-afflicted Agents of History? Well, they come in several shades. The Cowboy can raise virile cigarettes to her mouth so she need not miss a frame of Buster Keaton; he has swag. The Chicano fetches her fighting roosters, bedevils her with non-anglo chest hair; he has rizz. But this is essentially a dual picture: William Atherton's cautiously stewing set designer, and Donald Sutherland's gamely castrated Billy (Unfun)Day.

Who will she choose?

Refreshingly, neither.

Both men, while boasting genuine virtues, are not right for Faye Greener. They can't stack up. They are inadequate. They could not possibly satisfy her. She's communing with Martians while they're still mouthing HG Wells. One wants to domesticate her while the other needs to genuflect before her; neither is healthy for a relationship

When Atherton's Hackett and Sutherland's Homer look at Faye, they immediately begin to covet. They see Faye The Persona—a swirl of veils and affectations some 25 years in the making, a necessity for a working class woman to survive in ‘30s Hollywood—and assume it exists for them. All for them. Faye The Persona is based on truth, yes, it springs from the wellspring of who she really is; Faye's not “pretending” to be so vivacious, so headstrong, self-mythologizing. The issue is—and this is something men have been dooming themselves with since Chaucer—they take an authentic persona and impregnate it with a fantasy of their choosing. And so, when Faye The Persona fails to measure up to the fantasy—a woman who's brassy and crude, a woman who luxuriates in the voluptuous pleasure of deep-fried cheesecake, a woman who needs to dance with everyone at the party—they act out. They throw the tantrum of a petulant child.

Whereas Homer draws inward—eyes welling, lips pouting, facial muscles palsied like an alcoholic in the throes of delirium tremens—Hackett simply becomes violent. It only happens once, but it's enough to let us know The Sensitive Wit of Waterloo Miniatures is as much a bastard as any lecherous studio head. The clever quips, the polite nods, the laughing eyes—these were far more of a facade than anything Faye ever expressed. A great variety of controlling bastards evade detection because they're--on some intangible but nonetheless overpowering level—”nice.”

The Day of the Locust lacks an unnecessary scene. Everything is potent, everything is saturated with The Weight of All Which Matters. But it isn't portentous either, it isn't a slog! It's like—if you'll pardon the term—a Destiny Soufflé; irreverent and earthy but hugely powerful. There is a stag party in Topanga Canyon where soused dandies bring a level of postmodern analysis to the Early American Porno; I've never laughed so hard, I've never felt more elated. There is a Billy Sunday Holy Roller Rink of a Shindig; I've never felt more uncomfortable, Jesus Did In Fact Weep Upon Viewing Footage of Hick-Capitalist Religiosity.

And then there's simply the partying. A bottle in one hand, a joint in the other. Bonfires, kitchenettes, Hooverville Rotgut Obliteration in full view of Mulholland Drive. In full view of the disapproving Pacific. Abe Kusich, the world's least inhibited little person, often holds court. Abe, what a fucking guy. Hope he went onto something more respectable, finally earned some recognition. (He probably died scabied and alone.) Parties with the dramaturgical weight of Waterloo, parties as earthquaking as those Shaker Heights booze blasts The Hold Steady made infamous. Parties where lovers are sundered and flesh is merged. Parties where everyone is performing, everyone genuflecting toward Paramount, all for an audience of three hands clapping. Napoleon may have been bested at Waterloo, but diminutive dreamers continue to wreath the collective cosmologies of Working Class Hollywood. They can't quite quit that wily Corsican.

A period-accurate set, the closest 30's audiences ever got to comprehending early modern warfare, collapses. The DO NOT ENTER signs were neglected. A Person of Import almost dies; he pulls through. We later learn whether 1 or 3,000 people died, the insurance payout would be roughly equivalent. The studio would feel the same; pictures must continue to be churned out, The Dream Factory is unaware of Grieving Periods. It is, after all, just business. We're made to realize, no matter the Amerikan Circumstance, this is the operating logic. Is it possible not to feel pity—not because you don't care, because you care fucking immensely—because you're so used to hearing such things? I hear them every goddamn day; the nauseating repetition does nothing to make me feel less impotent.

Cecil B. DeMille's The Buccaneer premiered at Grauman's Chinese Theatre on February 4th, 1938. The Popular Front has nearly splintered. Chamberlain has surrendered A Land Without Vowels to Hitler. The Spanish Republic, in the throes of jubilant social revolution, is unable to repel the clerical hordes. There are wheelchairs, guns, tickertape. Everyone and their great uncle are in tow. The Los Angeles County troopers, ostensibly here to “keep the peace,” have the billowing parachute pants of Brownshirts.

Homer makes eye contact with an androgynous, mother-directed Hollywood Hopeful Kiddo from The San Bernardino Arms. He's really fucking annoying. Homer, a 1930's Apostle if there ever was one, stomp-jumps the kid's face into Brandywine Jelly. It's the most cathartic—and self-incriminating—act of violence I've seen on screen. Ever.

The crowd loses coherency, dons Boschian masks, Shows Us Who They Really Are. Homer and Tod and Kaye are offered up to Sociology Moloch, they're sacrificed to the failure of The Popular Front, the easy availability of bubble gum, racialized servants, ragtime LP's. The cloth they rend, the furrows they crimson-streak, have the queasy intimacy of sexual violence. It's like nothing I've ever seen. It's like nothing I'm capable of imagining. I felt ashamed for watching it.

Now that we're living Post Malibu Fire, perhaps we can hold an honest conversation about Los Angeles. It is, as Chinatown so helpfully reminded us, “a desert community.” Mike Davis, the New Left's final mensch, spent the remaining two decades of his life warning us about those communities. From the start, they were courting wildfire. Grand sepulchers to Anglo intransigence, they were fated to burn. Perhaps Courtney Love doomed them when she wrote that inimitable Hole song. All Mike and I know is, and we don't claim to be, like, “experts,” that such places must go. They were never welcome to begin with, but now, with the Waning of the American Century already some 50 years young, Mike and I are drizzling lighter fluid on the kindling. Sayonara, pasty affluence. Au revoir, ecological sacrilège.

In City of Quartz, Davis arrives at an astounding conclusion: the power brokers of Los Angeles have produced an entirely hollow infrastructure. Tap on those sleek Getty facades downtown, the mixed-use layercakes of Koreatown, Pynchonian beach huts astride Malibu; thunk thunk. As ephemeral as daytime television, as impermanent as Flint’s Autoworld. This is the fickle firmament Tod and Faye and Homer and Harry will try–and with a kind of stubborn delusion I find admirable, fail–to construct lives upon.

The San Andreas Fault has had enough. It's through with The Dream Factory. The Hollywood letters are jumbled, rearranging into racial slurs. Chic, modernist housing is piddling into the drink. People who look like me are colonizing the strip mall high rises; within a few years menudo or basmati will occupy the same cultural node as hamburger or hotdog. It's just going to happen. (I feel no pleasure in it.) Entire neighborhoods slough off the ridge like uterine lining. Italian cars eep eep, flower-flame in nostril cloying tar-smoke. The surviving realtors have unionized. (It took an event of this magnitude to make that happen.)

Mike Davis and I splay crosslegged on the ridge. We are watching the final homes stagger into the Pacific. The wildfires make electric light, artificial heat perfunctory. There is a certain satisfaction in our grins, but there's a guilt too. A sadness. A regretful “All the Marxism in the world couldn't strangle my sentimentality.” We too were Children of the Dream Factory. We were weened on these, slept over to these, made out to these. They bookended our lives. They (and I'll be frank!) gave me a reason not to kill myself at 19 or 24 or 29 or whichever fucking summer I lost another friend to opiates or road rage or AIDS or sepsis or just like, boredom. Is it worse to die from sepsis or working class ennui? Mike demurs.

When the earthquakes start, Mike and I grasp hands. That is it. This is all she wrote. A fissure bisects us, insists on keeping one of us in the divorce. There is no Gay Panic, no ironic post-homophobia. Just two dudes holding hands. That's all. Mike's hand is gnarled and callused and soaked with longshore insecurity. It feels good.

As the Earth opens around us, I realize we're sitting in one of Tod Hackett's memories. The San Bernardino Arms are yawning, cracked, awaiting our asses for imperfect inspection. (Neither of us are clever enough to joke about Maintenance and the Middling Landlord.)

Tilting at crematoria, slouching toward magma. This is it. Several seconds before Mike and I dissolve into lava, I pull a rose from the fissure and we both laugh; this is the apartment we'd always wanted.

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