A Response to The Day of the Locust

The hope of mobility, as a class and social pursuit, is what drives the characters of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939), and West uses this pursuit of mobility as a method for building the idea of a nation struggling to keep up, wrought with burdens financial and otherwise, floundering yet surrounded by images of the successes of others. It is this inability to discern between affluence and artifice that defines the Greener family in West's novel (Harry and Faye) who see in Hollywood the chance to become great -- while also missing, sadly, the generally artificial nature of the world that Hollywood has created for itself.

The Greeners work in vaudeville but dream of becoming more serious actors, their dreams buffeted by the images of financial and social success that Hollywood so successfully proliferates among the have-nots of the world. Faye expresses her history in the acting business ("Acting is in my blood. We Greeners, you know, were all theater people from way back." [163-164]) as affording her the requisite background for success, as though she should become a famous actress simply because it is what she has expected to happen all along. Faye assumes that as soon as she can manipulate Homer into buying her an appropriate wardrobe, Hollywood will accept her as one of its own. Her general misconception of how Hollywood is run is well-documented in the novel, as she "mixed bits of badly understood advice from the trade papers with other bits out of the fan magazines and compared these with the legends that surrounded the activities of screen stars and executives. Without any noticeable transition, possibilities became probabilities and wound up as inevitabilities" (164).

But however misconstrued her logic may be, Faye Greener ultimately believes that she has a chance, even though everyone around her seems to understand that she does not, and this is very important to West's construction of the America of the 1930s, specifically in relation to the burgeoning film industry which seems poised to take over the world as Los Angeles spreads further and further out into the country just as more and more people "come to California to die" (23). Tod Hackett is the one character in West's novel who sees through it all, conceiving Los Angeles as just a copy, possessing no originality; in describing the houses on the hills, Tod notes that "Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon" (23-24). He is working on a painting entitled "The Burning of Los Angeles," in which he envisions a great riot scene engulfing the artifice of Hollywood in flames -- a scene which is partly realized at the novel's end, at least thematically. Tod even imagines painting Faye into his work, "running with her eyes closed and a strange half-smile on her lips. Despite the dreamy repose of her face, her body is straining to hurl her along at top speed. The only explanation for this contrast is that she is enjoying the release that wild flight gives in much the same way that a game bird must when, after hiding for several tense minutes, it bursts from cover in complete, unthinking panic" (93). Tod sees Faye as completely oblivious to the fate that awaits her -- that is, the fate of being utterly destroyed by an industry that does not care about her at all. But even though Tod seems to be uniquely aware of the artificial nature of his surroundings, Tod does little to encourage others to rebel against it, and in fact does not rebel at all himself until the end of the novel, when he becomes just another loon lost to a process of imitation ("The siren began to scream and at first he thought he was making the noise himself. ... He knew then it was the siren. For some reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could." [202]).

In choosing to focus on these peripheral characters, the people in Hollywood who have not "made it" and who likely never will (with few exceptions), West is able to explore the idea of universal struggle, constantly yearning to be one of the glittering few presented to us by the star system yet always remaining at a distance. While there are no distinct mentions of particular stars in The Day of the Locust, the star system is always there, represented by Faye's yearning to become a successful actress; she has been duped by the system and now will settle for nothing less than open arms from the Hollywood establishment. The dream of Hollywood has become a new incarnation of the American dream, the dream of success through hard work and determination; yet at the same time, the Hollywood ideal is a closed off world, inaccessible to the majority of those who seek it. In writing this particular piece of satire, Nathanael West charges Hollywood with exploiting the American tendency to endlessly imitate and replicate, especially as it is based on an industry of people literally pretending to be something they are not, and also with providing the false hope of upward mobility to a nation just struggling, for the most part, in those post-Depression years, to simply stay on its feet. The film industry in Hollywood, as a social apparatus, has perpetuated glittering images of success and prosperity directly in spite of the struggles America has faced, and The Day of the Locust imagines a public that would ultimately see Hollywood for what it was and would destroy it, a reckoning that we are still waiting for almost seventy years later.