How Do Showbiz Hopefuls See Themselves and the World?

If Homer Simpson's name was the detail of Nathanael West's Day of the Locust most likely to spring to my mind, other aspects of the book have stayed with me in the decades since I read it--not least how it was probably the first proper "Los Angeles" novel I ever read, packed with all the standard elements, like the marketing of climate and health to people back east, the at times surreal oddities of its architecture, the endless driving that goes with living there, the way bizarre religious cults just seem to spring out of the soil and grab hold of the imaginations of the newcomers who never quite put down roots to replace they lost, and of course, the pervasiveness of so much of the place with things Hollywood and the obsession with things Hollywood.

In contrast with, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, which shows the film world from its uppermost heights (the standpoint of a figure such as the inspiration for the novel's protagonist, Irving Thalberg), Locust deals with the people who are only marginal in that world, or even just hoping to be part of it--the minor studio employees whose work does not see their faces on screen or in the press, the bit players and extras with big dreams that will almost certainly never come true.

The difference between the reality of what people hope for and what they actually get here (which can seem a variant on the then-hugely important literary theme of the American Dream and its betrayals) is a central theme of the book, and naturally West has something to say of what goes on in the mind of those chasing the dream, describing how would-be movie star Faye Greener explains her own ideas to an interested audience as a mix of "badly understood bits of advice from the trade papers," material from "fan magazines" and "legends that surround the activities of screen stars and executives," all as "[w]ithout any noticeable transition, possibilities became probabilities, and wound up as inevitabilities"--most importantly the possibility-become probability-become inevitability of "success."

The description has for me a depressing ring of truth about it, relevant not just to those in Hollywood but all those who play a longshot in the hopes of becoming a "somebody" instead of a "nobody," whether on Broadway, or Park Avenue, or online--their thoughts a farrago of the distorted and often dishonest material marketed to the public, and the readiness to transform a knowledge of the (remote) possibility of becoming a star with the far more pleasing belief that they are almost there--the more in as we live in a society where those who set the tone are as relentless as they are cynical in promoting this kind of "aspirational," "You can do it too!" thinking for the sake of deflecting the attention of the nobodies from a situation where the structure of society means that they are just life's "extras," and can expect to be treated as such until the day they die.