A look back at Hollywood’s prophecy of its conflagration.
It’s been 50 years since John Schlesinger’s film The Day of the Locust, based on the novel by Nathanael West, predicted “the Burning of Los Angeles.” That was the title of a painting by its protagonist Tod Hackett (William Atherton), a high-minded Yale graduate working as a Hollywood designer who felt superior to the working-class mob and retired seniors who had flocked to the West Coast, drawn by the allure of the movies. Hackett (West’s surrogate) privately sought to vent his disillusionment with the film industry, but The Burning of Los Angeles was also West’s vision of hell. Seeing the decline of Western civilization in the trash art of movies is why The Day of the Locust was seriously considered the greatest of all Hollywood novels. The Pacific Palisades fires encroaching on Los Angeles give reason to revisit this work.
West (born Nathan Weinstein) articulated the cynicism that was once a staple among the East Coast literary class. His fluent, satirical discourse in only four novels — The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million (1934), and The Day of the Locust (1939) — is still impressive. Their piquant sensitivity and horror have no equal in Millennial literature and journalism, which have become merely, rabidly politicized — so very socialist and anti-American that today’s media throws its hands up at the L.A. conflagration. We face the media’s cowardly refusal to report the political and sociological cause of the fires, choosing instead the sacred catch-all lament of “climate change.”
The most impressive aspect of Schlesinger’s film is its sense of place: the sunny, awesomely relaxed, fetid warmth captured by Conrad Hall’s sumptuous cinematography. Schlesinger brought his pop-cynicism from Midnight Cowboy and Darling to West’s story of movieland losers. Hackett, his bungalow neighbor Faye Greener (Karen Black), her vaudevillian has-been father (Burgess Meredith), assorted whores, hangers-on, venal studio executives, and a WASPy lunk — auspiciously named Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland) — suckered by Hollywood’s erotic promise.
Homer was West’s sacrificial American long before cartoonist Matt Groening stole the name for his own doglike human caricature, “Homer Simpson” of TV renown. Yet the real-life burning of Los Angeles includes privileged-class Californians who suffer the lofty indifference of social misgovernment. They’re more familiar with Groening’s spoofiness than West’s pessimism, so the calamity of the Los Angeles fires more likely inspires shock than political and cultural awareness.
Schlesinger’s film recalls the ironic nostalgia for golden-era Hollywood that inspired the renaissance of American movies in the 1970s. Hall’s imagery is a dreamy parallel to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown nightmare, but contemporary movies lack West’s and Schlesinger’s intelligence. All we get is the nihilism of The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s trite art movie that lacks West’s and Schlesinger’s understanding of American class and cultural aspiration.
The Corbet profile recently published in the New Yorker mentioned his highfalutin reading list, which includes László Krasznahorkai (the source of Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies) and Oswald Spengler — taste that runs toward the dystopian and melancholic. Corbet’s humorlessness falls short of Schlesinger’s dry satire and is typical of today’s doomy, misguided liberalism. It is at odds with West’s astute worldview.
Critic Jonathan Clarke described how the post-Depression-era cynicism of West and F. Scott Fitzgerald favored Spengler, whose 1927 The Decline of the West was popular among artistes: “It’s doubtful that Fitzgerald cared much about the philosophy of history, but Spengler’s book gave intellectual dignity to his own fatalistic mood.”
Today’s burning of Los Angeles has been met without a sense of fatalism. (At least Public Enemy’s jocular 1990 rap — “Burn, Hollywood, Burn!” — parodied the disingenuous civil rights movie Mississippi Burning.) Contemporary Hollywood progressives believe that “climate change” explains and excuses everything, so there’s never a need for political remorse. This attitude reflects and degrades West’s vision. The climax of Schlesinger’s film depicts a Hollywood red-carpet, klieg-light movie premiere that turns apocalyptic. It looks like a prediction of Millennial self-sacrifice — a Left Coast version of J6-style as if deliberately manufactured by TMZ, the tabloid TV show that dabbles in performative political commentary.
West’s hellfire-and-locust symbolism parodied biblical judgment, but such shame no longer applies to current secular permissiveness or the progressive ideology in Marxist writer Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1990), famous for its subversive condemnation of Los Angeles’s capitalist elitism. Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust doesn’t do justice to West’s paranoia, yet its remoteness captures the liberal Hollywood apathy that no longer identifies with American domesticity and sees its own working class as existing merely to perpetuate ruling-class superiority. Schlesinger’s joke about the doomed, obsolete 13-letter Hollywoodland sign hints at the self-hatred that now pervades the Anglosphere and suggests that the immolation starts from the inside.