The culture of Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular, may be seen as a major character in Joan DidionÆs 1970 novel, Play It As It Lays. For many Americans, California and Hollywood represent a golden dream, but that dream has become tarnished and life-destroying for the novelÆs protagonist Maria Wyeth. A 31-year old minor actress, and neglected wife of a self-absorbed film director with whom she still has a relationship, Maria feels as if she lives a meaningless existence and she operates in a fog of nihilism. Nothing matters, but the game must nevertheless go on. ôI know what 'nothingÆ means,ö she says in the bookÆs last passage, ôand keep on playingö (214).
The plotline follows MariaÆs journey into emptiness at the point in her life where she feels neither pleasure nor pain, although the obviously has a pained psyche. Told in a series of 84 brief vignettes, the nonlinear novel takes place in the late 1960s when Maria attempts in vain to make sense of her life as she slowly disintegrates. Didion uses both first and third-person narration to tell the story of Maria and Los Angeles, and the journal Maria writes frames the plot. The major theme of the book is the destructive consequences of the Hollywood culture industry, a culture in which people are viewed as commodities, and one in which the ôcommoditiesö accept their role. The Hollywood people surrounding Maria canÆt understand her deep depression and passivity. After all, she is a celebrity in a city where social standing in the ôindustryö is everything.
In the Los Angeles culture Maria functions in, the symbolic order to which she belongs is everything. The book is a dark and depressing view of the destructive nature of the Hollywood lifestyle, a culture in which people, like Maria, have been reduced to minute particles and suffer from a lack of authenticity and wholeness. The time period in which the book is setùthe 1960sùwas a turbulent time in the U...