Hollywood Culture Industry

The culture of Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular, may be seen as a major character in Joan Didion's 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 novel's 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. "I know what 'nothing' means," she says in the book's last passage, "and keep on playing" (214).

The plotline follows Maria's 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

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Category: Film - H