The Automatik

I read Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust a few years ago after finding J.G. Ballard’s description of it intriguing. In A User’s Guide to the Millennium, Ballard called the novel a “nightmare vision” of Hollywood, and after reading it myself, I found his analysis to be an accurate one.

After learning that John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) had directed a movie version, I added it to my film queue. I’ve just finished watching it and it’s perhaps more difficult to shake than the novel.

It’s challenging to resist the seduction of the Golden Era of Hollywood by way of the 1970s, a fashion and film trend ushered in with Bonnie and Clyde and continued with Chinatown and, to some extent The Great Gatsby. But for every facet of beauty that we witness in this film, there is twice the amount of grotesque.

Although Karen Black is good as the grasping, would-be starlet Faye Greener, it is Burgess Meredith who imbues the character of Harry with a deeply pathetic and haunting believability. Donald Sutherland, William Atherton, and Pepe Serna are the victims of Faye’s charms, each representing a different masculine stereotype as they fall over themselves in a literal and figurative cockfight.

In a world seething with such greed, amorality, and hypocrisy it should not be a surprise that there are some disturbing images. I found myself horrified yet transfixed by them all, particularly the ending, which I can easily imagine taking place today. The Hollywoodland of West’s novel is brought to ghastly fruition in this film: an orgy of despair that would make Caligula blush. This “nightmare vision” is one from which I’m afraid we still have not awoken.