Visions of Hollywood Quotes in The Day of the Locust

Hollywood features a ton of different architectural styles thrown together with no rhyme or reason. It's like the tackiest thing ever. On a symbolic level, however, this imagery seems to be a critique of the inauthenticity at the core of life in Tinseltown.

This quote is about Homer, but we think that it could apply to a lot of people in Hollywood. These folks go through the motions of everyday life completely oblivious to their true emotions and feelings.

We don't think that Tod actually likes Los Angeles– after all, why else would he be obsessed with painting the city being burned down the ground? Sounds like a secret fantasy to us. Unfortunately, there are plenty of Hollywood citizens who are just like Tod, torn between love and hate for the city where dreams come to die.

Tod spends a lot of time thinking about "the people who come to California to die"—the same group he believes will burn L.A. to the ground. He traces their disappointment to the broken promises of the American Dream.

Tod's imagery becomes increasingly apocalyptic as the novel goes on. As he further explores the dark, seedy underbelly of glamorous Hollywood, he becomes convinced that the city—and perhaps the country—will soon be destroyed.

Like the ridiculously styled luxury homes, this series of movie sets show us the falseness at the core of Hollywood. It's a trippy scene: Tod basically travels backwards in time as he runs through a series of film sets. Somebody call Doc Brown, right?

That's some highfalutin' talk, but we think we understand what Tod is getting at. No one expects to see a realistic historical account in a Hollywood movie—there are way too few explosions in real life. Because of this, historical films are less about our actual past than our conception ofor dreams about the past.

Of course, it wouldn't be California without some good old-fashioned hippie wackadoodles. (Okay, there weren't actually any hippies around at this point, but whatever.) To Tod, this is more evidence of the emptiness of modern American life. After all, how bad must things have become for people to buy so readily into the false promises of snake-oil salesmen?

Here's another example of the weird nonsense Hollywood-ians flock to like bees to honey. As Tod mentions, however, the ridiculousness of this message isn't as important as the fact that the entire audience buys into it hook, line, and sinker. There will always be crazy people out there, but you know things are bad when the crazy people are the leaders.

This is Tod's diagnosis of "the people who come to California to die." After working hard their entire lives, these people fulfill their dreams of retiring to Los Angeles, only to learn that it isn't all it's cracked up to be. That's a horrifying realization.