Monstrous Modernism and The Day of the Locust
2011; Wiley; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1540-5931.2011.00837.x
ISSN1540-5931
Autores Tópico(s)Political Theory and Influence
ResumoThe social and technological upheavals at the end of the nineteenth century bred, in that tangled network of discourses comprising modernism, a pervasive anxiety toward collective activity and the collective body. While Pinkertons violently discouraged collections of disenfranchised and migrant labor, the literati labored against what they referred to as the masses, the mob, or the crowd, that great beast indigenous to the expanding and machine-like life of the cities. “Today,” warned Max Nordau in his Degeneration (1883), “the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists …” (qtd. in Kolocotroni 37). Other examples of this modernist imperative include Gustav LeBon'sThe Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) or, later, Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht, 1984). In at least one case, fear of the collective sutured issues of nationalism and aesthetics into a surprising creature: on May 15, 1921, members of the American Legion, many with “permanent and disfiguring evidence of their recent service,” staged a march on Miller's Theatre, in Los Angeles, in an attempt to discourage the exhibition of German-made films (Skal 37). David Skal describes the riot as a collection of disparate elements, which nonetheless achieved a semblance of form in its violent disorder: In addition to wounded veterans, the mob at Miller's Theatre included hundreds of sailors from the Pacific fleet, local members of the Motion Pictures Directors Association, and throngs of ordinary, outraged citizens. As the day wore on, the crowd's energy gained momentum; what was first described by the press as a “spectacular demonstration” would escalate into “wild rioting” by nightfall. (38) These marauders had assembled to protest the US opening night of Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. A similar riot erupted after the release of another “creature” film, Frankenstein, in 1932; an “out of control” crowd at a midnight showing in Omaha destroyed the theater's plate glass window, and the publicity fed into the movie's already spectacular image (Skal 139). A revival of the film in 1937, doubly featured with Todd Browning's Dracula, was advertised in cinema trade papers in language that best embodies the strange correlation between acts of mob violence and the popularity of creature films. “THROW AWAY THE BOOKS!” the advertisement reads, “FORGET EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SHOWMANSHIP! BECAUSE HORROR IS PAYING OFF AGAIN!” A picture of the two monstrous leads, Bella Lugosi and Boris Karloff, accompanied an arresting prophecy: “… you play them together! You dare them to see it! AND THEN THE CROWDS BREAK DOWN YOUR DOORS!” (Skal 204). No wonder these films so often feature rioting crowds in their climactic chase scenes: movie monsters like Frankenstein's creature, it seems, provide both immediate and symbolic motivation for collective outbursts of both violence and cultural criticism. Monsters and crowds threaten real social order, not only the symbolic social orders represented on screen in the imaginary world of the film narrative. Paul Wells, attempting to define the operative functions of the screen monster in The Horror Genre, asserts the need to: perceive of [the monster] as a metaphor; a projection of certain threats, fears and contradictions that refuse coexistence with the prevailing paradigms and consensual orthodoxies of everyday life. … It comes to represent the disintegration or destabilization of any one dominant perception or understanding of what it means to be human. … it serves to operate as a mode of disruption and breakdown in the status quo … horror texts engage with the collapse of social/socialized formations. (10) Noel Carroll concurs with this reading of the monster as an agent of social collapse, asserting that “the objects of art-horror are, by definition, impure … the anomalous nature of these beings is what makes them disturbing, distressing, disgusting … . Monsters … are repelling because they violate standing categories” (Carroll 39). The postwar “disintegration” of social order created a cultural and social ecosystem favorable to the propagation of monsters, collective, and otherwise. The literary ecosystem thrived on this perceived fragility, and literary modernism capitalized as well on the fear of the crowd. Ironically, the film Frankenstein appears connected to a fictional explosion of mob monstrosity in the climactic episode of Nathanael West'sThe Day of the Locust (published in 1939). Homer Simpson, in “uterine flight” from a series of sexual repressions, failures, and humiliations, stomps a young boy, Adore Loomis, to death in front of the teeming, opening-night crowd at Kahn's Persian Palace Theatre (West, Locust 171). The crowd then surges forward and wholly consumes Homer. Although repressed, monstrosity—in the form of movie monsters who violate standing categories of order—nevertheless radiates throughout the pages of Locust. Most overtly, Maybelle Loomis (the “monstrous mother” of the “repulsive child actor” Adore) compares her son to the Frankenstein monster (Milburn 68). Stephanie Sarver has extrapolated this comparison into a litany of correlating characterizations and setting effects, concluding that: West invokes images suggestive of James Whale's 1931 film Frankenstein to comment on the indistinct boundaries between cinematic illusion and Hollywood life … In commenting on the Hollywood community and employing a motif in his novel, West offers more than simple criticism of the superficial aspects of Hollywood culture: he reveals the social disorder that occurs when a body of people adopt the artifice of film and integrate it into their lives as a representation of reality. Sarver's arguments, while cogent and perceptive (and, frankly, influential to this article), represent a common and perhaps orthodox interpretation of the novel: its critique of Hollywood artificiality and spectacle inherently refutes cinematic narrative (and indeed the symptomatic social performances manifest in its wake) as mechanical, deceitful, and alienating.1 But a closer examination of the lingering presence in Locust of the creature films of the 1920s and 1930s, specifically in relation to the films Frankenstein, White Zombie (1932), and Freaks (1932), betrays thematic and ideological affinities which dispel any simple critique of cinema's influence on mass culture during this “high” stage of modernism. A monstrously historicized reading of Locust realigns the position of West's novella in relation to both literary modernism and the modernists' anxious preoccupations with the “indistinct boundaries” of labor, biology, and form. David Skal opens his “cultural history” of the horror film, Monster Show, with the infamous epigraph on monstrosity from Locust: “It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.” These lines demonstrate the thematic matrix of Locust by contextualizing the specter of monstrosity in an examination of form. In 1936, cinematic monstrosity had proven to be a deep reservoir in the cultural imagination. The “monster” picture had reached tremendous heights in the 1930s, and this so-called golden age of Hollywood was largely populated with creatures who, alongside of the gangsters and the cowboys, made up a significant part of the growing constellation of Hollywood stars. Universal earned large financial returns from Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) and followed closely with James Whales's Frankenstein. Immensely popular, Frankenstein opened on November 4, 1931 at the Mayfair Theatre in New York's Time Square; perhaps more important to the publication history of Locust is the revival of Frankenstein, in a double bill with Dracula, in 1938. Variety reported that the double bill was “mopping up” everywhere (in Skal 204). These releases were followed by Whales's Bride of Frankenstein (1932) and Karl Freund's The Mummy (1932). RKO produced King Kong (1933), an enormously successful and influential blockbuster. Of course, these films were proceeded by classics of German expressionism like Weine's aforementioned Caligari, Paul Wegener's The Golem (1920), and Fritz Lang's Nosferatu (1922) and Metropolis (1926). West's name is habitually associated with the concept of the Hollywood novel, an association based not only on Locust, but also from his work as a script writer in Hollywood.2 West would have been aware of the great creature films of the 1930s simply from their ballyhoo, but his professional work tied him quite directly to the studios that produced these screen horrors. From July to December of 1933 and 1935, West wrote for Columbia Pictures (Martin 203–89). From 1936 to 1938, West wrote for Republic Productions. He began his work on The Day of the Locust in 1935 and 1936 and it was published by Random House in May 1938, after which he began work for Universal—home of the most famous movie monsters—before his death in 1939 (Martin 203–89). Direct references to Whale's Frankenstein are the most obvious link to Locust and the creature cycle of the 1930s. When Homer Simpson and Tod Hackett meet the young Adore Loomis, he greets them with his perverse rendition of “Momma doan' want no peas.” Maybelle Loomis suggests that her son's behavior is really a pantomime of “the Frankenstein monster” (West, Locust 140). By the time of the composition of Locust, the image of Boris Karloff in full make-up, lurching toward the audience had been assimilated into the language of film itself. Consider the description of Adore, the figure for whom the invocation of Frankenstein's monster is first made and who Irving Malin refers to as “the most grotesque character in the novel” (Malin 93). Not only is he dressed “like a man,” in a full suit, but he also has eyebrows which have been “plucked and shaped carefully”; he has a “pale, peaked face and a large, troubled forehead” with “great staring eyes” (139). Compare this troubled forehead to Boris Karloff's makeup effects in Frankenstein, which were groundbreaking and influential at the time of release. And of course, it is Homer's brutal murder of Adore which brings the novel's riot to full froth; the vengeful mob echoes the pitchfork and torch-bearing crowd at the end of Whales's Frankenstein. As Sarver notes, great similarities appear between the physical traits and behaviors of Homer and the Monster, including their stumbling gaits and their seemingly autonomous hands. Homer becomes the focus of consciousness in the middle section of the novel, as well as being the both the catalyst for and victim of the riot, and the characterizations of him should therefore be considered crucial to understanding the novel. West invokes Karloff's performance of the monster while describing Homer's retreat from Hollywood: “Homer walked more than ever like a badly made automaton and his features were set in a rigid, mechanical grin … With each step, he lurched to one side and then the other” (West, Locust 178). Sarver finds the similarity even more apparent in West's description of Homer's waking struggles on the first morning in his new home: “… he began to work laboriously toward consciousness. The struggle was a hard one. His head trembled and his feet shot out. Finally his eyes opened, then widened” (82). Noting this sequence, Sarver asserts: [Homer is] a consolidation of inharmonious parts, much like the Frankenstein monster, who is created from disparate parts of different men … West's insistent attention to Homer's hands effectively compels the most obtuse reader to recognize their significance: through them we come to understand that we must rely on the nonverbal messages conveyed through Homer's hands to understand the impact of the situations he encounters. As with Whale's film monster, Homer reveals through his hands that which he cannot articulate. This image of disembodied hands additionally links Locust's relationship to the cult film favorite White Zombie. Victor Halperin's foray into the monster “cycle” of the thirties, White Zombie saw widespread release and was publicized as “shocking and weird.” The film concerns horrific events surrounding the wedding of Neil Parker and Madeleine Shor on the “mysterious” island of Haiti. Beaumont, the couple's host, has enlisted local witch-doctor Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi) to zombify Madeleine so she can become Beaumont's slave. Legendre meanwhile has amassed a mob of former enemies into a pack of slow but resilient zombies whom he controls by performing a series of clenching gestures with his hands; he eventually turns on Beaumont, attempting to secure control of Madeleine for himself. The movie is, by today's standards, not so much horrific as horrifically awful. In 1932, however, the film was the subject of a massive publicity blitz in an attempt to capitalize on the success of films like Frankenstein and Dracula. The influence of White Zombie and the figure of the mechanical, walking dead surfaces in Tod Hackett's encounters with the los angelenos of the novel, whose “clothing was somber and badly cut … while the others moved rapidly, darting into stores and cocktail bars, they loitered on the corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed. When their stare was returned, their eyes filled with hatred …” (West, Locust 60). The disheveled clothing of the populace recalls conventional zombie costuming, and their slow (or stationary) stature resembles not only the “sleepwalking” movements of the undead in White Zombie but also the generically slow zombies of later films like Night of the Living Dead (1968). The zombies of White Zombie, it should be noted, are not actually re-animated corpses but humans under a form of hypnotic control resulting from the death-like state Legendre's zombie powder induces in them. These automatons may seem different from the contemporary (and now conventional) representation of a zombie, but both versions articulate similar fears: the growing anxiety that within modernity and monopoly capitalism the human laborer was as replaceable as parts of a machine and anxiety over a loss of bodily control (literally in the high-speed innovations in movement made by the automobile and figuratively in the increasingly visible alienation of workers from their labor, i.e. the assembly line and migrant labor camps). Legendre appears to play the role of the evil industrialist, celebrating to Beaumont the fact that his zombie plantation workers “work faithfully … they're not concerned about long hours.” Modernism's ambivalence toward technology often took the shape in the critique of the dehumanization of mechanized industry, prophetically so in Karl Capec's play R.U.R. (first performed in 1921) as well as Chaplain's Modern Times (1936) and the aforementioned Metropolis. The mindlessness and lack of human presence and/or depth in the figure of the zombie represents (among other things) just such mechanical dehumanization and automatism. The word automaton is most closely associated in West's novel with Harry Greener and Homer Simpson. West uses the word several times throughout the novel to describe both men (as well as the mock soldiers of the Waterloo sequence). For instance, Homer must awaken “in sections, like a poorly made automaton” (West, Locust 82). Harry is made out to be even more of a mechanical man, as evinced in the oft-cited description of his heart attack at Homer's house: “Suddenly, like a mechanical toy that had been over wound, something snapped inside of him …” (92). White Zombie further resonates this alienated, mechanical body in the image of grasping, clenching, or otherwise autonomous hands and hand movements (a pathological habit of Homer Simpson in Locust that some critics attribute to the influence of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio). Murder Legendre's hands—which he contorts into a vice-like grip to somehow control the movements of his zombies—receive prominent screen-time in White Zombie. One lobby poster for the film features the words “White Zombie” in between a close up of Lugosi's hypnotic eyes (above the words) and a depiction of his interlocking hands (below) along with the caption “WITH HIS ZOMBIE GRIP he made her perform his every desire!” (Rhodes 125). The descriptive association of Homer and his hands continues when he wakes from a nap: Every part was awake but his hands. They still slept … He got out of the bed in sections, like a poorly made automaton, and carted his hands into the bathroom. He turned on the cold water. When the basin was full, he plunged his hands in up to the wrist. They lay quietly on the bottom like a pair of strange aquatic animals. When they were thoroughly chilled and began to crawl about he lifted them out and hid them in a towel. Homer, compulsively unable to stop moving his hands, annoys Tod at the cockfight, who observes that “What made it particularly horrible was its precision. It wasn't pantomime, it was manual ballet” (161). The essential difference between these two characterizations is one of control. Legendre enacts his “manual ballet” as a demonstration of mastery over others, while Homer's inability to control his hands—to keep them ordered—results in a compulsive display of monstrosity, a body bereft of control and behaving as if animated but effectively dead. Perhaps the most biologically “monstrous” of the monster pictures of the 1930s that West incorporates into Locust is Tod Browning's infamous tale of love and revenge, Freaks. The film opens with a carnival barker offering to tell the story of the sideshow's most horrible monstrosity, who “used to be beautiful, folks.” The story then flashes back to an unidentified circus and the lives of its otherly bodied sideshow performers, including the midget Hans and his (also miniature) love Frieda, as well as a consortium of half-men, bird-women, conjoined twins, and dwarves—all portrayed by actual circus or sideshow “oddities.” When the “freaks” discover a murderous plot hatched by the “big people,” they enact a brutal revenge on the beautiful Cleopatra and her conspiring strong man, Hercules, as per the “code of the freaks.” Hercules is stabbed to death while Cleopatra is mutilated and transformed into the barker's aforementioned horror: the “human duck,” a feathered, speechless torso. The film has entertained a rather notorious place in the realm of cult, horror, or exploitation films because of its complex and often confusing depiction of the differently formed “freaks.” The United Kingdom banned the film; one reviewer in the New York Times quipped that “the difficulty is in telling whether [Freaks] should be shown in the Rialto … or in, say, the Medical Center … [Freaks] is so loathsome I am nauseated thinking about it … it is not fit to be shown anywhere” (qtd in Fielder 296). Nonetheless, a bit of Freaks returns in Locust. One theater poster for the film reads “Unlike anything you've ever seen … the strange and startling love-drama of a midget, a lovely siren, and a giant!” (qtd. in Hawkins 265). Although the love triangle of Locust does not actively involve the dwarf of the novel (Abe Kusich, though it is difficult to see any semblance of the “homunculus” Abe in the gentile and well-spoken Hans), it does involve a siren (Faye) and a giant in the form of either the “monumental sculpture” of Homer or his comically tall rival, Earl Shoope. The trapeze artist Cleopatra also displays some similarities to West's succubus Faye, who, besides being an object of sexual desire and scopographic pleasure, also enters into an exploitative “marriage” with Homer. Faye's teasing emasculation of Homer at the Cinderella Bar closely resembles Cleopatra's treatment of Hans: the circus beauty has mounted what Joan Hawkins calls a “campaign of sexual humiliation” against Hans once they are married, victimizing him through “complete feminization and infantilization” (Hawkins 271). Faye's repeated jabs at Homer for being a “big baby” offer little variation. West had “a particular feel for the ‘broken bastards’ who inhabit the fringes of society,” notes Victor Comerchero, “and in his novels these figures crawl out of the shadows into a bright light” (4). Comerchero may not have seen the climactic revenge sequence of Freaks, when the “broken” bodies of the sideshow performers literally crawl through mud and out from under circus wagons to wreak their revenge, but the allegorical image of these “broken bastards” resonates with tense immediacy in the postwar atmosphere of the 1930s—such a figure indisputably wielded (in Breton's words) the power of “stirring the human sensibility for a time” (qtd. in Jameson 104). Great masses of broken bodies, be they the scarred and amputated bodies of the war veterans or the degenerating and malnourished migrant workers from the Dust Bowl, filled the streets in the 1930s. The social movements that developed around these masses figured largely in the lives of the leftists, avowed communists, and intelligentsia of the West Coast. West himself cared deeply about social progress, though his work represses it entirely. Writing to Malcolm Cowley in 1939, he confessed that: … I'm a comic writer and it seems impossible to me to handle any of the “big things” without seeming to laugh or at least smile. … What I mean is that out here we have a strong progressive movement and I devote a great deal of time to it. Yet, although this new novel is about Hollywood, I found it impossible to include any of those activities in it. I made a desperate attempt before giving up. … When not writing a novel—say at a meeting of a committee we have out here to help the migrant worker—I do believe it and try to act on that belief. But at the typewriter by myself I can't. West's aborted attempts to include in his novels serious social critique or his Marxist sympathies may have, through the implied presence of monstrous horror films, found fictional hosts to deliver them from the shadows. The evocative constellation of classic monster films, actors, directors and images traversing the pages of Locust demonstrates literary modernism's preoccupation with biological or embodied horror. Locust irritates the biological sensitivities of modernism (eugenics, degeneration, etc.) that Angelique Richardson refers to as “the new biology.” The creature cycle of the 1930s had a scientific and ideological foundation in the widespread acceptance of eugenics and the “progressive” policies eugenicists proposed for putting Darwinian evolution into practical application. While eugenics initially gained power in Great Britain after the Boer War, America soon came to embrace its ideals. By 1924, the International Commission of Eugenics listed fifteen member nations, including the United States and Great Britain; the US National Origins Act of 1924 limited immigration based on eugenic principles of Nordic superiority; perhaps most shocking to the contemporary reader is the enactment, by 1934, of sterilization laws in thirty American states (Bradshaw 35–36). So, West's conception of “the monstrous” synthesizes anxieties over degeneration and hybridity that seemed to be part of the ambient culture of the early thirties, embodied in “thriller” films like Frankenstein and Dracula as well as in the vitriolic and (retrospectively) cruel eugenic observations of renowned authors like Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence. The spirit of eugenics also haunts Locust, as its focus on physical degeneration and grotesquerie (most notably in the form of Abe) determines many of the characters, “extras,” and social landscapes of the text. Consider Tod's famous assertion that “nothing is sadder than the truly monstrous.” Transplant from the East, ivy leaguer, classicist, and set illustrator for a major Hollywood studio, Tod expresses this sadness over the pathos of monstrosity while surveying the lathe and plaster anomalies of his Hollywood Hills neighborhood. His critique of this ahistorical bricolage of architectural surfaces parallels the observations of eugenics proponent E. W. MacBride, a spokesmen for Lamarckian eugenics in the early twentieth century (quoted infamously by Eliot): “In all cases where large numbers of a given species of animals are raised under somewhat artificial conditions a certain number of monsters will be produced … This is true both of insects raised on banana peel and of human beings raised in a large city” (qtd. in Bradshaw“Eugenics” 44). Los Angeles, a city whose immense wealth stemmed from artifice and illusion, has produced its own degenerate populations of façades and replicas. But Tod's comments are not limited to architecture: his lament concerns the degenerating citizens of Los Angeles, the degenerate and dispossessed who have gone there “to die.” Of course, Whale's Frankenstein also hints at the presence of eugenics discourse during Dr. Waldman's lecture on the “normal brain” and the “criminal” or degenerate brain; Igor's commandeering of the degenerate brain ostensibly provides the biological “cause” of the creature's violent eruptions. Atavism represents a further and perhaps more specific form of degeneration deployed in the modernist biological critique crowds. Nordeau again seems appropriate: “the spasmodic seeking of new forms,” he writes of literary modernism, “is nothing more than historical vanity, the freaks of strolling players and charlatanism … Its sole result has hitherto been childish declamation, with colored lights and changing perfumes as accompaniments, and atavistic games of shadows and pantomimes” (Kolocotroni 26–27). Locust consistently positions characters in just such an atmosphere, which Comerchero calls “a world of half-men” (141). Tod often perceives his fellow angelenos in terms bestial and atavistic. Abe, for instance, is characterized as subhuman during the fight with Miguel; as Wisker points out, he is only referred to as “Abe” at the end of the fight, and is otherwise called “the dwarf” or “the homunculus”—except when Miguel dashes him against the wall like “a man killing a rabbit” (117). But Miguel best represents the subhuman primitive (“a surrogate for the beast,” according to John Keyes) in the ideological frame of the text (Keyes 165). Tod first sees “the Mexican” on a picnic with Faye at Earl and Miguel's campsite. West describes Miguel as: toffee colored, with large Armenian eyes and pouting black lips. His head was a mass of tight, ordered curls. He wore a long haired sweater, called a “gorilla” in and around Los Angeles, with nothing under it. His soiled duck trousers were held up by a red bandanna handkerchief. On his feet were a pair of tattered tennis sneakers. (113) Locust positions Miguel in monstrous, atavistic terms: a disordered arrangement of textures and surfaces, his appearance fuses animal imagery (duck pants, a gorilla sweater) and ambiguously mixed ethnicity (Armenian eyes, black lips). Most of the scholarly focus on West's treatment of Hollywood as an illusion, as a masquerade, and as a waste dump of civilization, but few treat it for what it is: a border town. Miguel threatens Tod because of his nonwhiteness; in the anxious tension of a border town, “the Mexican” easily functions as a monstrous Other. The invocation of screen monsters in Locust dramatizes, among other things, the desire to control or assimilate the massive influx of immigrants, cultures, and humanity into the Los Angeles of the 1930s. Movie monsters, argues Robin Wood, represent the “repressed other” of modern middle-class American culture: “Otherness represents that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with … in one of two ways: either by rejecting it and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it, converting it as far as possible into a replica of itself” (27). Both White Zombie and Dracula feature the travels of Americans into mysterious foreign lands; Freund's The Mummy also concerns Americans who travel to the deserts of Egypt and encounter the exotic city of Cairo. The necessity of foreign travel to experience the monstrous stems, in Rhodes's words, from the “hatred brewed against immigrants” in the 1920s, and the common opinion in the US that Europeans were to blame for World War I and European immigrants were to blame for the Great Depression (19). Norden and Cahill concur that Freaks“shares some general similarities with other horror films of the period—most notably, its revenge theme, the plurality of ‘Others’ coded as aberrant if not outright abhorrent, and exotic/foreign settings …” (Norden and Cahill 88). Thus, the combination of aberrant others and exotic settings finds a perfect host in West's Los Angeles. West's novel thus reflects the modernist preoccupation with biological and social degeneration; degeneration also reflects the plight of narrative in the 1930s: literary authors, working in Hollywood, may have viewed their works as monstrous, degenerated (though their biographers most certainly shared this view). Locust uses the thematic and allegorical currency of the monster as entry into the great anxiety over literary and artistic form that pathologically defines the modernist movement. West had been experimenting or perhaps struggling with form, and his most successful result (according to the critical consensus) appears to be his novel Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), which he tellingly described as a novel in the form of a comic strip: “The chapters to be squares in which many things happen through one action. The speeches contained in the conventional balloons. I abandoned the idea, but retained some of the comic strip technique: Each chapter instead of going forward in time, also goes backward, forward, up
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