by Alice Bolin
“I guess I can’t see the harm in working and being a mama,” Spears sang in 2007, just after her series of personal crises, with her signature false naïveté. Britney Spears’s music is about desire; from the beginning, Britney Spears herself has been about a prodigious contradiction, a prodigious loneliness. Watch the end of the “. . . Baby One More Time” video, as Spears holds her face with boredom and smirks at the camera, her pigtail braids secured with feather scrunchies, and witness the spark: it’s not the dumb hand of the market patting her head with approval, nor sex and its dumb compulsions, nor even the dumb intelligence that is satire or critique. It’s that other thing. Art.
The Place Makes Everyone a Gambler
When I first moved to Los Angeles, I sat by Echo Park Lake and read Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It As It Lays twice. You have to be a special kind of depressive to read this book more than once, especially more than once back to back. It follows Maria Wyeth, actress and model of minimal success and wife to an up-and-coming movie director, as her life falls apart. Her young daughter, Kate, suffers from a mysterious mental disability and is institutionalized. Maria files for divorce. She gets an abortion. She becomes, in her agent’s words, “a slightly suicidal situation.”
Although Play It As It Lays has achieved classic status—it was on Time’s list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923—many readers find Maria unbearably dramatic, self-centered, messy, and babyish. It takes a personality with both a tendency toward old-fashioned melodrama and a ruthless, sad/beautiful, cinematic nihilism to pick up what Play It As It Lays is putting down—which is maybe to say it takes a bad personality.
I sat on a crumbling stone bench set into the greenery surrounding the lake, and dead bird-of-paradise flowers got tangled in my hair. It was lovely: ducks hung out in the shallows and the statue of the Lady of the Lake laid her shadow in the water. But as I observed the men pushing ice cream carts, the families, dogs, and joggers circling the lake, it was as if everything I saw concealed a dark edge, a poison that floated imperceptibly in the daylight. Toddlers almost pitched themselves into the water when their parents looked away. A man threw a tennis ball into the lake and his little dog swam out to retrieve it over and over again. Every time it looked to me like the dog would falter, she had gotten too tired, she might drown right there near the fountain.
At one point in Play It As It Lays Maria takes in the action in the town square of a small beach town. She watches “some boys in ragged Levi jackets and dark goggles . . . passing a joint with furtive daring” and “an old man [who] coughed soundlessly, spit phlegm that seemed to hang in the heavy air.” Maria fantasizes about calling her lover and, in making contact, undoing her dread. “Maybe she would hear his voice and the silence would break,” Didion writes, “the woman in the nurse’s uniform would speak to her charge and the boys would get on their Harleys and roar off.”
Maria’s anxiety is evidence of the secret patterns, connections, and implications that a mind accrues when it talks only to itself. “Her mind was a blank tape,” Didion writes of Maria, “imprinted daily with snatches of things overheard . . . the beginnings of jokes and odd lines of song lyrics.” Her life becomes inseparable from her dreams: images and figures and words and sounds collected, recombined, and imbued with sinister meaning.
Throughout Play It As It Lays, Maria dreams of her dead mother, a shadowy “syndicate” hiding bodies in the plumbing of her house, fetuses floating in the East River, and children filing into a gas chamber. Waking and dreaming, she is preoccupied with rattlesnakes, and her pregnancy and the aftermath of her abortion are dark and strange as a nightmare. Shortly after I moved into my first sublet in Los Angeles, I opened my laptop in the morning and tiny grease ants started crawling out of the cracks in the keyboard. I’d never encountered grease ants, which are so small that they crawled in under the cap of my closed jar of peanut butter, forming what I at first mistook for a film of dust. Sometimes dream symbolism collides with waking life by coincidence, but sometimes it is a bad sign, maybe indicating that I had ended up where I didn’t—or couldn’t—belong, not equipped financially for the city, and not equipped emotionally for the only life I could afford. Dread was, as it always is, an explanation, a sidelong look at what I couldn’t control.
Didion’s experimentation with dream structure in Play It As It Lays may have something to do with her suspicion of the unity, linearity, and cause and effect of traditional narrative. Didion is one of the essential essayists of the twentieth century, and all great nonfiction writers examine how the coherence we expect from storytelling is incompatible with the contradictions and competing truths of real life. I think of Janet Malcolm, who over her twelve books has considered the way narrative is created in psychology, journalism, and biography: the artificial order each lays over real life. Malcolm writes in The Journalist and the Murderer:
As every work of fiction draws on life, so every work of nonfiction draws on art. As the novelist must curb his imagination in order to keep his text grounded in the common experience of man (dreams exemplify the uncurbed imagination—thus their uninterestingness to everyone but their author), so the journalist must temper his literal-mindedness with the narrative devices of imaginative literature.
In this way, Didion walks a careful line in Play It As It Lays. She can’t avoid all the traditional conventions of the novel form, and she can’t ignore the mandates of fact. But she must find a way to shape a novel that reflects that archipelago of an industry that is “entertainment,” and Los Angeles, a city whose unifying characteristic is its disjointedness.
Play It As It Lays begins with Maria compulsively and aimlessly driving L.A.’s freeway system. “She drove it as a riverman runs a river,” Didion writes, and when Maria is not driving, she fantasizes about it, replaying in her mind perfectly merging from one freeway to another with a balletic shift across four lanes of traffic. This practice indicates Maria’s absolute idleness—her husband and daughter have both been taken away from her, so she has nothing to occupy her time or her thoughts. But she is also seeking emptiness. Driving can be a meditative activity, the mind and the body working in unison, moving in response to stimuli—the road, the lane, the signs and signals, the other drivers—without conscious thought: the flow of the fugitive act. “Sometimes at night the dread would overtake her,” Didion writes, “bathe her in sweat, flood her mind with sharp flash images . . . but she never thought about that on the freeway.”
Driving L.A. is one of Didion’s favorite themes in her nonfiction, too: in 1976 she described driving the city as requiring “total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway.” In 1989 she wrote how these hours spent in one’s car effect “a kind of seductive unconnectedness” in which
context clues are missing. In Culver City as in Echo Park as in East Los Angeles, there are the same pastel bungalows. There are the same leggy poinsettia and the same trees of pink and yellow hibiscus.
“Rapture-of-the-freeway” is maybe writing it a bit too large. For me, driving in L.A. was not a narcotic but the most terrifying kind of stimulant. I always felt like I was risking death, my own and that of unfortunate Los Angeles pedestrians who appeared as scary aberrations in the landscape, wandering around the Rite Aid parking lot or running across Normandie to the Laundromat. I spent much more time riding the bus and walking (risking death by a different method) than anyone I knew. I saw accidents all the time: cars spinning out on the freeway on sunny days; Lexuses backing up into other Lexuses in the parking lot at my job; a guy jumping the gun at a green light north of my place in Koreatown and ramming into the bumper in front of him, then both drivers getting out to yell at and threaten each other. At the same time, driving in Los Angeles is freeing in the way that all disasters are. Where I previously followed my driver’s ed teacher’s maxim that you must see a car’s tires in your rearview mirror before merging in front of it, I learned to look over my shoulder and quickly wed
ge myself into any car-sized space that had appeared in traffic.
In this, I understand the contradiction of experience—enforced lawlessness, trapped freedom, humdrum danger—that Didion is getting at in Play It As It Lays: freeway driving, navigating the network of loops and interchanges that take you right back where you started from, is uniquely appropriate for Maria’s erratic, desperate kind of heroine. If the open road is an American totem of independence and escape, what does it mean when the road is actually a closed circuit? In Vanessa Grigoriadis’s infamous 2008 Rolling Stone profile of Britney Spears, “The Tragedy of Britney Spears,” she writes about the routine Spears made of paparazzi chases: “She races around [Los Angeles] for two or three hours a day, aimlessly leading paps to various locations where she could interact with them just a little bit and then jump back into her car.”
Grigoriadis surveys Spears’s struggles from 2003 to 2008, “the most public downfall of any star in history,” as she descended from America’s golden pop star through quickie marriages, rehab stays, her children being legally removed from her custody, and one very public head-shaving incident to rock bottom. Grigoriadis describes her as “an inbred swamp thing who chain-smokes, doesn’t do her nails, tells reporters to ‘eat it, snort it, lick it, fuck it’ and screams at people who want pictures for their little sisters.” “The Tragedy of Britney Spears” is pure exploitive Hollywood camp, a lurid and gossipy rundown of sad events that were already public property. The strange thing about Didion’s Hollywood novel is that this sort of pulp journalism is where we are used to encountering characters like Maria, not in meditations on existential nothingness.
Grigoriadis admits, “it may be true that Britney suffers from the adult onset of a genetic mental disorder . . . or that she is a ‘habitual, frequent and continuous’ drug user,” but she does not deem these explanations of the Britney Spears “tragedy” worthy of exploration. They would hazard too much empathy, rendering Spears a human to connect with, rather than a spectacle to gawk at. But as Grigoriadis describes Spears’s unpredictable driving—“a Britney chase is more fun than a roller coaster”—I’m struck by the bizarre sadness of the situation, a young woman fleeing an army of mysterious men for hours every day, driving away just to find herself driving back, always being caught, rooted out. It’s like a bad dream.
The insanity of Los Angeles’s epically unsustainable urban development is that it was all on purpose, the dizzying system of freeways uniquely supporting the vision of the real estate barons who created the city. Didion writes: “This would be a new kind of city, one that would seem to have no finite limits, a literal cloud on the land.” This is why certain attributes that seem accidental, “the sprawl of the city, the apparent absence of a cohesive center,” are in fact imperative to Los Angeles’s raison d’être and are why driving is “for many people who live in Los Angeles, the dead center of being there.” The idealism of this “cloud on the land” stands in ironic juxtaposition to many facts about Los Angeles, like its constant, looming natural disasters, including wildfires, mudslides, and earthquakes. But one thrust of Didion’s project is probing the ways that the threat of disaster is not opposed to the Los Angeles dream of endless sprawl. In the idealists’ eyes, the Los Angeles of today or yesterday is impermanent, indeterminate, and unimportant. It can always be torn down, rebuilt, and reimagined. I’m collecting examples of a certain L.A. yin-yang: disaster and development, “The Tragedy of Britney Spears” and Play It As It Lays, film language and dream language.
In my first sublet in Echo Park, when I could pick up my neighbors’ Wi-Fi, I obsessively watched the true crime documentary series Dateline NBC on YouTube, particularly those episodes hosted by Keith Morrison, a rakish, ghoulish Canadian journalist with a luxurious mane of white hair, who seems to take macabre pleasure in the stories of people killing their spouses for insurance money, killing their lovers’ spouses, pushing their business partners off boats, or bludgeoning strangers while on meth benders. Obviously I took pleasure in it, too. The show is at once depressing and filled with weird comedy, like the time the show’s voice-over said about a victim, “Her new man made her tingle as if ginger ale had filled her heart.” This seemed suited to the dark comedy of my own life as I lay on the floor of my bedless sublet, eating junk food.
Many episodes of Dateline take place in Los Angeles’s outlying areas, suburbs and small towns in Orange County or San Bernardino County or the Antelope Valley, places where residents might think they are sheltered, just beyond the reach of urban chaos. These are mostly towns developed in the mid-twentieth century, part of that tract-house-studded Sunbelt that saw a huge growth in population with the Cold War aerospace boom. People migrated for the chance to reinvent themselves as members of the all-American middle class in shiny Southern California, a chance to lead lives like the families they saw on television. And for some, that dream was realized: for many of the interviewees on Dateline, it seems like they can’t believe their lives have become TV-worthy. Murder is the only interesting thing that has ever happened to them.
The Dateline mysteries about these boom suburbs are a peculiar bait and switch. These people came to California to become producers, but they became part of the product, and not even the most important part. The victims and their families are given due screen time on Dateline, but it is mostly generic, perfunctory. “She could make a whole room smile,” a family member says about one victim. “He loved being a dad,” we hear about another. The best parts of any Dateline episode are about the murderer and the police’s process of tracking him or her down, because the feelings are more straightforward: there’s nothing to complicate the audience’s basically clinical fascination with violent crime and detective work. “This is the story of a mother,” Morrison might say to introduce a victim, but the story is elsewhere.
Our cultural obsession with murder stories and the criminal justice system is a prime example of the impulse to narrativize a reality that is basically unexplainable. For better or worse, narrative is the tool that the system uses to deliver justice: the defense and the prosecution each present their stories, and the one that makes more sense—read as: the more satisfying one—becomes the reality. Didion writes in her 1989 essay “L.A. Noir” about a murder case that generated significant media attention because of the peripheral involvement of the onetime head of production of Paramount Pictures, Robert Evans, and a movie he was planning to produce, The Cotton Club. Although the case’s connection to Evans and his movie were dubious, every movie, book, and piece proposed about it involved Evans, so that the shorthand for the case became “Cotton Club,” inevitably implying Evans’s guilt. For both the media covering a case and the district attorney, a murder is a story to be sold, whether to a movie studio, a publishing house, or a jury. For Didion, the Cotton Club case affirms the Hollywood faith “in killings, both literal and figurative”:
In fact this kind of faith is not unusual in Los Angeles. In a city not only largely conceived as a series of real estate promotions but largely supported by a series of confidence games, a city even then afloat on motion pictures and junk bonds and the B-2 Stealth bomber, the conviction that something can be made of nothing may be one of the few narratives in which everyone participates.
This idea of Los Angeles’s massive communal roll of the dice is essential to Didion’s understanding of the city, that cloud on the land, and especially the entertainment industry. “The place makes everyone a gambler,” she writes. “Its spirit is speedy, obsessive, immaterial.” She describes how a project’s financing—the phrases “the deal” or “the action” are how Didion writes about the business of bankrolling movies—is the true story of any movie, and it’s over before production even begins. An excellent case study in the deal is Stephen Rodrick’s January 2013 New York Times Magazine feature “The Misfits.” It chronicles the making of Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis’s microbudget sex thriller The Canyons, which stars Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen. Schrader, writer of the
classic films Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, and Bret Easton Ellis, iconic enfant terrible novelist of American Psycho fame, were both dangerously close to washed up and looking to make something of nothing, to regenerate both of their careers with one sensational project.
Just how they intended to do that is the subject of Rodrick’s article. Schrader wanted to “do something on the cheap that didn’t look cheap.” There is extensive speculation about where the money is. Schrader and his partners design a deal in which The Canyons would be “the most open film ever,” with an interactive social media presence and a “populist” approach to financing, using the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, with “no studio looking over their shoulders offering idiot notes.” They cast Deen and Lohan, an infamously troubled former child star, to gain publicity for the project. This, the evolving financial deal of The Canyons, is the story of “The Misfits,” as much as it pretends to be about the on-set chaos caused by Lohan.
Lohan’s melodramatics serve as an object lesson in the difficulties of trying to make a movie in an unconventional way. One day when the crew is filming in a Santa Monica shopping mall, she sees a magazine with Oliver Stone on the cover and rips it up, cursing him for refusing to cast her in a movie. When this piece made a stir among the people I followed on social media, a few months before I moved to California, I thought of Grigoriadis’s piece on Spears immediately, and about the camp film disaster-piece Valley of the Dolls, which depicts the fresh-faced and wholesome Patty Duke transforming into a showbiz banshee, manically gobbling uppers and downers. These, and Play It As It Lays, too, were part of an L.A. syllabus I made for myself before I even knew I would live there. It illustrated how big questions about the mechanics of the city and the entertainment industry—who was in charge and who profited—could be obliquely probed or sidestepped altogether by focusing on the messy theatrics of washed-up white women. Grigoriadis describes a tantrum in which Spears’s credit card is declined. “A wail emerges . . . guttural, vile, the kind of base animalistic shriek only heard at a family member’s deathbed,” she writes, really going for the gusto. “‘Fuck these bitches,’ screams Britney, each word ringing out between sobs. ‘These idiots can’t do anything right!’”