Hollywood Panoramatics: Nathanael West's Baroque Modernity

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Other such inventories in West's novel would include the decontextualized architectural jumble of the Los Angeles terrain (“Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon” (262)), or the curio case of preserved animals (“glass pointers, silver beagles, porcelain schnauzers, stone dachshunds, aluminum bulldogs, onyx whippets, china bassets, wooden spaniels. Every recognized breed was represented and almost every material that could be sculptured, cast or carved” (281)) at Mrs. Jennings's brothel. In addition to Barnard's account of the high/low cultural divide, see, on “image culture” (Jacobs 247). On class mobility and collectivity, see Seguin's chapter on West. One implication of this condition is efficiently captured by Adorno and Horkheimer's description of the culture industry as a system in which “something is provided for all, so that none may escape.” See Adorno and Horkheimer 123. A partial enumeration of images of this type would include the defining image of the cockfight scene—that of the aged red cock fighting from its back and eventually succumbing, after repeatedly trying to “rise” over its foe (382–3); on the studio lots, an ensemble of actors attempting to scale a phony Mont St. Jean comes to disaster when the scaffolding collapses (356); in the climactic Hollywood riot of the novel's final scene, Tod sees Homer Simpson “rise above the mass for a moment, shoved up against the sky,” before being dragged back down to suffer a beating (415). Even the very name of Tod's apartment building, the San Bernardino Arms, evokes these climbs, Bernard being the patron saint of mountain climbers. This particular fantasy, it might be noted, is introduced during a pregnant pause on the stairs: “His room was on the third floor, but he paused for a moment on the landing of the second. It was on that floor that Faye Greener lived, in 208.” Predictably, it is here left unfulfilled: “When someone laughed in one of the apartments he started quickly and continued upstairs” (263). Emphasis added. One might note in passing how these objects—the Zeppelin and the stockade in particular—themselves respectively convey the opposition between ascension, flight, and freedom on the one hand and fixity on the other. As Ramirez points out, a sense of the ubiquity and range of stair imagery in West's context may be readily gleaned by kicking back with a triple feature of The Great Ziegfeld (1936), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), and Sunset Boulevard (1950). Whether Grot was guilty merely of a cost overrun, or of the more considerable crime of panoramatically revolutionizing the epistemology of set design, will probably persist as an unanswered question. But for more background on this transition in set design, see Ramirez's chapter on stairs. Freud corrects this shortcoming to some extent when he eschews such generalization and incorporates into his analysis an actual sadistic stair dream related by Otto Rank. Interestingly, the associated signs revealed in that analysis are uncannily similar to the fantasies harbored by Tod Hackett—stairs, a young girl, and landscape paintings that illustrate the fact that “cheaper pictures were also to be had.” See Freud 404. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAndrew Lyndon KnightonAndrew Lyndon Knighton is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. He is currently completing a book about the concept of unproductivity in nineteenth-century American literature and culture.