518 Making It New: 1900–1945prompts them to violence of the kind that their own jaded appetites, fed to saturation
by the popular media, had led them to expect would be waiting for them to watch
and enjoy in California. At the end of The Day of the Locust the hopeless hordes of
Midwesterners who have poured locust-like into California now pour into
Hollywood to gaze at the celebrities arriving at a movie premiere. There, the crowd
becomes a mob, goes berserk; and Tod, crushed almost to death, sees in a kind of
vision the canvas he has been working on, “The Burning of Los Angeles,” as if it were
completed. It is an appropriately apocalyptic note on which to end a story that
announces the selling and subversion of the American dream. The America West
describes is one that has lost touch with the real. All it has left is boredom and fear,
the resignation of the crowd and the rage of the mob: the both of them signs of a
culture that has no sustaining connection with the past – and no adequate means of
imagining its future.GGray_c04.indd 518ray_c 04 .indd 518 8 8/1/2011 7:54:07 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 07 AM