Le Jour du fléau

Synopsis

A cynical and gothic look at Hollywood during the late 1930s, The Day of the Locust tells the tales of residents of the dilapidated San Bernardino Arms: Faye Greener, a trashy aspiring actress with limited talent, and her father Harry, a washed-up vaudevillian reduced to working as a door-to-door salesman; sexually repressed accountant Homer Simpson, who desperately loves Faye, and East Coast WASP Tod Hackett, an aspiring artist employed by the production department of a major studio, who also fancies Faye.

There are unusual and bizarrely disturbing images: a middle-aged man sits in an untended garden staring at a large lizard that stares back; a young woman is transported into the film she's watching and finds herself portraying a harem girl in old Baghdad; a dwarf tenderly caresses a rooster, bleeding and dazed from a cock-fight,and then tosses it back into the ring to its death; an androgynous child beckons to a man through a window and performs a grotesque imitation of Mae West.

These brief vignettes do little to advance the basic plot, but they serve to shape the audience's understanding of the era depicted as one of Hollywood sleaziness and wholesale alienation. Spectacle fills the screen—a set of the Waterloo battlefield collapses on the extras during the making of the film within the film. In the film's climax, an enraged Homer brutally tramples a child near a Grauman's Chinese Theater as crowds gather for the premiere of a new film. Seeing this, the enraged crowd swarms over and kills Homer. Almost immediately, the entire crowd is driven to riot, turning on itself, smashing store windows, overturning cars, trampling each other to death and turning the already packed street into a war zone. Severely injured, a delirious Tod imagines some of the mob take on the appearance of the characters in his own grotesque painting The Burning of Los Angeles.