In 1970, a society photographer named Slim Aarons took some pictures at a modernist villa in Palm Springs. Aarons’s specialty was, as he put it, “attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places,” but he was a New York tenement-born kid who made good in postwar Los Angeles, and his images reveal an outsider’s eye for incongruity. In the foreground of these photos, impeccable blond women in cheerful crop tops chat and lounge, as the clean lines of a turquoise pool stretch away from them. Behind that looms the kind of sublimely austere desert landscape you find only in Southern California. Look once, and it’s all style and gloss. Look again, and there’s menace in the way those raw mountains hang over the brightness, the players utterly uninterested, by all appearances, in what lies beyond.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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Joan Didion’s second, and most essential, novel, Play It As It Lays, came out the same year Aarons shot those photos. Taking place amid the contrasts of late-1960s Hollywood, it ranks with The Great Gatsby and The Age of Innocence as one of American literature’s most perfect accounts of a hyperspecific social scene with outsize cultural capital. In recent years, Didion’s knowingness about the hypocrisies of her subject has been characterized as more pose than critique, as studied in its effect as slept-in eyeliner. But to read Play It As It Lays as an exercise in glamorous ennui misses how it uses incongruity to dramatize living with repression. What do you do with grief when your world has no room for sincerity? What do you do with love, or pain, or fear? Imagine you’re the Cassandra at the pool party who keeps pointing, fruitlessly, at those mountains. Eventually, you have to leave, or join the crowd.
Not unlike Greek tragedy, the novel opens after its foundational crises have already occurred. At 31, her young daughter institutionalized and her marriage to auteur Carter Lang as tattered as her acting career, Maria Wyeth is failing to keep up appearances. It’s October, and Los Angeles is baking. Carter is finishing his latest film somewhere in the Mojave. The only person to acknowledge Maria’s heartache is her friend BZ, a gay man consigned to a sham marriage bankrolled by his wealthy mother.
We know from the novel’s cool opening pages that BZ will die and that Maria will be sent away, and so the story we get, in fits and starts, has the hallucinatory, scattered quality of a bad dream someone failed to forget. We accompany Maria in close-up to parties with people no one likes, through an abortion and its aftermath, to work before unforgiving cameras for bad TV shows, and during hours of driving, at high speed, on freeways that, for once, actually earn their name. It’s clear that this can’t end well, but the only solutions are more ways not to care. It’s as if the secret to happiness lies in finding just the right mix of sex, work, and pills. At one point, Maria dials the number of a hypnotist who promises to regress clients to infancy. “With a sense that she was about to confirm a nightmare,” the brief chapter ends. In the ensuing beat, we realize that what Maria fears is not the resurfacing of pain but confirmation that it is beyond even a hypnotist’s reach.
Reading Play It As It Lays today, it’s impossible not to notice how cannily Didion turns all the tropes of Southern California’s beauty into lightly veiled threats. Trying to kill time at the beach, Maria finds “oil scum on the sand and a red tide in the flaccid surf.” Driving to meet the middleman for her back-alley abortion, she moves through air that’s “dry, burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows of firebreaks on distant mountains.” If Maria’s world is the one depicted in Aarons’s pool photos, she’s standing a little outside, eyes drawn to the background. The dangers are unambiguous, but to everyone except Maria, they remain unseen.
Repression, for Maria, is less a form of forgetting than a studied practice of living with the thing that most hurts or imperils and rendering it inert through sheer will. No novel is better at documenting the terrible costs of such an effort, or at understanding why, sometimes, it needs to be done.•
