The cityscape unfolds as an unending film reel where the central difficulty is discerning where charade ends and reality begins. Their aspirations frustrated, they are unwilling exiles caught between the city's dramaturgy and their own latent violence. The book's final scene powerfully captures this obscurity with the conflation of a riot and a movie premier. Revealing its Dadaist and Surrealist influences, particularly montage schemes, Day of the Locust rejoices in convoluted imagery. Observing the ascendant film and mass cultures of the thirties, West confronted in California the empty promise of consumerism and predicted that the resulting alienation and boredom would midwife society's destruction.
Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies.
They have been cheated and betrayed. In 1939, with Europe and Asia descending into world war, it represented a bold, if not outlandish, political and cultural caveat. Ultimately, The Day of the Locust presented too dark a statement for depression America. The book sold under fifteen-hundred copies. And yet in a life embellished by irony, West's anonymity could only be short-lived.