620
PARTISAN REVIEW
flight, who, instead of having three names, has none at all. We are told that
she is an architecture student.
It
is a role in which Maria Schneider is assigned
some of the most insufferably gnomic dialogue on record: "This place," she
grandly intones as her ftrst line, "was built by a man who was run over by a
bus." Countless thousands neither know, nor want to know, the purport of
The Girl's lines in
The Passenger.
Among this throng must be included the
actress who utters them. Schneider plainly does not know. She plainly does
not care. Neither does anybody else.
This includes, I presume, Antonioni. It is perhaps a backhanded testa·
ment to his integrity that when presenting something he obviously neither
sees nor believes, he becomes simply incompetent, hysterical, incapable of
putting together a credible" product." Not so John Schlesinger. He does not
ever make" incompetent" movies, and his
Day ofthe Locust
is in every visible
way "superior" to
The Passenger.
For example, all the actors' performances in
Day ofthe Locust
are highly professional (that they are repeatedly overblown
is the director's fault), while nobody in
The Passenger,
except Nicholson, ever
manages to act their way out of that famous paper bag. And while
The Pas–
senger
can scarcely be said to exist at all as a work,
Day ofthe Locust
has real
power. Power of a peculiarly hateful kind.
Like
The Passenger, Day ofthe Locust
ostentatiously pretends
to
inhabit
the landscape of modern spiritual disease, and everything that happens in
that landscape has a theme. Oppressively, relentlessly, the subject of
Schlesinger's ftlm is sexual anguish. The disease here paralyzing the techni–
color terrain is murderous horniness in absolute frustration-sexual hysteria,
sexual degradation, sexual despair. The despair of
men,
that is-for at the
center of all this utterly miserable lust, within the panting circle of yearning
and bloodshot male eyes, stands Karen Black as Faye Greener. A strange
transformation has been worked on Nathanael West's pessimism.
It
has not
only been sexualized, it has been rendered sexually speciftc and turned into a
preeminently masculine form of suffering. Of course there is plenty of sexual
frustration in West's book, but in fact his vision is generic and absolute: It is
the hysterical bafflement of
every
impulse to fresh feeling or action, and it
leaves Faye Greener as baffled as anyone else. In Schlesinger's version, West's
despair has become a slavering, brutalized, degraded condition consequent
upon being sexual and male.
It
is men whom frustration humiliates and drives
to horrifted, hysterical destruction and self-immolation. The Faye Greeners
merely muse-emptily, of course-on the carnage they create. One could
hardly ftnd a more convincing example of how a profound misogyny neces–
sarily entails a profound misandry.
I was, ofcourse, sent back to the novel after seeing the ftlm. Rather
to
my
surprise, I found myself revaluating the book in the light of the ftlm, and
