Play It As It Lays
Encyclopedia
Play It as It Lays is a 1970
novel
by the American
writer Joan Didion
. Time
magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. The book was made into a 1972 movie starring Tuesday Weld
as Maria and Anthony Perkins
as B.Z. Didion co-wrote the screenplay with her husband, John Gregory Dunne
.
The protagonist, an unfulfilled actress, recounts her life while recovering from a mental breakdown in an exclusive Neuropsychiatric Institute. The reason for her confinement is purportedly having participated in the suicidal death of a befriended bisexual movie producer, BZ (an abbreviation for benzodiazepines, sedative drugs).
The “facts” from Wyeth’s childhood include being raised in the small town of Silver Wells, Nevada
, to a gambling, careless father and a neurotic mother who used to “croon to herself” of chimeric yearnings. After graduating from a high school in Tonopah
, encouraged by her parents, she leaves for New York
to become an actress. In the Big Apple
, Maria works temporarily as a model and meets ex-boyfriend, Ivan Costello, as is later insinuated, a domineering psychological blackmailer who has no scruples using the money and the body of his acquiescent girlfriend.
During her stay in the city, Maria receives the news about the death of her mother, possibly a victim of a self-provoked car accident. Her father dies soon afterwards, leaving useless mineral rights to his business partner and friend, Benny Austin. Maria withdraws from acting and modeling to get over the shock of her mother’s death, splits up with Ivan, moving to Hollywood with the newly met Carter. We learn that she and Carter have a 4-year-old daughter Kate, undergoing mental and physical “treatment” for some “aberrant chemical in her brain.” Maria truly loves her daughter, as indicated by her tender descriptions of the child, frequent visits to the hospital, and a determination “to get her out.” She seems to be the only significant person in Wyeth’s life. The love for the girl obviously means more than her marriage to despotic Lang and affairs with men, including his Hollywood acquaintances, Les Goodwin and BZ.
In the course of the novel, Maria becomes pregnant, plausibly by Les, and is coerced by Carter to abort. The traumatic procedure leaves her mentally shattered and haunted by nightmares of dying children. Looking for oblivion, she plunges into her routine of compulsive driving on the roads and freeways of southern California
, wandering through motels and bars, drinking and chancing sexual encounters with second-rate actors and ex-lovers. She spends a night in jail for car theft and drug possession, after a one-night stand with a minor film star, Johnny Waters. Eventually she involves herself in a perverse love quadrangle with Carter, BZ and his wife Helene, abruptly ended when BZ overdoses on sedative barbiturates (specifically, Seconal) in Maria’s hotel bedroom. The book concludes with reclusive Maria planning a new life with Kate, resolved to “keep on playing,” despite her past.
magazine. She is submissive in relationships with men. Her agent calls it “a very self-destructive personality structure.”
Didion's heroine owes much to the modernist output of Lost Generation
wordsmiths, like Ernest Hemingway
and F. Scott Fitzgerald
. Didion's fiction is filled with psychologically wounded decadents, corrupted members of the rich middle class, and cracked-up elite from the movie industry. The rejection of the past, ravaging oppressiveness of material reality and an awareness of the ambiguous character of language, put her in a more postmodern strain.
In the Encino room the man in white duck pants who performs Maria's abortion watches a movie with Paula Raymond
. “Funny she never became a star,” he says later to Maria. Paula Raymond
started her career well in the fifties, but ended up playing in second-rate horror films and soap opera
s. In many respects, she’s Maria’s alter ego.
Rattlesnake
s appear several times in the book, mostly denoting personalized danger and threatening male predatoriness. As a child, Maria is made to read by her mother about “rattlesnake bite” from "American Red Cross Handbook." In an introductory monologue, Maria wonders why a coral snake
needs “two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive, while a king snake
, so similarly marked, needs none.” Snakes are part of the desert landscape, they “stretched on the warm asphalt” on the roads in Nevada, figure in Maria’s fantasies about car accidents, or give deadly bites to those venturing outside. Maria tells Carter a story about a man who wanted to talk to God
, later found dead, “bitten by a rattlesnake.” “[T]he rattlesnake in the playpen” and “on the plate” are also significant metaphors.
Noteworthy, negative connotations in world religions include snake as a Biblical tempter, an agent in ritual suicides, shrewd schemes, or the symbol of fertility and male sexuality - the phallus. In his writings for "The Philadelphia Journal", Benjamin Franklin
represents a female rattlesnake as a symbol of America
: “The poison of her teeth is the necessary means of digesting her food, and at the same time is certain destruction to her enemies.”
In the film version of the book, a Los Angeles
highway is shown from a panoramic view as a snake.
Hummingbird
Maria watches a hummingbird
in Neuropsychiatric. Possibly it is the symbol of real life and tangible empirical reality, as contrasted to superficial and empty life in Hollywood. Earlier in the novel, Maria feels that “glossy plants” in her agent’s reception office take away her oxygen. At a party at BZ’s one guest complains of being given an “artificial lemon.”
Eggs
Wyeth eats eggs while driving on the freeway. In a conversation with her agent, she asks him if he’s “playing with a Faberge
Easter egg.” Conventionally, they stand for fertility, if anything a mocking reminder of Maria’s abortion.
Freeway, Road Signs and Hypodermic Needles
One of a few truly postmodern bits in the book. Initially, Maria’s road obsession is contrasted with a defunct interpersonal communication (or lack of such) between the characters. Freeway is “a way of getting somewhere,” sedated rhythm of the ride is an escape, while nowhere is the only destination she craves.
In the desert, Maria has trouble following road signs. The gravity of the road doesn’t allow her the carefree motion madness of a freeway, though her travels are equally aimless. Didion’s beatnik
ian descriptions heavily influenced Bret Easton Ellis
, especially in his first book, Less Than Zero. Just as Maria is “trying not to notice the signs,” Ellis’s protagonists are reluctant to put any meaning on the surface of reality around them.
Games
Maria’s father is an addicted gambler. He loses a house in Reno
in a private wager, and puts money in uncertain business deals. He teaches Maria to assess her chances in the game of craps
which he compares to life. Despite the fact that he never wins, Maria claims to having inherited his optimism and, in the end, tenacity.
Maria often refers to herself as a “player” (but not an actress), mostly in the context of the roles that society imposes on her. BZ constantly accuses her of “playing,” and forces Helene to “play-or-pay,” though it is in the end his nihilistic attitude to life that brings him to suicide. Hollywood is a place where the thin line between truth and fiction blurs.
Dreams
After the abortion, Maria suffers from recurring nightmares and ghastly visions featuring dead fetuses, dying children, severed body parts and plumbing.
Air conditioners
They appear regularly, among others in the room in Encino where Maria undergoes abortion. May have to do with suffocating atmosphere of Wyeth’s environment. Carter is said to dislike air conditioners.
Whiteness
Maria dreams of driving “into the hard white empty core of the world,” then she falls into a sleepless dream. Before termination of her pregnancy, she sleeps between “immaculate” white sheets and wears “white crepe pajamas,” to ensure miscarriage. Her mind is like a “blank tape” merely recording impressions and experiences. One of the figures from her dreams is “a man in white duck pants” who was present during the abortion. Whiteness prefigures nothingness and obliteration of memory. It is also in accordance with the stylistic intention of the author to write “a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all....white space. Empty space...."
Insanity
/Madness
An aggressive madwoman in a queue at a Market attempts a conversation with Maria, accusing her of inattentiveness. After marrying Carter, she receives letters from “mad people.” Her daughter is having mental problems, and ultimately she herself is admitted to a neuropsychiatric ward. In Didion’s world normality and cause-effect solutions constitute conventions established by unspecified “them.”
Music
Maria’s mother croons to herself the lyrics of the hit single by Jo Stafford
, "You Belong to Me
". Maria replays in her head lines from 1969’s "Son of a Preacher Man
" by Dusty Springfield
and "Spinning Wheel" by Blood, Sweat & Tears
.
1970 in literature
The year 1970 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* Deliverance by American poet James Dickey published...
novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by the American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
writer Joan Didion
Joan Didion
Joan Didion is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation...
. Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. The book was made into a 1972 movie starring Tuesday Weld
Tuesday Weld
Tuesday Weld is an American actress.Weld began her acting career as a child, and progressed to more mature roles during the late 1950s. She won a Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Female Newcomer in 1960...
as Maria and Anthony Perkins
Anthony Perkins
Anthony Perkins was an American actor, best known for his Oscar-nominated role in Friendly Persuasion and as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho , and its three sequels.-Early life:...
as B.Z. Didion co-wrote the screenplay with her husband, John Gregory Dunne
John Gregory Dunne
John Gregory Dunne was an American novelist, screenwriter and literary critic.-Life:He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and was a younger brother of author Dominick Dunne. He suffered from a severe stutter and took up writing to express himself. Eventually he learned to speak normally by...
.
Plot summary
The novel begins with an internal monologue by the 31-year-old Maria Wyeth, followed by short reminiscences of her friend Helene, and ex-husband, film director Carter Lang. The further narration is conducted from a third-person perspective in eighty-four chapters of terse, controlled and highly visual prose typical for Didion.The protagonist, an unfulfilled actress, recounts her life while recovering from a mental breakdown in an exclusive Neuropsychiatric Institute. The reason for her confinement is purportedly having participated in the suicidal death of a befriended bisexual movie producer, BZ (an abbreviation for benzodiazepines, sedative drugs).
The “facts” from Wyeth’s childhood include being raised in the small town of Silver Wells, Nevada
Nevada
Nevada is a state in the western, mountain west, and southwestern regions of the United States. With an area of and a population of about 2.7 million, it is the 7th-largest and 35th-most populous state. Over two-thirds of Nevada's people live in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which contains its...
, to a gambling, careless father and a neurotic mother who used to “croon to herself” of chimeric yearnings. After graduating from a high school in Tonopah
Tonopah
Tonopah may refer to:* Tonopah, Arizona, United States* Tonopah, Nevada, United States* Tonopah Test Range, Nevada, United States* Monitor USS Nevada , renamed USS Tonopah in 1909....
, encouraged by her parents, she leaves for New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
to become an actress. In the Big Apple
Big Apple
"The Big Apple" is a nickname for New York City. It was first popularized in the 1920s by John J. Fitz Gerald, a sports writer for the New York Morning Telegraph...
, Maria works temporarily as a model and meets ex-boyfriend, Ivan Costello, as is later insinuated, a domineering psychological blackmailer who has no scruples using the money and the body of his acquiescent girlfriend.
During her stay in the city, Maria receives the news about the death of her mother, possibly a victim of a self-provoked car accident. Her father dies soon afterwards, leaving useless mineral rights to his business partner and friend, Benny Austin. Maria withdraws from acting and modeling to get over the shock of her mother’s death, splits up with Ivan, moving to Hollywood with the newly met Carter. We learn that she and Carter have a 4-year-old daughter Kate, undergoing mental and physical “treatment” for some “aberrant chemical in her brain.” Maria truly loves her daughter, as indicated by her tender descriptions of the child, frequent visits to the hospital, and a determination “to get her out.” She seems to be the only significant person in Wyeth’s life. The love for the girl obviously means more than her marriage to despotic Lang and affairs with men, including his Hollywood acquaintances, Les Goodwin and BZ.
In the course of the novel, Maria becomes pregnant, plausibly by Les, and is coerced by Carter to abort. The traumatic procedure leaves her mentally shattered and haunted by nightmares of dying children. Looking for oblivion, she plunges into her routine of compulsive driving on the roads and freeways of southern California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, wandering through motels and bars, drinking and chancing sexual encounters with second-rate actors and ex-lovers. She spends a night in jail for car theft and drug possession, after a one-night stand with a minor film star, Johnny Waters. Eventually she involves herself in a perverse love quadrangle with Carter, BZ and his wife Helene, abruptly ended when BZ overdoses on sedative barbiturates (specifically, Seconal) in Maria’s hotel bedroom. The book concludes with reclusive Maria planning a new life with Kate, resolved to “keep on playing,” despite her past.
The main character
Maria’s problem seems that, apart from her daughter, she lacks a purpose to her life. She admires strong personalities, including her father who “always had a lot of plans,” the unyielding female character she played in the film Angel Beach, or the resolute wife of an Italian industrialist from an article in VogueVogue (magazine)
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition by Condé Nast.-History:In 1892 Arthur Turnure founded Vogue as a weekly publication in the United States. When he died in 1909, Condé Montrose Nast picked up the magazine and slowly began...
magazine. She is submissive in relationships with men. Her agent calls it “a very self-destructive personality structure.”
Didion's heroine owes much to the modernist output of Lost Generation
Lost Generation
The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to...
wordsmiths, like Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
and F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
. Didion's fiction is filled with psychologically wounded decadents, corrupted members of the rich middle class, and cracked-up elite from the movie industry. The rejection of the past, ravaging oppressiveness of material reality and an awareness of the ambiguous character of language, put her in a more postmodern strain.
In the Encino room the man in white duck pants who performs Maria's abortion watches a movie with Paula Raymond
Paula Raymond
Paula Raymond was an American model and actress.In 1950, she was put under contract by MGM, where she played opposite such leading men as Cary Grant and Dick Powell...
. “Funny she never became a star,” he says later to Maria. Paula Raymond
Paula Raymond
Paula Raymond was an American model and actress.In 1950, she was put under contract by MGM, where she played opposite such leading men as Cary Grant and Dick Powell...
started her career well in the fifties, but ended up playing in second-rate horror films and soap opera
Soap opera
A soap opera, sometimes called "soap" for short, is an ongoing, episodic work of dramatic fiction presented in serial format on radio or as television programming. The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers, such as Procter & Gamble,...
s. In many respects, she’s Maria’s alter ego.
Symbols and motifs
SnakesRattlesnake
Rattlesnake
Rattlesnakes are a group of venomous snakes of the genera Crotalus and Sistrurus of the subfamily Crotalinae . There are 32 known species of rattlesnake, with between 65-70 subspecies, all native to the Americas, ranging from southern Alberta and southern British Columbia in Canada to Central...
s appear several times in the book, mostly denoting personalized danger and threatening male predatoriness. As a child, Maria is made to read by her mother about “rattlesnake bite” from "American Red Cross Handbook." In an introductory monologue, Maria wonders why a coral snake
Coral snake
The coral snakes are a large group of elapid snakes that can be subdivided into two distinct groups, Old World coral snakes and New World coral snakes...
needs “two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive, while a king snake
King Snake
King Snake is a fictional character who appears in books published by DC Comics universe, usually as an adversary of Tim Drake and Batman. Created by writer Chuck Dixon and artist Tom Lyle, King Snake first appeared in Robin #2...
, so similarly marked, needs none.” Snakes are part of the desert landscape, they “stretched on the warm asphalt” on the roads in Nevada, figure in Maria’s fantasies about car accidents, or give deadly bites to those venturing outside. Maria tells Carter a story about a man who wanted to talk to God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
, later found dead, “bitten by a rattlesnake.” “[T]he rattlesnake in the playpen” and “on the plate” are also significant metaphors.
Noteworthy, negative connotations in world religions include snake as a Biblical tempter, an agent in ritual suicides, shrewd schemes, or the symbol of fertility and male sexuality - the phallus. In his writings for "The Philadelphia Journal", Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
Dr. Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat...
represents a female rattlesnake as a symbol of America
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
: “The poison of her teeth is the necessary means of digesting her food, and at the same time is certain destruction to her enemies.”
In the film version of the book, a Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
highway is shown from a panoramic view as a snake.
Hummingbird
Maria watches a hummingbird
Hummingbird
Hummingbirds are birds that comprise the family Trochilidae. They are among the smallest of birds, most species measuring in the 7.5–13 cm range. Indeed, the smallest extant bird species is a hummingbird, the 5-cm Bee Hummingbird. They can hover in mid-air by rapidly flapping their wings...
in Neuropsychiatric. Possibly it is the symbol of real life and tangible empirical reality, as contrasted to superficial and empty life in Hollywood. Earlier in the novel, Maria feels that “glossy plants” in her agent’s reception office take away her oxygen. At a party at BZ’s one guest complains of being given an “artificial lemon.”
Eggs
Wyeth eats eggs while driving on the freeway. In a conversation with her agent, she asks him if he’s “playing with a Faberge
Fabergé
Fabergé may refer to:*House of Fabergé, a Russian jewelry firm founded by Gustav Faberge in 1842*Fabergé workmaster, goldsmiths who produced jewelry for the House of Fabergé*Fabergé eggs, the most famous works of the House of Faberge...
Easter egg.” Conventionally, they stand for fertility, if anything a mocking reminder of Maria’s abortion.
Freeway, Road Signs and Hypodermic Needles
One of a few truly postmodern bits in the book. Initially, Maria’s road obsession is contrasted with a defunct interpersonal communication (or lack of such) between the characters. Freeway is “a way of getting somewhere,” sedated rhythm of the ride is an escape, while nowhere is the only destination she craves.
In the desert, Maria has trouble following road signs. The gravity of the road doesn’t allow her the carefree motion madness of a freeway, though her travels are equally aimless. Didion’s beatnik
Beatnik
Beatnik was a media stereotype of the 1950s and early 1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s and violent film images, along with a cartoonish depiction of the real-life people and the spiritual quest in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical...
ian descriptions heavily influenced Bret Easton Ellis
Bret Easton Ellis
Bret Easton Ellis is an American novelist and short story writer. His works have been translated into 27 different languages. He was regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack, which also included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney...
, especially in his first book, Less Than Zero. Just as Maria is “trying not to notice the signs,” Ellis’s protagonists are reluctant to put any meaning on the surface of reality around them.
Games
Maria’s father is an addicted gambler. He loses a house in Reno
Reno, Nevada
Reno is the county seat of Washoe County, Nevada, United States. The city has a population of about 220,500 and is the most populous Nevada city outside of the Las Vegas metropolitan area...
in a private wager, and puts money in uncertain business deals. He teaches Maria to assess her chances in the game of craps
Craps
Craps is a dice game in which players place wagers on the outcome of the roll, or a series of rolls, of a pair of dice. Players may wager money against each other or a bank...
which he compares to life. Despite the fact that he never wins, Maria claims to having inherited his optimism and, in the end, tenacity.
Maria often refers to herself as a “player” (but not an actress), mostly in the context of the roles that society imposes on her. BZ constantly accuses her of “playing,” and forces Helene to “play-or-pay,” though it is in the end his nihilistic attitude to life that brings him to suicide. Hollywood is a place where the thin line between truth and fiction blurs.
Dreams
After the abortion, Maria suffers from recurring nightmares and ghastly visions featuring dead fetuses, dying children, severed body parts and plumbing.
Air conditioners
They appear regularly, among others in the room in Encino where Maria undergoes abortion. May have to do with suffocating atmosphere of Wyeth’s environment. Carter is said to dislike air conditioners.
Whiteness
Maria dreams of driving “into the hard white empty core of the world,” then she falls into a sleepless dream. Before termination of her pregnancy, she sleeps between “immaculate” white sheets and wears “white crepe pajamas,” to ensure miscarriage. Her mind is like a “blank tape” merely recording impressions and experiences. One of the figures from her dreams is “a man in white duck pants” who was present during the abortion. Whiteness prefigures nothingness and obliteration of memory. It is also in accordance with the stylistic intention of the author to write “a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all....white space. Empty space...."
Insanity
Insanity
Insanity, craziness or madness is a spectrum of behaviors characterized by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns. Insanity may manifest as violations of societal norms, including becoming a danger to themselves and others, though not all such acts are considered insanity...
/Madness
Insanity
Insanity, craziness or madness is a spectrum of behaviors characterized by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns. Insanity may manifest as violations of societal norms, including becoming a danger to themselves and others, though not all such acts are considered insanity...
An aggressive madwoman in a queue at a Market attempts a conversation with Maria, accusing her of inattentiveness. After marrying Carter, she receives letters from “mad people.” Her daughter is having mental problems, and ultimately she herself is admitted to a neuropsychiatric ward. In Didion’s world normality and cause-effect solutions constitute conventions established by unspecified “them.”
Music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
Maria’s mother croons to herself the lyrics of the hit single by Jo Stafford
Jo Stafford
Jo Elizabeth Stafford was an American singer of traditional pop music and jazz standards and occasional actress whose career ran from the late 1930s to the early 1960s...
, "You Belong to Me
You Belong to Me (1952 song)
"You Belong to Me" is a pop music ballad from the 1950s. The singer reminds his/her lover that, whatever exotic locales and sights he/she experiences, "you belong to me." It is credited to three writers: Pee Wee King, Chilton Price, and Redd Stewart...
". Maria replays in her head lines from 1969’s "Son of a Preacher Man
Son of a Preacher Man
"Son of a Preacher Man" is a song recorded by Dusty Springfield in September 1968 and featured on the album, Dusty in Memphis. It was written by John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins. The rights to cover "Son of a Preacher Man" were originally offered to Aretha Franklin, who turned it down...
" by Dusty Springfield
Dusty Springfield
Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'BrienSources use both Isabel and Isobel as the spelling of her second name. OBE , known professionally as Dusty Springfield and dubbed The White Queen of Soul, was a British pop singer whose career extended from the late 1950s to the 1990s...
and "Spinning Wheel" by Blood, Sweat & Tears
Blood, Sweat & Tears
Blood, Sweat & Tears is an American music group, originally formed in 1967 in New York City. Since its beginnings in 1967, the band has gone through numerous iterations with varying personnel and has encompassed a multitude of musical styles...
.