ARMOND WHITE: Review: The Day of the Locust — a Prophecy of Hollywood’s Conflagration.

Today’s burning of Los Angeles has been met without a sense of fatalism. (At least Public Enemy’s jocular 1990 rap — “Burn, Hollywood, Burn!” — parodied the disingenuous civil rights movie Mississippi Burning.) Contemporary Hollywood progressives believe that “climate change” explains and excuses everything, so there’s never a need for political remorse. This attitude reflects and degrades West’s vision. The climax of Schlesinger’s film depicts a Hollywood red-carpet, klieg-light movie premiere that turns apocalyptic. It looks like a prediction of Millennial self-sacrifice — a Left Coast version of J6-style as if deliberately manufactured by TMZ, the tabloid TV show that dabbles in performative political commentary.

[Nathanael] West’s hellfire-and-locust symbolism parodied biblical judgment, but such shame no longer applies to current secular permissiveness or the progressive ideology in Marxist writer Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1990), famous for its subversive condemnation of Los Angeles’s capitalist elitism. Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust doesn’t do justice to West’s paranoia, yet its remoteness captures the liberal Hollywood apathy that no longer identifies with American domesticity and sees its own working class as existing merely to perpetuate ruling-class superiority. Schlesinger’s joke about the doomed, obsolete 13-letter Hollywoodland sign hints at the self-hatred that now pervades the Anglosphere and suggests that the immolation starts from the inside.

Come for the leftist self-hatred, stay for Donald Sutherland as – and I’m not joking – Homer Simpson!