History Literature / TheDayOfTheLocust

* DepravedDwarf: Played with in the case of Abe Kusich. He's not malicious per se, just ill-tempered, drunken, and often prone to either fits of violence (despite his diminutive stature) or to making sexual advances at women who obviously what nothing to do with him.

Tod lives upstairs from aspiring actress Faye Greener, who has the good looks for stardom but lacks the talent to even be reliably cast as an extra; Tod falls for her, but her shallow GoldDigger attitude toward romantic relationships leaves her unable to reciprocate, and his love turns to a dark obsession. Her father, Harry, is a washed-up former vaudeville clown in declining health who works as a door-to-door salesman, mostly as an outlet to keep performing in front of a captive audience. Tod's other acquaintances include the acerbic screenwriter Claude Estee, his only connection to the more glamorous side of the industry; "Honest" Abe Kusich, a little person bookmaker; Earle Shoop, a dimwitted cowboy and occasional bit part actor in Westerns; Miguel, a Mexican friend of Earle's who trains fighting cockerels; sexually repressed accountant Homer Simpson, who's come out to Los Angeles from Iowa at his doctor's advice; and androgynous EnfantTerrible Adore Loomis, whose mother is hell-bent on making him a child star but who is himself hell-bent on raising hell.

* AgeInappropriateArt: Adore Loomis is about eight years old, and yet when he first appears in Chapter 19, he performs the raunchy song "Mama Don' Wan' No Peas an' Rice an' Cocoanut Oil", complete with suggestive dance moves. In the film, he also draws an outline of lips with his mother's lipstick on Tod's back window, then knocks on the glass and does a grotesque parody of Creator/MaeWest's signature line (or, rather, the BeamMeUpScotty version) from ''Film/SheDoneHimWrong'', "Why don't you come up and see me sometime?", before blowing a raspberry and running off. The movie adds AgeInappropriateDress, as Jackie Earle Haley is obviously entering puberty and yet [[NotAllowedToGrowUp is still dressed in a little boy's "Buster Brown" suit]] with rather too-tight, too-short shorts, wearing his hair in childish blond curls.

Tod lives upstairs from aspiring actress Faye Greener, who has the good looks for stardom but lacks the talent to even be reliably cast as an extra; Tod falls for her, but her shallow GoldDigger attitude toward romantic relationships leaves her unable to reciprocate, and his love turns to a dark obsession. Her father, Harry, is a washed-up former vaudeville clown in declining health who works as a door-to-door salesman, mostly as an outlet to keep performing in front of a captive audience. Tod's other acquaintances include the acerbic screenwriter Claude Estee, his only connection to the more glamorous side of the industry; "Honest" Abe Kusich, a little person bookmaker; Earle Shoop, a dimwitted cowboy and occasional bit part actor in Westerns; Miguel, a Mexican friend of Earle's who trains fighting cockerels; sexually repressed accountant Homer Simpson, who has come out to Los Angeles from Iowa at his doctor's advice; and androgynous EnfantTerrible Adore Loomis, whose mother is hell-bent on making him a child star but who is himself hell-bent on raising hell.

In 1975 the novel was [[TheFilmOfTheBook adapted into a film]] that re-united the creative team of ''Film/MidnightCowboy'': producer Jerome Hellman, director Creator/JohnSchlesinger, screenwriter Waldo Salt and composer Music/JohnBarry. Its cast includes Creator/WilliamAtherton as Tod Hackett, Creator/KarenBlack as Faye Greener, Creator/BurgessMeredith as Harry Greener, Creator/DonaldSutherland as Homer Simpson, Creator/BillyBarty as Abe Kusich, Creator/RichardDysart as Claude Estee, and a young Creator/JackieEarleHaley as Adore Loomis.

In 1975 the novel was [[TheFilmOfTheBook adapted into a film]] that re-united the creative team of ''Film/MidnightCowboy'': producer Jerome Hellman, director Creator/JohnSchlesinger, screenwriter Waldo Salt and composer Music/JohnBarry. Its cast includes Creator/WilliamAtherton as Tod Hackett, Creator/KarenBlack as Faye Greener, Creator/BurgessMeredith as Harry Greener, Creator/DonaldSutherland as Homer Simpson, Creator/BillyBarty as Abe Kusich, Creator/RichardDysart as Claude Estee, and a teenage Creator/JackieEarleHaley as Adore Loomis.

** The book's title is a dual reference to Literature/TheBible, alluding to both the plague of locusts called down on Egypt by Moses in Exodus, and the description of the coming apocalypse in the New Testament. The film played up the latter connection with the tagline "The Day of the Locust is coming!" on early posters.

* WordSaladHorror: Tod finds Homer curled up in a fetal position in his garden muttering incoherent gibberish after Faye leaves him. Tod remarks that only the rhythm and phrasing of Homer's ramblings resembled speech, the content was utterly meaningless to anyone except perhaps Homer.

* WhileRomeBurns: In the film version, the characters remain cheerfully indifferent to the brewing tensions in Europe. When Faye discovers that her part in ''Ali Baba Goes to Town'' has largely ended up on the cutting room floor, she, Earle, and Tod leave the theatre, uninterested in the newsreel reporting a military buildup in Germany and broadcasting a speech by UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler. Later on, when Tod and Faye go to Earle and Miguel's campsite, they eat quail roasted over an open fire out of unread newspapers reporting on the doomed four-nation Munich Agreement (i.e., the UsefulNotes/NevilleChamberlain "peace in our time" pact, which the Nazis barely even pretended to honor).

* WhileRomeBurns: In the film version, the characters remain cheerfully indifferent to the brewing tensions in Europe. When Faye discovers that her part in ''Ali Baba Goes to Town'' has largely ended up on the cutting room floor, she, Earle, and Tod leave the theatre, uninterested in the newsreel reporting a military buildup in Germany and broadcasting a speech by UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler. Later on, when Tod and Faye go to Earle and Miguel's campsite, they eat quail roasted over an open fire out of newspapers reporting the doomed four-nation Munich Agreement (AKA the UsefulNotes/NevilleChamberlain "peace in our time" pact, which the Nazis barely even pretended to honor) which they can't be bothered to read.

* WhileRomeBurns: In the film version, the characters remain cheerfully indifferent to the brewing tensions in Europe. When Faye discovers that her part in ''Ali Baba Goes to Town'' has largely ended up on the cutting room floor, she, Earle, and Tod leave the theatre, uninterested in the newsreel reporting a military buildup in Germany and broadcasting a speech by UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler. When Tod and Faye go to Earle and Miguel's campsite, they eat quail roasted over an open fire out of newspapers reporting the doomed four-nation Munich Agreement (AKA the UsefulNotes/NevilleChamberlain "peace in our time" pact, which the Nazis barely even pretended to honor) which they can't be bothered to read.

* WhileRomeBurns: In the film version, the characters remain cheerfully indifferent to the brewing tensions in Europe. When Faye discovers that her part in ''Ali Baba Goes to Town'' has largely ended up on the cutting room floor, she, Earle, and Tod leave the theatre, uninterested in the newsreel reporting a military buildup in Germany and broadcasting a speech by UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler. When Tod and Faye go to Earle and Miguel's campsite, they eat quail roasted over an open fire out of newspapers reporting the doomed four-nation Munich Agreement (AKA the "peace in our time" pact which the Nazis barely even pretended to honour) which they can't be bothered to read.

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** Creator/DonaldSutherland gets top billing, even though his character doesn't appear until 45 minutes into the movie and gets less screen time than either Creator/WilliamAtherton or Creator/KarenBlack.

* AmbiguousDisorder: Homer has no social skills and exhibits a variety of strange, obsessive tics.

''The Day of the Locust'' is a satirical 1939 novel by Nathanael West that tells a story of HorribleHollywood as seen through the eyes of Tod Hackett, a graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts who has come to Los Angeles to work as a scenery painter while creating an ambitious painting entitled ''The Burning of Los Angeles'' in his spare time.

* AgeInappropriateArt: Adore Loomis is about eight years old, and yet when he first appears in Chapter 19, he performs the raunchy song "Mama Don' Wan' No Peas an' Rice an' Cocoanut Oil", complete with suggestive dance moves. In the film, he also draws an outline of lips with his mother's lipstick on Tod's back window, then knocks on the glass and does a grotesque parody of Creator/MaeWest's signature line (or, rather, the BeamMeUpScotty version) from ''Film/SheDoneHimWrong'', "Why don't you come up and see me sometime?", before blowing a raspberry and running off. The movie adds AgeInappropriateDress, as Jackie Earle Haley is obviously entering puberty and yet [[NotAllowedToGrowUp is still dressed in a little boy's "Buster Brown" suit]] with rather ill-fitting shorts, wearing his hair in childish blond curls.

* {{Bizarrchitecture}}: In Chapter 1, Tod regards the design of the typical Los Angeles building as an example of this. The houses in his neighbourhood (including his apartment building, the San Bernardino Arms) are a chaotic mishmash of imitations of Alpine, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, English Tudor, and rural Irish designs (with some houses, especially Homer's as described in Chapter 7, trying to fuse two or more of these styles), all built on the cheap with such materials as paper, plaster, and lath, creating an effect so grotesque that, as far as Tod is concerned, the only way to solve the visual problems they offer is to burn them all down and start over.

** The film premiering in the book's final chapter is unnamed. In the film, the premiere is for Creator/CecilBDeMille's 1938 epic ''The Buccaneer'', and many of the film's actual cast members, including Creator/FredricMarch, Creator/AnthonyQuinn, Walter Brennan, Douglas Dumbrille, and Beulah Bondi, are mentioned as being present for the premiere, as are Nelson Eddy, Jeanette [=MacDonald=], Creator/GingerRogers, Merle Oberon, and Creator/DickPowell.[[note]] The only one of these to "appear" on screen is Dick Powell, played by his own son, Dick Powell Jr., as Powell Sr. had died in 1963. When the sequence was filmed, Dumbrille, Eddy, and [=MacDonald=] were also dead, March and Brennan were terminally ill and would be dead within a year, Oberon and Rogers had retired from screen work, and while Quinn and Bondi were still active, they looked nothing like they did in 1938.[[/note]]

* PowderKegCrowd: Tod observes that the crowd that has assembled outside the film premiere in Chapter 27 comprises mostly people who have been left bitter and disillusioned at life in Los Angeles, who worked unfulfilling jobs to save up and move to California to live lives of leisure, only to become bored with what the city has to offer and find outlets through violence. When they see [[spoiler:Homer stomping Adore to death, their anger and boredom boils over and they abandon the film premiere to exact mob justice against him before turning to more wide scale violence, including smashing windows, overturning and burning cars, and attacking innocent bystanders]].

Tod lives upstairs from aspiring actress Faye Greener, who has the good looks for stardom but lacks the talent to even be reliably cast as an extra; Tod falls for her, but her shallow GoldDigger attitude toward romantic relationships leaves her unable to reciprocate, and his love turns to a dark obsession. Her father, Harry, is a washed-up former vaudeville clown in declining health who works as a door-to-door salesman, mostly as an outlet to keep performing in front of a captive audience. Tod's other acquaintances include the acerbic screenwriter Claude Estee, his only connection to the more glamorous side of the industry; "Honest" Abe Kusich, a little person bookmaker; Earle Shoop, a dimwitted cowboy and occasional bit part actor in Westerns; Miguel, a Mexican friend of Earle's who trains fighting cockerels; sexually repressed accountant Homer Simpson, who has come to Los Angeles from Iowa at his doctor's advice; and androgynous EnfantTerrible Adore Loomis, whose mother is hell-bent on making him a child star but who is himself hell-bent on raising hell.

In 1975 the novel was [[TheFilmOfTheBook adapted into a film]] that re-united the creative team of ''Film/MidnightCowboy'': producer Jerome Hellman, director Creator/JohnSchlesinger, screenwriter Waldo Salt and composer Music/JohnBarry. Its cast includes Creator/WilliamAtherton as Tod Hackett, Creator/KarenBlack as Faye Greener, Creator/BurgessMeredith as Harry Greener, Creator/DonaldSutherland as Homer Simpson, Creator/BillyBarty as Abe Kusich, and a teenage Creator/JackieEarleHaley as Adore Loomis.