Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 50
the frontier comers. The octopus image is a central part of the
California myth. Joan Didion’s Maria in Play it as it Lays spends
her days driving the freeways: to the end and back, to another end
and back to another end of the octopus tentacles. Think of the
distant places Hollywood has reached.
Steinbeck has created a large part of the California landscape
in our minds. It is a male landscape. His stories are told by males
to males. Few of the questions a woman might ask are answered.
Robinson Jeffers, writing in nearby Carmel, is a useful antidote to
Steinbeck. Jeffers’ landscape is not maternal, his women are no
more objects than his men are.
W hen I taught Nabokov’s Lolita this fall I had trouble con
vincing my class Nabokov didn’t invent (and enjoy) nymphets.
Only when I passed around copies of LA Style magazine— with its
underaged females, its women surrounded by leather motifs, their
shoes being kissed by subservient males, the women being de
voured males—did I convince them that Nabakov found Lolita in
our California-formed culture. He did not invent Lolita; he found
her, and her home is in California, where aging and death are kicked
out o f paradise. Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One is the sharpest
satire yet on the denial of death that California has taught us.
California has given us the knowing illusion, by which we live.
Where would we be if we didn’t have the illusion of California
to live in? Douglas Fairbanks made suntans chic to hide his Jewishlooking complexion. Ronald Reagan mairied Jane Wyman in
Forest Lawn Memorial Park. For $119, you could buy a bondage
starter kit in Anaheim in 1983. The real-life model for Gidget was
a Jewish girl who now likes to make matzo-ball soup. A widow left
$7 million to care for the needy in Marin County, but they have not
been able to End any. One-fifth of all American bank robberies
occur in Los Angeles branch banks because o f the easy access to the
octopus o f freeways for escape. “High School Honor Student by
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