Maria in 'Play it as it Lays'

Maria is an actress, immersed in the cold, rash, hard reality of the Hollywood film industry. She has not exactly “made it,” and therefore has had to suffer the consequences of being in the Hollywood industry without its rewards. Out of her years of living the debauched model-actress life, fraught with drugs, sex and lies, she herself is psychotic.

We can infer that her current state is a direct affect of her occupation as an actress—always to please others and take direction from others. Up against the competition of beautiful Hollywood sex symbols, she has no self-esteem and is constantly cognizant of whether or not she is pleasing her audience or the men in her life, and as a result is self-loathing. And because she is so self-loathing, she no longer cares about her life. She has no sense of control, and she definitely does not feel like she controls her own destiny. From the abortion to the drugs, the eating disorder, she really approaches all of these situations with a hard, no-feeling attitude.

Through her psychosis, it is apparent that, contrary to what I just said, she is feeling. Perhaps too feeling. And because she is so feeling, but also because she is controlled by all of Hollywood's men, she feels like she has to let everything go. And though she tries to let everything go, because she thinks that's how she's supposed to live, she cannot because she is so emotional and sentimental. She knows that dichotomy; she goes crazy.

Women like Helene don't know their own predicament. While she is overemotional, just like Maria, she doesn't recognize any control factor. Maria ponders of control. She wants it, but she thinks she cannot have it. She thinks that control belongs only to the men. Men who use her up and dump her to the side. Carter. The doctor. And her lover--I forget his name. But Helene on the other hand doesn't even think about control. She accepts herself as a shallow girl in the shadow of her gay husband, BZ. In general, the women-industry-effect theme, in Didion's novel, can be summed up as such: "Actually, how emotional they get over the shallow ‘shit’ can obviously be linked back to painful experience in the industry or hanging around the industry & being used."

While reading, I made some quick notes.

• Maria feels out-of-touch, out-of-control. She recognizes control, but she is incapable of exercising it, because she feels that's how it has to be. And because it's 'how it has to be,' she leads this dirty lifestyle that she obviously hates. And that makes her feel like a dirty whore. She's always showering and putting on new sheets.
• For the women who know about control, for the women who yearn to drive their own life, there is a sense of loneliness. Yet a deathly fear of loneliness. They want to isolate from the rest of that dirty world, but they know they're not supposed to. It's not within their control.
• Oh yeah. Back to Maria's crazy obsession with being clean. Just to emphasize how dirty the rest of Hollywood is, when she's at the salon, this girl talks about cleaning out her tubes, because she has a pelvic abscess. First of all, abscesses are sick. And secondly, obviously she had some infection that was sexually transmitted. It was in her pelvis!

Last comments. Maria reminds me of Britney Spears. Downward spiral, miss.