If we were to make a list of films by established directors that do not seek to engage the audience by means of noble or even acceptable sentiments, films that use grotesque imagery and situations, tend to abrasive and violent scenes, deal in paradox and extreme satire, and evince a philosophical concern with evil, the list would not be long. Eric Von Stroheim's Greed (1924), Tod Browning's Freaks (1932), and John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust (1975) are three well-known films that fit this description, but they are so different from one another that we cannot characterize them as belonging to any particular school of thought or tradition. All we can say is that none of these films gives us an easy, or easily classifiable, viewing experience, yet each has proven to be of lasting interest. Schlesinger's film— my subject here— is taught in film schools today.

The following pages attempt to do justice to the vexing moral demands Locust makes on the viewer. Up to the present, the most common approach to the film has been to point out where it fails to please the audience, rather than to consider that audience pleasure is precisely what Schlesinger has in mind to expose— which is to say, deconstruct. Locust continually confronts the viewer with images that are both grotesque and elegant and with characters that are as abhorrent as they are touching. It is not a conventionally “viewer-friendly” film, any more than the work of fiction upon which it is based— Nathanael West's acclaimed novel of 1933— is a conventionally “reader-friendly” novel. Schlesinger read the novel in 1967, two years before coming to Los Angeles for work on Midnight Cowboy, and greatly admired the writing. Then, after moving to Hollywood himself, he was struck by the enduring truth of West's vision. He devoted six years to bringing the film to the screen and did not expect it to appeal to audiences. “I knew it was going to be controversial, but I was very proud of it— and still am, incidentally,” he said in an interview in 1978, “I felt that we had […] [an] extraordinary film which by no means was going to be popular” (qtd. in Riley 1978, 113).