The Two Sides of Maria

*Spoilers lounge in this post like drugged out starlets in a producer’s Hollywood home: read on at your own peril*

Maria, the protagonist of Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It as It Lays, starred in two films directed by her husband Carter Lang early in their relationship.  The first was an artistic film called Maria, never released, though it “won a prize at a festival in Eastern Europe.”  It consists of documentary-like footage of Maria going through her days.  The second film was a commercially released film called Angel Beach, about a girl, played by Maria, who is raped by a motorcycle gang.  At the end of it, the girl is a survivor, “strolling across a campus.”  Maria dislikes the first film and is uncomfortable sitting through viewings of it.  She doesn’t like being the subject of all the gazes and thoughts of the (predominantly male) audience.  But as for the second film, “she liked watching the picture: the girl on the screen seemed to have a definite knack for controlling her own destiny.”

It is not, I believe, mere chance that led Didion to make these two movies central to Maria’s acting career, for they act as the two narrative poles in Play It as It Lays.  The novel consists of dozens of short chapters that play out as individual vignettes through which we follow Maria’s emotional journey from her splitting with Carter to BZ’s suicide.  In the structure, and in third person narration, we are treated to something resembling Maria, the film.  We are forced to experience her exchanges with the people in her life from the outside, kept at a cool distance by the under-emotional narrator.  We are seldom allowed into Maria’s thoughts.  As Maria herself dislikes the first film, so I have some difficulty with this aspect of the novel.  Didion writes with beauty and power, but the long suffering of Maria threatens to cross over from interesting and moving to trying and unsympathetic.  And like Carter’s film, Didion’s novel threatens to become overly artsy at these moments.  What keeps the novel from becoming an empty and pretentious piece is Didion’s integration of a strong character and plot, elements found in Maria’s second film, Angel Beach.

Like the character she played in that film, Maria is a survivor.  In her own words, she is a player, and we see this Maria most clearly in the opening and ending of the novel.  Although the novel is primarily narrated in the third person, the novel begins with a chapter in Maria’s voice.  In that chapter, the longest in the book, we see Maria’s intellect, insight, and strength.  She is a wary and wounded soul, but there is something fierce and touching as well.  It is easy to forget this strong character as the novel wears on and we, even as we follow her closely, are kept at an arm’s length.  But as the novel nears its conclusion, we once again get a smattering of chapters written in first person, and we see Maria’s character contrasted with BZ.  Carter and Helene have been impatient with and dismissive of Maria throughout the novel, seeing her as acting out of a desire for attention and faking her symptoms.  She is considered weak and uncontrollable, a danger to Carter’s career.  Moreover, her faults seem particularly tied to her gender—her weeping and semi-hysterical behavior.  So it surprising when BZ, whom we knew would die but knew not how, is the one who swallows a handful of pills to slip into the darkness.  The signs have been there, of course, when we look back, but he had none of what came across as the histrionics that Maria displays.  In BZ’s suicide, Didion makes it clear that Maria is neither alone nor weak.  We are reminded of the determined Maria of the opening chapter, and as she lies in the bed with BZ holding his hand and comforting him on his last journey, we are also reminded of the thing that keeps Maria going in spite of her difficulties: Kate.  With BZ, Maria is comforting, understanding, and maternal.

By bringing together the two narrative styles of Maria and Angel Beach in Play It as It Lays, Didion creates a strong and moving tale.  It is both beautifully written and delicately plotted.  Generally, I’m not a fan of books and films about people who feel dead inside because they tend to be pretentious and sacrifice character to the atmosphere of ennui.  Didion’s novel works precisely because character and plot are always central to the novel, even as it explores the dark absence at the center of Maria’s existence.