It’s only natural, then, that she’d force Adore to perform for the pleasure of two strange men, Tod and Homer.
His shoulders twitched as though they already felt the strap. He tilted his straw sailor over one eye, buttoned up his jacket and did a little strut, then began:
"Mama doan wan’ no peas
An’ rice, an’ cocoanut oil,
Just a bottle of brandy handy all the day.
Mama doan wan’ no peas,
Mama doan wan’ no cocoanut oil.”
His singing voice was deep and rough and he used the broken groan of the blues singer quite expertly. He moved his body only a little, against rather than in time with the music. The gestures he made with his hands were extremely suggestive.
“Mama doan wan’t no gin,
Because gin do make her sin,
Mama doan wan’ no glass of gin,
Because it boun’ to make her sin,
An’ keep her hot and bothered all the day.”
He seemed to know what the words meant, or at least his body and his voice seemed to know. When he came to the final chorus, his buttocks writhed and his voice carried a top-heavy load of sexual pain.
I don’t think this passage needs a long explanation. If there’s one thing Nathanael West nailed in The Day of the Locust, it was a young, nubile Britney Spears.
Other examples: Milla Jovovich started modelling at age nine, with support from her manager-mother. Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff were made into sex symbols before they were sixteen. Venus Williams started playing tennis at age four and was coached by her father. Michael Jackson.
The Destroyers
Hitchcock referred to them as the “moron masses”. They were the ones who went to his films; the ones he manipulated.
In The Day of the Locust, they are the ones who pay to watch Adore sing and dance, who attend the “Church of the Christ, Physical”, and who cheer and stomp their feet at the firebrand speaker.
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