Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays

Play It As It Lays: Life Unscripted (DRAFT)
Maria Wyeth is an actress, a beaut, a dimming star, a schizophrenic, and beyond that a untraditional loving mother to Kate, her daughter. The way Joan Didion writes “Play It As It Lays” in satirical way upon Hollywood lifestyle is tantalizing the mind to think that Hollywood is full of people who have problems of drinking, drug abuse, and sex. Which is undeniable happening in the most era of Hollywood lifestyle since the day one. Fame, success and pouring fortune are hard to handle for, practically anyone who deals with the hazardous lifestyle of Hollywood. Human relationship is not weigh into the equation, includes the marriage that is usually ruined in the lifestyle, if not meant to be doomed.
Her life reflects herself as a dimming star replaced by the younger stars is inevitable. She worries about her physical look as her only asset in the entertainment business and the life after fame is not the life expected. She is not fond of being called old, Carter confronts Maria just find out if Maria still feels by calling her old and “menopausal depression”. (Didion, Play It As It Lays 196). This confrontation proves that in the skepticism about people in Maria’s life barely to feel if not pushed to the extent of extreme probing of one’s sensitive matters. Hedonism, a pleasure seeking is a phantasmagoria of identity destruction for the meaning of life, in its stereotype, as a common symptom of celebrity’s lifestyle. One never owns what one really needs in life by living an imaginary
“That should be the sound of music to you … don’t scream, Maria, there are people next door, almost done, almost over, better to get it all now than do it again a month from now … I said don’t make any noise, Maria, now I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, you’ll bleed a day or so, not heavily, just spotting, and then a month, six weeks from now you’ll have a normal period, not this month, this month you just had it,” (Didion, Play It As It Lay 83)
Maria is and always be a sexual object as much as she is portrayed in a character of her movies. Maria’s sexual role is not much different than Ruth, the character of “Green Girl” by Kate Zambreno. Zambreno compares Maria and Ruth as two persons in one essence. They both are viewed as sexual commodity, while Ruth works as a shopgirl who sells “Desire” perfume and Maria, an actress who is sexually characterized in her movies. They are the sexualized women in their life, at work and in person. (Gay, Garish, Glorious Spectacles