51 pages • 1 hour read
Joan DidionPlay It As It Lays
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1970A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Nihilism
Maria Wyeth lives by the principle “nothing applies.” The phrase encapsulates the philosophy of existential nihilism, the belief that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. Maria is frustrated by her doctors’ insistence that she make meaning out of past events because she does not believe they matter.
Maria’s nihilism is epistemological as well as existential, meaning that she cannot say for certain whether a fact or event is true or not. This idea often arises when Maria thinks about her past: “I have trouble with as it was” she says (6), to indicate that she, her parents, and Benny all remember the past differently. The phrase “as it was,” is always italicized, signifying that it is an idea or impression about the past, rather than the past itself, which is unrecoverable. Maria tells Benny “there is no Silver Wells” because the town was reclaimed as a missile testing range after her parents had passed away (8). If no one can agree upon an objective record of the past, and if things that existed in the past no longer exist, the effort to draw meaning from them is futile.
Although Maria abides by nihilism most of the time, key moments reveal her breaks with this belief system. Maria reads an article about a man who was found dead after telling his wife he was going for a walk to talk to God. Maria asks Carter: “Do you think he talked to God? [...] Do you think God answered?” (204). A textbook nihilist would deny the existence of God, but Maria’s questions reveal that her nihilism may not be as unshakeable as she believes it to be.
Existential nihilism posits that if actions and events have no meaning, they cannot have moral consequences. Maria also has a moral compass, whereas a textbook nihilist does not. Maria believes in something like karma: “All along she had expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would crash if she boarded them in bad spirit […] Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal” (72-73). Again, Maria’s belief in “punishments” suggests a belief in God or some other force that judges human activity.
Drug and Alcohol Abuse
All the characters use both prescription and nonprescription drugs and alcohol as a form of escape. The people around Maria do not take her physical or emotional pain seriously; whether she is speaking with a doctor, her friends, or Carter, Maria finds that others dismiss her attempts at connection. The feeling of relief and well-being they gain from self-medicating substitutes (poorly) for meaningful connection.
Doctors prescribe drugs whenever Maria comes to them with a concern. For instance, the doctor Maria who sees after her abortion tells her, “It’s nothing, […] You’re just menstruating early, I’ll give you some Edrisal” (90). (Edrisal is a highly addictive amphetamine.) When it is ineffective for her physical ailment, she uses it to medicate her emotional one: “The Edrisal did not work and neither did some Darvon she found in the bathroom and she slept that night with a gin bottle by her bed” (90). Shortly after the abortion, Maria begins shooting a new film, but her bleeding and pain have not subsided. Instead of going to the hospital, she takes Dexedrine, a stimulant used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Maria frequently takes Seconal, a barbiturate, to sleep; BZ takes the same drug to commit suicide.
Maria does not want to rely on medication to dull her emotional pain. After her car accident, when she discovers that her doctor will not renew her barbiturate prescriptions, the narrator notes that “in a way she was relieved” (138-139). Later, when Helene offers Maria Darvon for a headache, Maria refuses it. After the incident in which BZ slaps Helene, Maria takes three aspirin; earlier in the narrative, she would have taken a much stronger drug.
The final demonstration of Maria’s desire to live without relying on drugs comes when BZ is about to commit suicide. He pours a bottle of Seconal capsules on the bed and asks Maria if she wants some, but she says no. It is not clear if Maria receives medication in the Neuropsychiatric ward in which she resides or if she experienced withdrawal symptoms from her heavy drug and alcohol use. It is perhaps an ironic commentary on Los Angeles in 1970 that the psychiatric ward is the only place Maria does not have access to drugs.
Life as a Gamble
Games and gambling represent the risks one must take in order to live. The metaphor comes from Maria’s father, who played craps. Craps is a game of chance in which players roll dice and bet on the outcome. Unlike in poker, which is a game of skill, craps players cannot influence the outcome of the game.
It is significant to Maria’s story that her father taught her craps rather than another game. Maria’s ability to see the field carries over into her ability to assess the dynamics of the society in which she lives. As with craps, she knows that even if she can see the field, she cannot determine the outcome of the game.
Gambling metaphors frequently arise when Maria thinks about her family. As a child, Maria learned that her life circumstances could change based on a dice roll, because her father lost their first home in a gambling bet. At the end of the novel, Maria says: “I remain Harry and Francine Wyeth’s daughter and Benny Austin’s godchild. […] You call it as you see it, and stay in the action” (210). The lesson she learned from her family—that life is a gamble—helped her to stay alive when her friend BZ could not.
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By Joan Didion
