This is Tod's diagnosis of "the people who come to California to die." After working hard their entire lives, these people fulfill their dreams of retiring to Los Angeles, only to learn that it isn't all it's cracked up to be. That's a horrifying realization.

This, we think, is the perfect metaphor for ambition in The Day of Locust: as soon as you reach the prize you've been working toward, it's abruptly stolen away from you. After all, do we meet any character who actually realizes his or her ambitions? Claude might fit the bill, sure, but he seems pretty discontent about his life as a producer.

Yup, good old Hollywood pretty much turns people into robots. It makes sense: if everything and everyone in Hollywood is fake, just a surface with nothing substantial underneath it, then the only way to get by is to become just a surface yourself. Just about everyone in this book has been so busy hiding his or her true self that it's hard to say if any true selves are even left anywhere.