They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

"Maybe it's just the whole damn world is like Central Casting. They got it all rigged before you ever show up." 

Numerous books were released during the Great Depression, but no book struck more of a cultural chord or contained a decade's worth of human resilience during economic and social disparity better than John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Even if you haven't read it (*coughs and looks away*), you know something about it, as the title alone has almost become synonymous for the era of hardship it represents within its pages. Just Google "The Great Depression", and its at the top of the results. A teacher you once had probably assigned it in class. It no doubt resides on a bunch of required read-before-you're-casket-ready reading lists. It's a book that is just impossible to ignore.

Now, no disrespect to Steinbeck, but Grapes wasn't the only book to explore one of America's most harrowing hours. Okay, maybe these books weren't out there winning Pulitzer Prizes, but they did exist. Coming up blank? Let me steer you over to a neglected corner, where you'll see cussing and fussing for attention Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, the anti-Grapes...the anti-everything, really.

Horses was released in 1935, in the thick of the Great Depression, and it's with no surprise that it ended up faring better with French existentialists such as Simone de Beauvoir (who dubbed it the first "American existentialist novel"), and Albert Camus (who'd seven years later would pen a similar sketch of human doom with The Stranger). Americans wanted hope and relief and sympathetic characters they could relate to --- not someone extolling pessimism and framing them as farm animals being led to the slaughter. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? doesn't offer a mustard seed of faith, or even a 'this too shall pass' reassuring pat on the shoulder. This lean, mean novella instead sneers at the migrant farming sojourn of the Joad brood as it ensnares its disparate youths Robert Syverton and Gloria Beatty in a thorny fate, all while lifting a soiled middle finger towards the sweet apple pie of Americana optimism and prosperity.


Leaving no room for speculation, Horses cracks the whip from the start with its compelling opening paragraph that lays bare Robert's ruminations as he stands before a judge, preparing to be sentenced for Gloria's murder.

"For a moment I saw Gloria again, sitting on that bench on the pier. The bullet had just struck her in the side of the head; the blood had not even started to flow. The flash from the pistol still lighted her face. Everything was plain as day. She was completely relaxed, was completely comfortable. The impact of the bullet had turned her head a little away from me; I did not have a perfect profile view but I could see enough of her face and her lips to know she was smiling. The Prosecuting Attorney was wrong when he told the jury she died in agony, friendless, alone except for her brutal murderer, out there in that black night on the edge of the Pacific. He was as wrong as a man can be. She did not die in agony. She was relaxed and comfortable and she was smiling. It was the first time I had ever seen her smile. I was her very best friend. I was her only friend. So how could she have been friendless?"

Interspersed with Robert's condemning are flashbacks of how aspiring actors Robert and Gloria meet by chance after both are rejected one afternoon from the cattle call of Central Casting, their dreams of landing a role, any role in a Hollywood film deferred once again. Despondent and desperate, Gloria convinces Robert to enter in a marathon dance competition on the Santa Monica pier. Promised is a prize of $1,000, free meals, a place to sleep and shower, and the possibility that a Hollywood insider will take notice of them and whisk them away to cinematic glory. For these promises and "prizes", continuous hours on a dance floor with ten-minute breaks in-between beats pounding the pavement looking for yet another unsteady gig, but what Robert and Gloria don't figure is how they'll become willing victims in a test of ultimate human endurance.

Since we know the end result, there is a sort of intense morbid curiosity that pulls us throughout this book and dares us not to look away at what McCoy has pushed in front of us. The physical and mental toll of the Great Depression is lurid enough, but now they are compartmentalized in a suffocating dance hall, with our duo cocooned in it along with every kind of delusional Hollywood hopeful, starving destitute, fugitive criminal, fanatical spectator, and shrewd huckster imaginable, and such a collision of foul makes for some serious bone chilling horror. Horses leans more into noir territory, as the taunt prose crackles hard-boiled and dire, but when you have scenes of the grueling derbies, the dancers struggling to maintain their sanity and strength, and the dancehall being perched on the end of a pier as the sea churns threateningly below --- almost like a looming seaside haunted house --- such imagery is so effective and grotesque that it reminded me of the domestic gothic horror that authors such as Shirley Jackson and Michael McDowell would excel at decades later.

The dance competition is played to greater, and more harrowing effect for the 1969 Sydney Pollack-directed film version, which is a fantastic expansion of McCoy's novel, and a classic on its own merit. In film we're able to see the ghoulish derbies in real time, hear that ominous whir of a siren signaling the beginning and end of torture, feel the utter hopelessness as Robert and Gloria come into full vulnerable form via the excellent performances of Michael Sarrazin and Jane Fonda, and experience how devilishly craven Gig Young's huckster Rocky is as he goads the applauding audience to "give". McCoy's words comes to life on screen better than most book-to-movie productions, and with a stellar cast and the terse tinge of the gritty realism that would drive 1970s cinema, the movie is to my eyes better than its source material. It's not the most comfortable watch as I rank it in a class such as 1977's Looking For Mr. Goodbar, with it being a "human monster movie", but I surprise myself with how many times I've seen Horses as a film, and even in my disturbance I still come away fascinated and haunted by its execution.

At turns, Horses is kindred towards Nathanel West's macabre classic, The Day of the Locust, as it too teems with every kind of desperate wannabe and degenerate character imaginable to further explore the gruesome, claustrophobic canals of Hollywood during the Great Depression. Both of these slim novels are ruthless in describing the levels their cabals of the cursed stoop to survive, but McCoy manages to be in defeated tone, almost more humanistic, and even sympathetic to his subjects whereas West turned the wattage up on the garish satire in Locust.

Also, there were clear antagonists in Locust, Horses is unique for being void of them. Nobody present is outright villainous or is drawn as such. Manipulative announcers and organizers Rocky and Socks might control their dancers, shout the commands, and come up with abusive schemes to keep people coming in the door to ogle, but they too are trapped in this den of despair and see their duties as a form of survival as much as the fated dancers themselves. Everybody is a victim of the situation, as the situation itself is what has them acting out in ways they wouldn't normally resort to.

If you truly wanted to apply a "villain" then Gloria is your girl as she's the needling fatalistic voice that pops the balloon of hope with every line she spats out to Robert as they hobble along the dancefloor. She is "tired of living, and afraid of dying", and far from redemption. Her character is coarse and crass, and at first Robert --- being the naive somewhat sanguine fawn that he is --- tries to persuade her into thinking otherwise, but Gloria bristles and becomes even more feral and fatalistic, scoffing at Robert's soft rebuttals and reassurances of an end to the relentless dance. We know that Robert will succumb to Gloria's apathy, and such a turnabout is telling to how it's not just those above us that can wield a particular and cruel power, but it's those who are in the same gutter as us, our own peers, that can also become our worst enemies as they sink us to their level.

Jane Fonda as Gloria Beatty in a promo shot for They Shoot Horses, Don't They (1969)

McCoy crafts Gloria not so much as a character, but an entity that echoes a generation waking up to the ultimate con job called the 'American Dream'. Her doomsday dialogue does come off a bit overcooked as she remains ensconced in her own disgust more than any other character, but she comes from a real place. Like most Americans, she's probably been fed a diet of prosperous fairy tales, of a "good life" guaranteed all under the red, white, and blue, and she does this all without reading the fine print. She fails to see the asterisk by her name, realizing almost too late that if you don't fit the criteria, the right social, physical, or financial bracket, that the system wasn't meant for you --- it was meant to screw you over --- and it's up to you to figure out how much pain and humiliation you're willing to endure just to achieve a taste of that apple pie.

"Past a certain point you kept moving automatically, without actually being conscious of moving. One minute you would be travelling at top speed and the next moment you started falling."

McCoy is also far from subtle at having this dance competition being an allegorical criticism on the American Dream, and him being as blunt and scathing about it is the true mastery of this novel. We know how it all ends, but how we get to that requires some reflection on the underbelly of America's storied history, and consideration of our contentious class system. Simone de Beauvoir had Horses pegged right, this is an existentialist novel tailor made for America, as it boils the whole philosophy down in a slim bitter gulp of a read that has you rethinking all the systems in play, and your role within them.

Also done skillfully, is how there's a kernel of prophesy wedged into the teeth of this, as with today's "freakshows for profit", reality shows like The Bachelor, The Voice, The Biggest Loser, etc. have expanded the dance marathons of the 1920s and 1930s into an even grander, more soul crushing spectacle. Week after week we see a mix bag of contestants pushed to physical and emotional brinks, coerced into false relationships, and made to be the brunt of jokes, all for ratings, for the "grand prize" to secure financial and celebrity status, with all of it swathed in sponsorships from vampiric corporations. Some of this "bad press is better than none" attitude (that's now being foisted at the presidential level) has expanded into other avenues with social medias expansion, and us reaching a fever pitch in narcissism, but 20th Century America begat the 21st, proving we've always been a nation that thrives on the vapid need to chew and spit out our citizens all for the sake of entertainment, self-affirmation, and the all mighty $.

Most of the criticism I found for this novel rests in the realization of the (great) title's meaning. Most readers are upset that we lumbered on these word blisters, went through this assault of the senses, and we're left with...well, a really a bleak outlook for the future. That for as long and as much as you 'dance' hoping for some ultimate prize, that the fix is already in, and that it's best to just throw in the towel and get some lead pumped into you, and to do it quick before you change your mind. We're also left to ponder if there is such a thing as a "merciless killing", asking hard questions about life and death, and who should dictate the handling of such. Did Robert do something to Gloria, or for her? Was he really her best friend in her hour of need? Does his own execution, this by law, extend a cruel and unusual irony about our justice system?

I get that not everyone wants to entertain these takeaways, and that's fine. Horses was not meant to be a pleasant read or inspirational, it intends to incite fright and inquiry toward the fiber of our society, and is so illicit in its reading that you're half-expecting those darn biddies from the Mother's League of Good Morals will snatch it out of your hands, condemning you alongside Gloria for contributing to indecency. It just wasn't made to make you see the glass half-full or half-empty, it rather wanted you to smash all the glasses cause #FML. But that's nihilism for ya, it's an acquired taste, and McCoy positioned a lot of his written works in such a manner that at the time weren't well-received, but have endured in their intent to give us the quick and dirty alternative account of Americana in a time when so few dared to be critical of it.

For me, McCoy's little masterpiece worked. It worked in all the ways that the best fiction should work, at fluidly crossing genres and possessing characters that urge us to look deep within ourselves, yet it also works in its timelessness. Its ability to be prophetic and still a fixture of its era, all while forcing us to pull back the curtain of our society at large, and be forever haunted by the view.

Yowza. Yowza. Yowza.

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from the margins

• Rating: **** 1/2
• 130 Pages
• Published 1935

in the key of...


I personally feel the best soundtrack is the film itself.

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• Alternate History: My two sets of grandparents were raised during the Depression, and though I heard scraps of their stories (it's obviously a time they begrudged to recount) and was aware of their plights at the time (and just to note when it rains for white Americans, it pours for us Black Americans), but never did I know of these harrowing dance competitions. Honestly, I don't even think these things were even open to people of color, and in the film the only Black person I saw was the janitor (go fig...), but I can assume people of color had their own dance competitions and did them in separate venues.

• Lone Star State of Mind: We don't know much about Gloria's upbringing (in review, I just assumed) but the one thing we do know is that she came from West Texas, and I thought that was so damn fitting. My folks used to live up there a years ago back when my Dad relocated for his job, and I visited them for a summer and a Christmas, and let's just say that was enough for me. That place will make anyone a raging pessimist within five seconds of breathing that manure tinged air, full stop. So I get it Gloria, I get it. 

• Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For blog (one of my fave little corners on the net) has an excellent in-depth write-up about They Shoot Horses, Don't They? as a film.

• It's All Relative: I find it interesting that Henry Fonda had a iconic role in the film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath while his daughter, Jane Fonda, decades later starred in the "anti-Grapes" film, They Shoot Horses Don't They? Their prospective Depression era films also earned the two of them well-deserved Oscar nominations.