Magicking the Dream Factory: Old Hollywood Hauntings in the New Hollywood Cinema

Hollywood films of the 1960s-70s looking back to the studio era frequently employed a constellation of audiovisual tropes that participated in an aesthetics of the occult. Although this haunted, cynical, yet nostalgically spellbound perspective is more familiar in the avant-garde art of Kenneth Anger, comparable magical hermeneutics can also offer a valuable perspective on two mainstream films, Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and The Day of the Locust (1975), in which the soundtrack performs acts of ghostly, self-reflexive, and occasionally sexualized slippage between the film world and the imagined worlds of its characters and audience. Beyond understanding these films simply as characteristic New Hollywood critiques of the industry that produced them, they also can be viewed as an unresolved overlapping of rational and magical critical perspectives.