"Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God"
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Hollywood as a zip code is almost beside the point; as a mental habit, it is everywhere. Erica Jong’s line lands because it treats “Hollywood” not as an industry but as a kind of cognitive real estate, a set of reflexes: glamour as meaning, narrative as substitute for reality, wish-fulfillment as civic religion. “Chiefly between the ears” is a joke with teeth. It shrinks the sprawling apparatus of studios, publicity machines, and celebrity economies into something more intimate and indicting: a predisposition inside the viewer.
Then she twists the knife with that last clause, “lately vacated by God.” It’s deliberately blasphemous, but the aim isn’t theology so much as cultural diagnosis. Jong is pointing at a mid-to-late 20th-century American drift toward entertainment as solace and celebrity as authority: when transcendence recedes, we don’t simply become rational secular citizens; we often swap one faith for another, with different icons and a faster news cycle. Hollywood, in this frame, becomes the replacement metaphysics, offering clean arcs, redemption-by-makeover, and the comforting illusion that someone is writing the script.
The subtext is also feminist and literary, consistent with Jong’s era and reputation: a novelist watching mass culture flatten complexity into marketable archetypes, especially around sex, femininity, and “star” identity. The jab isn’t just at Hollywood’s fakery, but at the audience’s complicity in wanting it - the part of the brain that prefers a spotlight to a conscience.
Then she twists the knife with that last clause, “lately vacated by God.” It’s deliberately blasphemous, but the aim isn’t theology so much as cultural diagnosis. Jong is pointing at a mid-to-late 20th-century American drift toward entertainment as solace and celebrity as authority: when transcendence recedes, we don’t simply become rational secular citizens; we often swap one faith for another, with different icons and a faster news cycle. Hollywood, in this frame, becomes the replacement metaphysics, offering clean arcs, redemption-by-makeover, and the comforting illusion that someone is writing the script.
The subtext is also feminist and literary, consistent with Jong’s era and reputation: a novelist watching mass culture flatten complexity into marketable archetypes, especially around sex, femininity, and “star” identity. The jab isn’t just at Hollywood’s fakery, but at the audience’s complicity in wanting it - the part of the brain that prefers a spotlight to a conscience.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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