Erased by Loo Hui Phang and Hughes Micol

This is not true - it's presented as if it were non-fiction, and, in a way, it's the distilled essence of the lives of dozens or hundreds of people in the glory days of the Hollywood studio system, but it is, at is core, a fable, a constructed parable to tell one very particular story.

It's the ambiguously ethnic Zelig in a way, with a main character who stands in for all of the peoples of America who are not white, not the default.

It's all too much, far too much of the time, to my taste, but it aims high and stakes out a a lot of ground: I can appreciate and encourage that even if I think it does try to do too much and makes itself a cartoon along the way.

Erased is the story of Maximus Wyld. You see: even the name is already too much. He was an orphan teenager in late-30s Hollywood, of mixed Black, Native, Asian, and Mexican heritage - literally made of all of the other kinds of people of the USA, in the kind of notes that Erased keeps returning to, to heavily underline its points.

He's discovered quickly - by Cary Grant, in a way that first hints Grant may have a sexual interest in the compelling young boxer he meets. But none of the actors have more than minor character flaws; all of the famous names are here to be famous, to be illuminating, to show how awesome Wyld was because these famous people thought he was even more wonderful and special than they were. Wyld quickly has a screen test, is seen as absolutely wonderful, and starts getting work immediately - his early years of struggle and hardship happen off the page; he is too good to be seen to struggle at all in the book.

Wyld can play any role as long as it's not white: Japanese in exotic melodramas, Indian in cowboy pictures, Black in race films. More oddly, as I read it, he always plays minor characters that are easily cut from movies - this will be a plot point at the end - which is an inherent, central contradiction. Wyld is both so compelling and special - it doesn't even seem to be his acting, just some pseudo-sexual visual power of his presence - that he's in every famous movie you've ever heard of for a stretch of about twenty years, and is the best thing in all of those movies, but he is also entirely extraneous to all of those movies, and was removed entirely, so that we learn about him only now, decades later.

I'm sorry, but that doesn't make sense. Famous is well-known. Famous is influential. Famous means things change. The creators here - writer Loo Hui Phang and artist Hughes Micol - could have made up a fake filmography, threaded through the history of Hollywood, and then said it was all suppressed due to Wyld's unforgivable transgressions. They could have made him a leading man, a screenwriter or storyteller, a director or producer - someone who did more than show up and say other people's words in other people's stories. But, instead, they make him something that can be removed easily - and, by extension, everything he is supposed to represent is also removed easily.

Along the way, he fucks every famous actress and befriends every famous actor. Again, Wyld is wonderful and perfect: everyone loves him and wants him. None of them are close friends; he and they emote at each other, getting through the authors' historical material and attempting to build up the pseudo-mystical power of Wyld in every scene, full of portentous, roundabout dialogue that talks about gigantic social issues like a textbook rather than having people connect to each other as humans.

There are no non-famous characters. The closest thing we see to a friendship or long-term relationship with Wyld is Grant, who is mostly a mentor, giving advice on how to navigate this world. Wyld is so busy being mythic, being an icon, that he doesn't really become a person. I don't think that was the point - that he was that Hollywood cliché, the empty vessel that everyone else pours their dreams into - but Wyld comes across as ambitious in only very weird and circumscribed ways, and as deeply passive rather than kept in one specific small role by the system.

He only gets one lead role: the one that destroyed his career entirely and forever. He spends what seems to be twenty years - never getting much older, without much flow of the narrative to show time is changing in any way other than what kind of movies are currently popular - living the same way, doing the same things, saying the same kind of things, while around him the real-world famous people pop up to do the famous thing they did that year, note how they have changed in the ways we the audience are already familiar with, and then move on.

I wanted to believe in the mythic power of Maximus Wyld.

Well, I wanted to believe in the mythic power of a person named something slightly more realistic who was renamed "Maximus Wyld" by Hollywood. But I just couldn't. I haven't even gotten into the way that Wyld supposedly created "coded messages" - by wearing particular items of clothing in some big studio movie - that did something or other and transformed the world forever.

Again, in the scenes that no one can now see and which left no trace.

All in all, this feels like a fever dream caused by reading too much Hollywood Babylon too quickly and getting drunk on it. It is gorgeous and aims high and absolutely wants to have a mythic, overwhelming power, to tell the story of everyone cast out and pushed aside and not celebrated, all of the other people of America and how their stories could become Hollywood myth. Maybe that's enough.