Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls is a treatise on time to rival anything Heidegger ever wrote. Far more than the 'dolls' - the depressants, uppers, sleeping tablets and diet pills of the title - it's time that proves the real downer, stripping the girls of their looks, pulling power and careers by the age of twenty-five. Horizon of possibility? That's a showbiz lifespan to rival the mayfly. And unlike Heidegger's death, which, after all, simply coincides with the end of Being-in-the-world, even if one paradoxically can't quite live one's own demise ('Dying is not an event'), for the aging girls of Valley of the Dolls one is, in the blink of a heavily made-up eye, dead within life - 'washed up'. If you haven't taken care to get a trustworthy husband, secure your finances and preserve your reputation, then you might as well take too many pills and get it over with.

¶ 9:43 PM