Hollywood & God is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing—even lurid—hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century, from Cotton Mather and a nineteenth-century minstrel boy to B-movie actress Barbara Payton, a female Elvis impersonator, and even Paris Hilton, Polito tracks the stars, rituals, snares, hijinks, and mysteries at the crossroads of American spiritual and media life across a diversity of styles, tones, and eras. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, Hollywood & God is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.
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