Play It As It Lays

Maria Wyeth lives by the principle “nothing applies.” The phrase encapsulates the philosophy of existential nihilism, the belief that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. Maria is frustrated by her doctors’ insistence that she make meaning out of past events because she does not believe they matter.

Maria’s nihilism is epistemological as well as existential, meaning that she cannot say for certain whether a fact or event is true or not. This idea often arises when Maria thinks about her past: “I have trouble with as it was” she says (6), to indicate that she, her parents, and Benny all remember the past differently. The phrase “as it was,” is always italicized, signifying that it is an idea or impression about the past, rather than the past itself, which is unrecoverable. Maria tells Benny “there is no Silver Wells” because the town was reclaimed as a missile testing range after her parents had passed away (8). If no one can agree upon an objective record of the past, and if things that existed in the past no longer exist, the effort to draw meaning from them is futile.

Although Maria abides by nihilism most of the time, key moments reveal her breaks with this belief system.