In Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust, a big budget Hollywood epic of the Battle of Waterloo is being filmed that epitomizes the industry's superficial idea of history. “Waterloo” is a meticulously rendered period piece that views the past as a series of discrete events on a horizontal continuum. The viewer is invited to look back in admiration and/ or horror at these events without being distracted by their possible relation to the present. The flattened view of history Schlesinger satirizes in Locust is the opposite of the vertical, simultaneous grasp of both past and present at work in his masterpiece, Sunday Bloody Sunday, the film most central to any discussion of Schlesinger's use of the human past.

The character Tod, who works for the studio art department in Locust, understands the past in a way that brings us closer to the director's own view. He pours over reproductions of past art in search of inspiration for deeper human content. When the studio set collapses and the producers refuse responsibility for the injuries it causes, we get a glimpse of the moral indifference that characterizes the entire production. Human beings are as extraneous to the epic Waterloo as the injured extras are to its producers. In Hollywood epics generally, the lead characters can seem oddly ornamental— mere celebrities in costume, unable to convey a vital relation to either nature or history. The sweeping scope of the epic can overshadow even a very good actor's contribution. One reason for this is that film epics are characteristically not interested in historical remembrance, or in capturing the particulars of what is “lost without recovery,” as Carlyle phrased it (Carlyle 1971, 54). They are more often nostalgic celebrations of our grand myths of the past. From the silent era to the present, Hollywood epics have attempted to revive myths (heroic, romantic, historical and religious) and some have succeeded, but the complexity and magnitude of the task is such that good directors have also failed at it.

One wonders if Schlesinger did not occasionally smile to himself as he filmed the film-within-the-film, noting certain resemblances to the epic he himself made eight years earlier, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1874).