On the Shelf
We Inform Ourselves Tales: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine
By Alissa WilkinsonLiveright: 272 pages, $30If you purchase books linked on our website, The Occasions might earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges assist unbiased bookstores.
If Joan Didion had an overarching preoccupation as a journalist and novelist, it was to seek out interstices the place fact and fable mix into one another.
In most of the essays that had been collected within the books “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” and “The White Album,” Didion, in distinction to her New Journalism contemporaries, keenly debunked the prevailing fable of the ’60s counterculture as some new utopian portal, as a substitute revealing in her essays a rustic that was coming undone by its personal unchecked permissiveness, inward-looking narcissism and religious anomie.
Curiously, she had a blind spot when it got here to essentially the most environment friendly mythmaking equipment of the twentieth century: Hollywood films. In her new ebook, “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine,” Alissa Wilkinson paints the famously reserved writer as an unabashed fan of Hollywood, particularly the foursquare style photos churned out by studios within the Nineteen Forties and Nineteen Fifties. As a inexperienced author, Didion wrote film evaluations for William F. Buckley Jr.’s Nationwide Overview, amongst different retailers, celebrating leisure for its personal sake and ignoring the incipient art-film motion of Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes and Michelangelo Antonioni. “She liked to be entertained by Hollywood stories,” says Wilkinson.
As a toddler of the West, she was particularly drawn to the movies of John Wayne — that self-reliant man of motion, Hollywood’s figurehead of Manifest Future. Didion, who spent a short while throughout her childhood on Military bases along with her enlisted father, watched films to fend off her restlessness. It was throughout one such languorous afternoon that, in line with Wilkinson, “Joan first encountered the love of her life.” It was Wayne — America’s largest film star, the self-reliant enforcer, the loping lawman who set the world to rights by advantage of his unbending fortitude.
For Didion, Wayne was the embodiment of particular person will, quiet power and indomitable can-do-ism. “John Wayne was one of the guiding lights of her life,” says Wilkinson. “He represented safety and security for her, this kind of independent spirit. He was the personification of this image she had of The West, of doing the work necessary to settle the new land. He was crucial to her personal mythology.”
Didion would write fulsomely about Wayne in her early journal tales. “Saw the walk, heard the voice,” Didion wrote of Wayne in an article for the Saturday Night Submit. “Heard him tell the girl in the picture called ‘War of the Wildcats’ that he would build her a house ‘at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.’” Didion needed to be that woman.
After all, Wayne was a strolling fable. The actor, who was synonymous with heroism and bravado for tens of millions of Individuals, didn’t enlist within the Military when his nation entered World Conflict II, and he by no means noticed fight or used reside ammunition to defend himself. As an alternative, Wilkinson writes in her ebook, Wayne “became the man we imagined him to be.”
This suited Didion; she would later write of the need of constructive myths and origin tales that Individuals cling to as articles of religion, tales that served as signposts to a method ahead, versus the empty ’60s myths that she believed led to entropy. Even when Didion moved away from movie evaluations to change into one of many preeminent essayists of her technology, she clung to Wayne as an avatar.
Wilkinson factors out that Didion was an outlier amongst her technology, a conservative each in her aesthetic style and her politics. And she or he was drawn to politicians who projected what she had admired in John Wayne: that no-nonsense, plainspoken method to problem-solving. When Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, a compassionate conservative who championed civil rights and environmental protections, introduced his intention to run in opposition to John F. Kennedy within the 1964 election, Didion embraced his candidacy.
“Goldwater was a commanding presence who projected a straight-forward approach towards issues,” observes Wilkinson. “Didion saw some of Wayne in him.” In distinction, she was cautious of Kennedy — too easy, too prepared to change his backstory to curry favor. (Goldwater would lose to Lyndon B. Johnson.)
To Didion, Kennedy represented one thing insidious within the American character: the need for voters to admire politicians like film stars, and the pandering of American politicians to supply heroes fabricated from clay. This, for her, was the beginning of the brand new “star system” that was to contaminate American politics all the way in which as much as Invoice Clinton, a brand new misdirection that averted the exhausting questions in favor of feel-good glad-handing, the glittery spin of politics within the age of TV that created a false consensus.
Writer Alissa Wilkinson
(Liveright)
What rankled Didion about this flip was that it decreased the complexity of all points to tidy bromides. “She hated the idea of that Hollywood enchantment crossing over into political discourse,” explains Wilkinson. “Movie logic was everywhere,” she writes, as political conventions had been now expressly staged for TV audiences. On the identical time, as Wilkinson factors out, films may very well be an inflection of the nationwide temper, even when they had been misinterpreted by the politicians who cited them. When Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, President Johnson cited Arthur Penn’s movie “Bonnie and Clyde” as a possible reason behind nationwide violence, somewhat than a mirrored image of the nationwide temper. Films solely suited politicians when their prevailing myths lined up with marketing campaign rhetoric.
Regardless of her creeping cynicism towards politics and its appropriation of film model, Didion hadn’t misplaced her ardor for movie. In 1964, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, moved from New York to Los Angeles, decided to interrupt into the trade. They quickly discovered success in Hollywood — their first movie, “The Panic in Needle Park,” screened on the 1971 Cannes Movie Pageant — however by that point, Didion, who had been internet hosting legendary “industry” events at her home on Franklin Avenue, sensed a vacuity that she described in “Play It As It Lays,” her 1970 novel. Hollywoodland, because it turned out, was additionally a fable.
“She was both inside and outside Hollywood when she wrote that novel,” says Wilkinson. “You can see her noticing this all over Southern California, this lack of a moral center, and people for whom a moral center is a laughable invention.”
Didion continued to discover this topic in a sequence of essays for the New York Overview of Books within the ’80s and ’90s, the perfect of which had been collected in a ebook aptly titled “Political Fictions.” In her essay “Insider Baseball,” Didion decried the trivial nature of two-party politics within the age of media saturation. Watching then-President Reagan addressing the delegates on the 1988 GOP conference, Didion witnessed a speech “rhetorically pitched not to a live audience but to the more intimate demands of the camera.” In Didion’s view, viewers now processed politics like TV dramas, with their very own heroes and villains, subplots and twists.
Didion, who died in late 2021, lived lengthy sufficient to witness the sluggish decline of conventional media and the creeping hegemony of social media, with coverage positions specified by 140-word missives and the raging hailstorm of on-line political discourse. Even the films aren’t actually films anymore, simply uncooked materials for the streaming maw. One factor is for sure: They’re the tales we now inform ourselves so as to reside.
