We Tell Ourselves Stories - Book Cover
'We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine' by Alissa Wilkinson
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote. In her new book about Didion, We Tell Ourselves Stories, New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson shows that the stories told by Didion, one of the greatest essayists to emerge from the ‘60s, were Hollywood narratives. Like untold millions around the world, Didion’s imagination was molded by Hollywood, yet she had a greater gift than most for using those narratives to probe beneath surface appearances.
More than any star from Hollywood’s golden age, John Wayne became exemplary not only of American manhood but America’s idea of itself—and idolatry of Wayne was essential to Didion’s formative years. Wilkinson finds aspects of his movies in Didion’s writings, not to mention her slightly apologetic review of his epic, The Alamo (1960), in the National Review. According to Wilkinson, even as Didion’s initially conservative political views grew more uncategorizable, Wayne’s image of America and the frontier continued to inform her perspective. Wilkinson speculates that Didion began to perceive a cleft between the person of Wayne and the actor’s persona. Left unclear is what Didion ultimately made of Wayne’s evasion of military service during World War II, his leading role in the Hollywood witch hunt that followed or his membership in the John Birch Society.
Beyond Wayne or any particular facet of Hollywood was the industry’s overriding power over not only popular culture but human behavior. “Show business has given vocabulary not just to entertain ourselves, but to understand our lives,” Wilkinson writes. Television only magnified the movies’ impact on image making, not only in a consumer society or in the personal realm but in politics. Didion didn’t care for John F. Kennedy’s image, but she didn’t like Richard Nixon either. He probably reminded her of a small-change crook from a B picture.
Scrambling the Script
With the cataclysmic events in late ‘60s, including Vietnam, the counterculture, Manson and multiple assassinations, Didion’s views changed. As Wilkinson puts it, “the script she inherited from her pioneer ancestors and the culture she’d grown into had started to slip sideways, scramble, make less and less obvious sense.”
Didion’s fascination with Hollywood led her to a side career in the industry, starting with the screenplay she wrote with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The Panic in Needle Park (1971), a gritty heroin drama set in New York on the skids, was the star debut for Al Pacino. The early ‘70s were a special time in Hollywood as the industry, uncertain of the culture’s direction, opened the door to rebels and outsiders. Didion soon found that even then, the approval-by-committee process was not to her liking, declaring, “It’s not writing but it can be fun.” Maybe the fun was the chance to hang with Warren Beatty, Mike Nichols, Barbra Streisand and company. Didion castigated the studios for refusing “risky aesthetic choices or advancing cinematic techniques or changing hearts and minds on important cultural issues.” She wrote those words in 1973. Within a few years, Hollywood was seized by a blockbuster mentality that continues today. Risky choices were definitely out.
Wilkinson’s account is an imaginative biography of a great writer from the past century, less concerned with Didion’s personal details than the cultural forces that engaged her. We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream is published by Liveright.
