Joan Didion was reserved. But she loved Old Hollywood

If Joan Didion had a global concern as a journalist and novelist, it was to find interstices where the truth and the myth mix.

In many essays that have been collected in the books “Spouching To-Bethlehem” and “The White Album”, Didion, unlike his new contemporaries of journalism, has strongly demystified the dominant myth of the counter-culture of the 1960s as a new utopian portal, rather reveals in its tries of narcise and spiritual.

Curiously, it had a blind spot with regard to the most effective myth machinery of the 20th century: Hollywood films. In his new book, “We say stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine”, Alissa Wilkinson depicts the famous author reserved as a shameless fan of Hollywood, in particular the images of gender ovens, extinct by studios in the 1940s and 1950s. As a green writer, Didion wrote cinematographic criticism for the national criticism of William F. Buckley Jr., among other points of sale, celebrating entertainment for itself and ignoring the emerging movement of the film Art by Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes and Michelangelo Antonioni. “She liked to be entertained by Hollywood Stories,” says Wilkinson.

As a child of the West, she was particularly attracted by John Wayne's films – this autonomous man of action, the figure of Hollywood of manifest destiny. Didion, who spent a short time during his childhood on the basics of the army with his enlisted father, watched films to repel his agitation. It was during this languid afternoon that, according to Wilkinson, “Joan first met the love of his life”. It was Wayne – the largest movie star in America, the autonomous empressor, the legislative that has put the world to rights because of its inflexible strength.

For Didion, Wayne was the embodiment of individual will, silent force and indomitable CAN-DO-ISM. “John Wayne was one of the lights of his life,” said Wilkinson. “He represented security and security for her, this kind of independent spirit. He was the personification of this image she had of the West, to do the work necessary to settle the New Earth. He was crucial for his personal mythology. ”

Didion wrote entirely on Wayne in his first magazine stories. “I saw the walk, heard the voice,” wrote Didion about Wayne in an article in the Saturday Evening Post. “Heard him say to the girl on the photo entitled” War of the Wildcats “that he would make her built a house” in the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. “Didion wanted to be this girl.

Of course, Wayne was a myth of walking. The actor, who was synonymous with heroism and bravery for millions of Americans, did not enlist in the army when his country entered the Second World War, and he has never seen a fight or used living ammunition to defend himself. Instead, Wilkinson writes in his book, Wayne “has become the man we imagined.”

This didion suited; She will later write about the need for constructive myths and original stories to which Americans cling to as a articles of faith, stories that served as signaling to a way to follow, as opposed to empty myths of the 1960s which, according to her, led to entropy. Even when Didion moved away from film criticisms to become one of the pre -eminent trials of her generation, she hung on to Wayne as a Vatar.

Wilkinson stresses that Didion was an aberrant value among his generation, a curator both in her aesthetic taste and her policy. And she was drawn to politicians who project what she had admired in John Wayne: this free and suspended approach to problem solving. When Arizona Barry Goldwater's senator, a compassionate curator who defended civil rights and environmental protections, announced his intention to appear against John F. Kennedy in the 1964 elections, Didion adopted his candidacy.

“Goldwater was a dominant presence that projects a simple approach to problems,” observes Wilkinson. “Didion saw a little Wayne in him.” On the other hand, she was wary of Kennedy – too sweet, too ready to modify her background for Curry the favor. (Goldwater would lose against Lyndon B. Johnson.)

For Didion, Kennedy represented something insidious in the American character: the desire for voters to admire politicians like cinema stars and the cargo of American politicians to provide clay heroes. For her, it was the beginning of the new “star system” which was to infect American policy to Bill Clinton, a new bad orientation which avoided difficult questions in favor of Feente, the well-being sheath, the sparkling rotation of politics in the era of television which created a false consensus.

Author Alissa Wilkinson

(Delivered)

What Didion has stored in turn is that it reduced the complexity of all problems with well -stored bromides. “She hated the idea that Hollywood enchantment is going through a political speech,” said Wilkinson. “The logic of cinema was everywhere,” she writes, because political conventions were now expressly staged for the television audience. At the same time, as Wilkinson points out, films could be an inflection of national mood, even if they were misinterpreted by the politicians who cited them. When Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, President Johnson cited Arthur Penn's film “Bonnie and Clyde” as a potential cause of national violence, rather than the reflection of national mood. The films only suited politicians when their dominant myths aligned themselves with the rhetoric of the countryside.

Despite his crawling cynicism towards politics and his appropriation of the cinematographic style, Didion had not lost his ardor for cinema. In 1964, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, moved from New York to Los Angeles, determined to enter the industry. They quickly found success in Hollywood – their first film, “The Panic in Needle Park”, screened at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival – but at that time, Didion, who had organized legendary festivals “Industry” at home on Franklin Avenue, felt a emptiness that she described in “Play it as she is”, her novel from 1970. Hollywoodland. also a myth.

“She was inside and outside Hollywood when she wrote this novel,” said Wilkinson. “You can see her noticed this throughout South California, this lack of moral center and people for whom a moral center is a laughable invention.”

According to Didion, this moral hollowness has found its ideal spokesperson for Ronald Reagan, a minor Hollywood actor who exploited his position as the Guild of the Guilds of Screen to be elected Governor of California in 1966. In 1968, while being assigned for the publication of Saturday evening, Didion visited Nancy Reagan in the manor of the Governor and Observed a team of new televisions when they tried to make a perfect game of Rawead. Nothing substance was even discussed. The photo session had supplanted politics as the sine qua non condition of political discourse. Hollywood had diverted politics and there was no going back.

Didion continued to explore this subject in a series of tests for the New York review of books in the 80s and 90s, the best of which were collected in a book entitled “Fictions. “” In his essay “Insider Baseball”, Didion has criticized the trivial nature of bipartite policy in the era of media saturation. Looking at the president of the time, Reagan addressing the delegates of the 1988 GOP convention, Didion attended a “rhetorically presented to a live audience but the more intimate requirements of the camera”. According to Didion, viewers have now treated politicians such as television dramas, with their own heroes and bad guys, subtotters and twists and turns.

Didion, who died at the end of 2021, lived long enough to attend the slow decline in traditional media and the creeping hegemony of social media, with political positions presented in missives of 140 words and the unleashed hail of online political discourse. Even films are no longer really films, just raw materials for the streaming mouth. One thing is certain: these are the stories that we are now racing to live.