In 2020, Alissa Wilkinson began working on a book project on Joan Didion. She wanted to explore the distinguished fans, correspondents, novelist and theatrical writer through an angled angle – Didion’s contact with the film industry. This book has become, “We tell ourselves stories: Joan Didion and the American dream machine.”
Wilkinson, who was a critic in the New York Times since 2023 and wrote for Fox before that, was not interested in going into “Didion’s character or famous, as much as he connects all of her work together.”
“I reached the idea of writing about it through the Hollywood lens, both of which were because it worked in Hollywood and wrote films that were produced that we are still watching today, but also because it was written on Wilkenson said: “Hollywood” diverse In a recent phone interview.
“We tell ourselves stories”, which were published on Tuesday, arrives a few weeks before the usterfincta materials, along with the materials of her husband John Gregory Don, are newly reaching the public through the New York Public Library on March 26 (Wilkinson will appear there for a book event on the same day). The archives contain Dedion and Don, which provides another way to learn about Didion’s work in the movie.
Wilkenson argues that Hollywood was often a vehicle that Didion used to explore an important idea: How novels work and stories in our daily life. The Heart of the Book is the ultimately cautious of the motivation to create easy accounts of an individual’s life, from others and major political and cultural transformations – a tendency that can lead to extremely emotional conclusions. This focus is clear in the title of Wilkenson’s book, taken from the opening line of “The White Album”: “We say ourselves for life.”
Wilkinson, Didion’s childhood that arose with John Wayne’s films in her early career in writing New York in favor of Vogue, was a cinematic critic that one day had a column with Pauline Keel, to her professions in the book “Dhul -hands” and “Den” from the “Star” that is in Los Angeles (among them “. She formed her notes on characters such as Reagans and Michael Dukakis.
Writing the book included intense research in the life of Didion and his career, including the discovery of its films from the public library’s archives in New York early in the epidemic-which was “this pdf huge, heavy and full of pictures from Vogue 1954 or something like this.” Wilkinson also studied the important political events that Didion wrote in order to develop a context of its progress.
Wilkinson spoke diverse About Didion’s work as a cinematic critic and screenwriter, what Didion understood about Hollywood and American policy and what the book hopes will provide to the readers.
How much American history and policy do you want to dive? What has appealed to you about covering these broader strokes as well?
It is difficult to extract the history of America in the twentieth century in particular from the history of Hollywood. I did not think much about that about the fact that if I wrote this book, I will write about Ronald Reagan, John, Wayne and Pari Golduter, and how there is an intersection between politics and Hollywood with them all. The same for John F. Kennedy. It seemed to be a very mature way to think about the topics that concern me a lot and see how they gathered in the narration, and Didion just presented as a really wonderful evidence through this because it was what you already wrote.
I am not sure that she realized exactly how much she was writing about Hollywood, but I think it was the moment when I was reading an article written by “BaseBall”, which is the Dukakis campaign. It mainly writes an article that the political campaigns have turned into films. It works like a collection of films. It works in the way the collection of films works, and this turns the presidency into just a performance that takes place for cameras. And I thought, “Oh, my God, this is perfect.” So, whether it is fully aware of the directive borrowing in its work, I think it is very clear when you read that lens.
How much do you realize to criticize the Dedeion movie?
I was not really. I knew mainly some literary criticism that I published in the national review and such publications when she was young and lived in New York. So it was a little surprise. The film’s criticism often appears to be popular. It has not been republished anywhere. Many of their books consist of articles that you wrote mainly for other places, then they were collected in books. You are a kind of belief, when you dig through the archive of a magazine in search of Didion’s articles, that everything you wrote has ended in a book. But this is not true.
What did you learn from her movie reviews?
I got them all, read them all, and started seeing her philosophy, if you can call it, as a cinematic critic. I do not think it is something that aspires to be as much as it retreated. She was already working in Vogue for many years before she fluctuated and wrote the movie column for a few years. But it was really great, because I really don’t agree with many of its reviews, as well as many of them, such as films today, somewhat came out. Some people saw them, then no one thought about them again. Many of this is funny because it does not take the movie seriously as an artistic means, and I think this type of continuous continues throughout her life. But it is very fond of business, spoom and the fun recreational aspect of everything.
Then there was another small piece of that that I did not realize, and it was, I wrote alternating columns with another writer. Thus, every other problem, she had a film review column. For a while, the other writer Pauline Kyle was in the years before becoming the famous critic who would be in New Yorker. They never liked each other. They both thought that the other was a kind of ridiculous and ridiculous, and they cut each other for many years after that, but it was funny to share a column for a period of time.
She writes about how Dida had a strict way and a thinking formula about how the movie was. Do you think Didion’s opinions about the film evolved on her life?
It is difficult to know this because after being dropped in writing the cinema criticism of the Vogue column, she did not write much about the films directly. There is a piece that I write about in the book I wrote to The New York Review of Books, which revolves around Woody Allen. This was true at this height in the Allen’s career when he was making “Manhattan” and “Annie Hall”, but she was not really writing about films. It is a kind of writing about the way of thinking and believing in the world that I felt in Woody Allen’s films. The more she writes about anything related to work at a later time, it often relates to the culture that responds to the films more than the films themselves.
Another type of paradox, or perhaps tension here, which you can say from its reviews, is that it was not a great fan of anything that was experimental, underground, or New Hollywood, or at least this is what you feel from reading their reviews. Its reviews are very driven by the love of the old school, Hollywood, the Golden Age, the actors playing all the time and never playing.
But if you watch two first two films he wrote and the Dunn that was produced, it is “panic in Needle Park”, then adapting to her novel, “run it as you put”, both of which play like the new Hollywood films that you can imagine. They are very disintegrated, and they have all these innovative filmmaking techniques, and they feel they are made for counter -culture. So it is funny to see this contrast there. I think this is the type of movie that people were making at that moment, and they wanted to make films, and this is what they did a little, this is the type of the movie that people made at that moment, and they wanted to make films, and this is what they did.
Can you talk about how her time in the cinema industry form her political observations, which she later enters into the book?
I am not the first to notice this, but it was a conservative and a western province. The Republican Party eventually left as a democrat because it hated that the Republican Party in California had converted to Nixon and then Reagan at a later time, and had no benefit in Reagan at all, and this extends throughout their time to their time when California ruler Reagan was. So it is a complacency, but I think this is true in all its views.
But I believe that its opinions on American policy become more critical of the way the policy is carried out than the content of any certain ideology. This becomes more clear at a later time in the work we get. I just felt that there was a kind of category confusion that happens where the width of business is one thing, and politics is a different thing. They have different goals. They have different goals.
The lack of clarity of business in politics, which occurs somewhat because of the films, as a natural, television result, is a problem because it knows closely all the things you have to do to make a movie or to make a television program, the way in which manifestations are offered, and the way you build these icons, stereotypes and focus groups. And when she saw that bleeding is more and more in politics, she not only seems concerned, but is upset with that, and knowing that the end of that will be a cavity of politics to be a method of essence, and this can only have bad repercussions for the future.
Do you see a way for American culture to try to get out of these courses from emotional stories and rely on nostalgia to the past, given what I searched for about Didion’s writings on this topic?
Its statement is that “we tell ourselves stories to live,” comes at the beginning of its article, “The White album”, and it is most likely its most famous article. I used part of it for my eyes, because I felt there were multiple meanings there. But often I see this phrase quoted as if it was inspiring, such as, “Oh, we tell ourselves stories, like the important book”, and this is not what this article or what this statement is at all, but it is not also its saying because we tell ourselves, we must stop. She does not think this is a possibility.
For her, “We tell ourselves stories” is a diagnosis of the human condition, including its human condition. We are desperately emotional, even Joan Didion. We are desperately linked to the stories that we tell ourselves. And out of it, we tell ourselves a different story. This, for example, what education should do, or the value of living in pluralism.
All of these things are of great value specifically because they remind us that there are more stories than that we tell us, and that others live with their own stories, and that the goal is not to stop telling the stories, but expanding the story and thinking about any of them corresponds to the truth, and anyone has invented a person and gives him his experience.
What do you want to add this book to the way we think about Didion?
I found that most people really do not think about it as a person in Hollywood, even the people who know that she wrote some films. I do not want to make the book look like a prominent Hollywood person, because it was certainly many other things and did not spend its whole life making films or anything like that. But I think it is a new framework to look at her work and to see, in hope, a really coherent vision of what its main concerns was.
So I hope this shines for people who really love Didion, but also lights up for people who are not really interested in Dadis but they are somewhat interested in how we have reached what we are, and they can see that it is more than just a picture of a load bag, or the image we have in our minds.
This interview has been edited and intensified.
