Joan Didion and How Hollywood Shaped American Politics
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, writer Joan Didion famously chronicled California's culture and mythology. And her relationship with Hollywood is what film critic Alyssa Wilkinson explores in a new book called We Tell Ourselves Stories.

You can't fully understand Didion's later political reporting, Wilkinson says, without thinking in terms of her experience with the business with Hollywood. We'll talk to Wilkinson about Didion's concerns with an American political landscape that was molding itself after the movies. Join us.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. When the Los Angeles fires burned this year, many shared Joan Didion quotes or turned to her writings for solace, like Blue Nights, where she noted the season when the fire comes, or her essay on the Santa Ana winds, the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.

Didion, who died in New York in 2021, was a Californian, Sacramento-born, Berkeley-educated, and a longtime resident of Los Angeles, who often wrote of the landscape and mythology of the state. But Didion came to see Hollywood enchantment as an insidious force, especially when adopted by politics, as Alyssa Wilkinson argues in her new book called We Tell Ourselves Stories, a title that comes from one of Joan Didion's most quoted sentences.

Welcome to Forum, Melissa Wilkinson. Always great to have you on with us. Thanks so much, Mina. It's great to be here. So I want to ask you more about that title, We Tell Ourselves Stories. It comes from the first line of her essay collection, The White Album. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. And you say it's probably her most quoted and misquoted lines. How is it misquoted?

Well, often the way that I've seen it is used as kind of an inspirational slogan for writers and people who want to tell stories. I actually have a Google alert set for it because, of course, it's the title of the book. So I see every time someone posts about it on the Internet. And frequently it's like, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. So you should tell your story and share your story. And that's not really what Didion meant. She was more diagnosing something about the human condition, which is that

In the midst of chaos and sometimes things seem random or meaningless, we try to make sense of things by stringing them together into a story or trying to fit them into a story that we're telling ourselves. And sometimes this can be, you know, something that just helps us cope and sometimes it can be something a bit darker. So that's really where I drew the title from, in part because I think Hollywood has really furnished us

Americans in particular, but certainly the whole world with a lot of the stories that we use to make sense of the world. And sometimes that's for good and sometimes it's less good. Yeah, that darker side of what she likely meant is probably something that can be revealed in the very essays where she included it, like the White Album essay. Remind us what that was about. So the White Album essay is about living in Los Angeles from kind of the 60s

late 60s, so 68, 69. Didion was living there with her husband and daughter. And this was the time when there were just a lot of confusing things going on in the world. There were activist movements. There were, you know, the Manson murders happened in that summer. And so, you

you know, the essay is about her perceptions of what was going on, her reporting of what was going on and the way that people were trying to process this very confusing and chaotic time in American history. So the line is, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. And then immediately after that, she says, you know, we look for the sermon in the suicide and we look for

Yeah. And she wasn't a fan of counterculture, right?

No. The way they were trying to make sense of this. Yeah. No, not at all. I mean, in a previous collection, but an essay written not long before this one, you know, she wrote about San Francisco and the hippie children in Haight-Ashbury and

Sort of the chaos there. So, you know, this was something that she was constantly looking at and thinking about. But she, I think, would be a much more traditional person, even if she was very clear eyed about what was going on. Yeah. So she was pretty reserved and conservative, which came from her.

upbringing, right? At that time, anyway, at least when she was writing those essays, it came from her upbringing in California. Can you talk about that? How it came from being somebody who was from and was many generations from California? Yeah, so she was a fifth generation Sacramento girl. Her family, you know, a big part of her kind of personal mythology is her family coming

you know, across the plains and the mountains as pioneers and sort of setting out for California and eventually settling there and making their way, being very independent, being very self-sufficient and also quite conservative. She says she's the first member of her family who died

was not or who basically deregistered from the Republican Party in her case after Nixon was embraced by the California Republican Party and she just had no use for him. So so that's, you know, a big part of her life. And she was a very big proponent of Barry Goldwater all the way into 2001. She was still she wrote in an introduction to her book, Political Fictions, that if he had stayed the same age and still been running, she would have voted for him in every election since he lost.

So while she, you know, she never embraced and in fact, quite the opposite Nixon and Reagan and the kind of what they represented within the party. She I think her views remained very Western inflected conservatism quite largely.

libertarian, quite independent, and also quite traditional. And she loved John Wayne and John Wayne movies, right? Tell us about that and what he embodied for her. You know, John Wayne is a very important figure in the first third of my book because he was so important to her. I think the least common

critical thing she ever wrote was about him, which was an essay called John Wayne, A Love Song, which she wrote in the mid-60s after meeting him finally on set of a movie. But in it, she writes about being a child. Her father's in the Army Air Corps. She's moving around. And when she was about eight, she remembers seeing him in a movie that was playing on the base that they were at, Peterson Field in Colorado. And, you know, just like whatever he represented at that moment, so

was so important to her that she carried it with her well into adulthood. And there are John Wayne characters and John Wayne references that crop up all the time. She writes about John Wayne movies when she's working as a film critic. I think for her, it's

It seems like Wayne, you know, he represented that California heritage to her that a lot of his movies are about sort of the same things and someone who's in charge and is capable and is ready to do, you know, what needs to be done. But also she frequently mentions his promise to a woman in a movie that, you know, he'll

He'll build her a house at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow is the phrase that comes up repeatedly. And I think that kind of security and safety was something that she really longed for. And I think that appears throughout her writing, but it also really shaped her love of him and what he represented.

Yeah, and maybe never really went away. You talked about how she liked Barry Goldwater, and you suspect it was because he was like John Wander. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of harmony there. That's for sure.

Alyssa Wilkinson is showing us a new side of Joan Didion in her book, We Tell Ourself Stories, Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. And listeners, I'd love to know what Joan Didion has meant to you, what Joan Didion has taught you, how her work has affected you. And also about this idea of story, a story maybe you've told yourself that isn't actually true or a California story you once embraced.

You can tell us by emailing forum at kqed.org, finding us on Blue Sky Facebook, Instagram, or threads at KQED Forum, or you can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

I was also struck by how when she was a film critic, since you are a film critic, that she seemed to really like neat storylines, not necessarily that far away from the kind of storylines that John Wayne movies were. That's absolutely. I mean, she has a great love and she's in her late 20s, early 30s when she's working as a film critic for Vogue.

She has a great love for very traditional types of stories and very traditional types of Hollywood production. You know, you might have expected kind of a young woman

intellectual in New York City, which where she was living at the time to be really into the kind of cinephile underground scene or the French new wave or that kind of thing. And I think a lot of people think of her as kind of an elitist and might expect that. But actually, she writes very early in her first column that, you know, she doesn't really need a movie to be a masterpiece. She just wants it to have a big moment. And later on, she says, you know, one of her criticisms, for instance, is of directors who, you know,

have their actors act against type. So she's pretty mad when like a dramatic actor is doing a comedic role or vice versa, because she says, you know, we go to the movies to see that guy do that thing and not some other thing. So it's not the kind of opinions you would have gotten out of a lot of other movie critics at the moment who were kind of on the cutting edge. She's really writing out of her great love of movies as entertainment.

And as kind of big stories and not as maybe the kind of experimental films that were starting to bubble up at that time. So I got to ask, was it did you like her film criticism?

criticism? Well, you know, there's two sides to that answer. I don't agree with almost any of her opinions, which is great. You know, there's a lot of people who are working today who I feel the same way about, but I love and think they're great. But, you know, her turns of phrase are just absolutely Didion-esque. And she's writing in a very compressed format. I mean, it's literally a column in Vogue. So it's, you

And I have written short reviews like that. And it's very, very difficult. So it's amazing to see how well she's able to create something in that space that's just fun to read and often very, very funny. And she was a she was a hilarious writer, especially in her youth. I think she's underrated as a humorous writer.

We're talking about Joan Didion, who chronicled California's culture and mythology and soul, and about her relationship with Hollywood with Alyssa Wilkinson, a movie critic for The New York Times and author of We Tell Ourselves Stories, Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, and how her relationship with Hollywood really informed her analysis of politics and life.

Is there something that Joan Didion has taught you, a work that has affected you? Do you have a favorite quote from Joan Didion? Or is there a story that you've told yourself that isn't actually true, maybe about California even? And you may have strong feelings about her, good or bad. So we want to hear those too.

I got to ask you, we're coming up on a break, but what drew you personally to Dainene? When were you introduced to her? I'll give you the short version, which is when I hadn't read her at all until after college. And I moved to New York in 05. And the year of magical thinking had just come out, was all over the subways.

And so I just picked it up and read it. And as it turned out, it was right when my father suddenly was diagnosed with leukemia and passed away shortly thereafter. He was in his 40s. So there was a harmony there, obviously, between what I was feeling and her book.

And I just felt like I had never read anyone say those things about grief or put them in that way. And I found it very helpful. And so I kept reading her. And that's how we end up here today. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, Alyssa. Your father was...

I was able to dedicate the book to him. So I'm really grateful for that, at least. Yeah, 40s is young. Well, we will have more with Alyssa Wilkinson about Joan Didion and your reflections on her too. Stay with us. You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Listeners, do you have a connection to the work of Joan Didion? We're talking about it with Alyssa Wilkinson, who's written a new book called We Tell Ourself Stories, Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, about Didion's relationship with Hollywood and how it informed the way that she reported on politics and also the way that she saw Americans coping with difficult moments in life or inexplicable things.

as well. You can share your reflections and connections to Joan Didion and your feelings about her at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. And you can email forum at kqd.org or find us on our social channels, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, and threads. You can also tell us if there was something specific that you captured about California or a California story you tell yourself or once believed.

Rick writes, I love California's history as I do our nation's history, but I hate both politics at the federal and state level. So, Alyssa, you say, you know, Didion is perhaps...

best or most fruitfully understood through the lens of American myth-making in Hollywood. And I just love to better understand her history with Hollywood. Remind us of her connection to that world. Yeah, so I mean, it starts when she's a child watching John Wayne movies, and she often writes about her youthful experiences through books.

Hollywood vocabulary, film vocabulary, even I think one of her most famous essays is Goodbye to All That, which is about her moving to New York and then eventually moving away. And she uses all movie vocabulary to describe thinking about her memories and herself. So it's clear that that really shaped her.

the way that she thought about life in the world. And then after being in New York for a while, she got married to John Gregory Dunn. And about six months later, they moved to Los Angeles where his brother, Dominic Dunn, was already working as a TV producer. And they made a go of it as Hollywood screenwriters and,

And were successful. I mean, they had five produced screenplays and two teleplays, and then they worked as script doctors on a whole bunch of other films. Two of the films that people might know that they made were The Panic in Needle Park, which kind of launched Al Pacino's screen career.

And a star is born with Barbara Streisand's also up close and personal played as it lays. So they they wrote for Hollywood and they were kind of at the center of Hollywood society for, you know, a couple decades. And then when they moved back to New York, Didion became a political reporter for a while. And she writes about basically how American political culture was being subsumed by the logic of Hollywood productions and of entertainment culture.

sort of, you know, in harmony with a lot of media theorists of the time, but she's very forward thinking. And so you see that right to the end of her life. And that, I think, for me, was a really useful arc. You know, someone shaped by Hollywood and then joined Hollywood and then saw that her own world was being shaped by

by entertainment logic as well. Yeah, and her very keen sense of how Hollywood was being appropriated by politics. The fact that she was so deep in that world probably gave her a really good lens into it. Before we jump into that a little bit, Andy writes, can your guest talk about the gestation of the panic in Needle Park? Do you know?

Well, I know only, you know, some, which is that they and I should say the New York Public Library acquired their archives and they just opened two days ago. So I haven't even been in there yet to see what's in there. I think there's more information about all of this. But basically, there was a novel, The Panic in Needle Park. I'm forgetting the name of the author, but they knew him slightly and they picked up the novel. I believe John picked up the novel first. They read it.

and thought, well, this seems like a movie and nobody else is hiring us to write screenplays. This is early in their time in Hollywood. So they wrote it. And of course, Needle Park is in New York City. It's actually where the 72nd Street 23 subway is, if anyone knows where that is. And they moved out to New York again for a bit and hung out around there. There were a lot of people who were either drug addicts

addicts or sellers and just sort of immerse themselves in the culture to understand it and then wound up making this movie with two theater actors, Kitty Wynn and Al Pacino. Pacino had only been on screen once before and then, you know, the film ended up being one of the best of the kind of drug movies of its era. It's really devastating, but it's really incredible if you get a chance to watch it. It's quite a movie.

Let me go to caller Jennifer in San Francisco. Hi, Jennifer, you're on. Good morning. I'm trying not to get teary. Stories like this, things in magazines about Joan Didion, anything reminds me of my former sister-in-law, Meredith. This amazing, amazing creature from Australia that my brother married and then subsequently divorced. And she wrote her first book,

serious paper on Didion. It made her eyes light up. And I know this is not a particularly erudite observation. We talked about what Didion said, we tell ourselves stories in order to live.

And she firmly believed this. And I haven't seen her in 20 years because it's too painful for her to see her family because she wasn't our sister-in-law. She was our sister. She wasn't my parents' daughter-in-law. She was their daughter. And Gideon was one of her heroes.

Oh, well, Jennifer, thank you for telling us about Meredith. I so appreciate that. You can really hear all those connections in your voice. Didion, you know, her political writing really was very high level and deft. And I'm wondering if you could just explain to us, Alyssa, what were some of the

early examples of what you were describing earlier, sort of the logic of Hollywood sort of infecting politics.

Yeah, I mean, for Didion, I think it was encapsulated early in Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan as well. Reagan, you know, was elected governor and she just felt like this was an example of everything that had gone wrong in the party she'd already left. I think especially as a Sacramento native, she was

I believe the word she uses is like shocked and to a degree personally affronted by this because she saw that they both were thinking about politics as sort of an extension of show business that, you know, not that there weren't ideas there, but basically that, you know, a lot of the ways that you might run your political career had to do with the same ways you might run your entertainment career, designing it for the audience.

you know, for the cameras or getting the shot or having the right speech. And, you know, obviously that continued well into the 80s, but that she was writing about this all the way back in the 60s, which I think was a really important,

framework for her. And the place that I picked it up was in an essay that she wrote that's in political fictions from 88 called Insider Baseball, which is actually about Dukakis. But she's following political campaigns around as a reporter.

reporter. And instead of listening to the candidates, she's listening to what all the advisors and the handlers are saying and noticing how similar it is to the language that she would hear on set when she was on film sets and just starting to understand and articulate what's going on here more thoroughly.

Could you read a passage from your book, the part where she really is showing you how concerned she is about the figures of Nancy and Ronald Reagan and their embodying of sort of the Hollywoodification of politics? Yeah. So this is from or this is set in 1968.

While Didion saw in Nixon an opportunist who was nonetheless a true conservative believer, in the Reagans she saw a "vapidity, a fixation on image to the exclusion of anything else, that astounded and unnerved her." In 1968, for the Saturday Evening Post, she visited the governor's mansion the same day as a TV producer and a cameraman to spend the day with Nancy Reagan. "Pretty Nancy," as the title of the piece called her. It's probably the meanest thing Didion ever wrote.

She begins the essay with a blisteringly precise description of the morning in which the TV producer and cameraman work with Mrs. Reagan to get a perfect shot of her cutting a few a couple flowers from her garden as if it's a normal thing she does every day. Mrs. Reagan has the beginning actresses habit of investing even the most casual lines with a good deal more dramatic emphasis than is ordinarily called for on a Tuesday morning on 45th Street in Sacramento, she writes, soaking in the sarcasm.

The obvious point of this portrait is to needle Nancy Reagan, a woman living a kind of childish daydream circa 1948, as Didion puts it. But there's a deeper reason Didion is interested in the Reagans, which she slips into the middle of the essay. Mrs. Reagan tells her that politics is rougher than the picture business, because you do not have the studio to protect you. The studio.

The Reagans were treating political office like a movie production, with the smiling geniality that they'd always displayed. They were Hollywood people, come to political power, and their playbook was a Hollywood playbook.

That means it came with all the same silliness that Didion and Dunn had seen and written about in the industry. The way people dress, sets, and use lingo, and were forever putting together deals and repeating lines written for them by someone else. By writers, in fact, who frequently had nothing new to say at all except whatever brought in the paycheck. Show business, all glitz, little beneath.

That's Alyssa Wilkinson reading from her new book, We Tell Ourself Stories, Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, which includes long analysis of our political landscape being molded after the movies and Joan Didion's concerns about how politicians and an electorate came to value story over substance. Let me go to caller Don and Pinal next. Hi, Don. You're on.

Hi, okay, thank you for this. This program, this hour meets the moment. This is more, this is better. Let me just say this.

I'm a child of the 60s from the East Coast, and I came to California to seek a California dream in the 70s. So my political figure akin to what Joan Didion was doing with Barry Goldwater and even John Wayne, and maybe my political figure growing up in the 60s was not Malcolm X or Martin Luther King as an African-American from an African-American working-class community.

But Muhammad Ali, you know, Muhammad Ali in the sense that his words and actions embodied each other, reflected on each other. You know what I mean? Yeah. We know whatever he said.

you know, he met the moment, you know, nobody would believe you, right? Okay, that's all I got to say. Well, Don, thanks. I appreciate that that's what this has brought up for you and hearing that and the importance of Muhammad Ali to your, you know, personal mythology, I think is the way that you put sort of John Wayne's importance to Joan Diddy and Alyssa Wilkinson. So that passage you read was when

Reagan was governor. Yes. And then he becomes president. Yes. So the two, Hollywood and the federal government, just became fully intertwined, I'm sure, in Joan Didion's mind. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting because she really writes about Reagan as a kind of a B-movie president. Yeah.

who created arcs and emotional moments that she had written about loving emotional moments in the movies. But now it's happening in politics, and her perspective is that we should be thinking in politics, not just feeling. And it's funny because she goes on. I recommend everyone read Political Fictions. I think it's a terrific collection. But she goes on to write about Bill

Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and other figures who she has no use for, Newt Gingrich. But she writes about them as sort of the TV presidents, people who are doing soundbites for the television, which, you know, really leads you to wonder what she would have written about today's

political situation. But, you know, she didn't. But there's still a lot there, I think, to chew on and a lot that's instructive for our moment, too. Yeah. Actually, could you talk more about her writing about Newt Gingrich and his awareness of the power of C-SPAN and how he used it? Yeah. I mean, her. So it's one of my favorite essays in political fiction because it's actually a book review kind of about Gingrich's books.

And it almost entirely is just quotes from his books, but it manages to be kind of a devastating takedown, which is a very Didion way to write a pan. But she does write about the way that he positioned himself within movie mythology. And of course, what we know of Gingrich is that he's the first figure in American politics, really, to figure out that

C-SPAN might be a way to get into people's homes. So, you know, Congress would go home for the day and he'd stick around and just start talking to the cameras instead of letting them roll on an empty congressional chamber. And he knew that it didn't matter that there was nobody in the room because on TV, all you could see was him.

And by the time other people kind of caught on to what he was doing, it was a little too late. So you can see it as an early incarnation of, I think, really cable news commentary on all political sides. But he just, he was savvy about it. But she also had no use for him at all and thought that, you know, he was kind of both full of himself and had no ideas in his head. And given Joan Didion's capacity for a takedown, the fact that she never wrote about Trump

Trump, right? Yes. But you imagine that that

She completely anticipated him even beforehand, right? I think so. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I can only guess at what she would write, but given her arc from movie logic to TV logic, I think perhaps the logic, if I were to extend her ideas, perhaps the logic of today is sort of a divide between reality television, where you kind of create conflict in order to generate conflict,

you know, sort of a moment to watch and get people talking. But it's designed to go viral. So the kind of social media virality where we create things, it doesn't even matter if they're real. They just sort of appear to be real and then people want to talk about them. And that seems like kind of the logic

that underlies a lot of what we see going on today, particularly, but I would say not only in the Trump White House. So that's, I hope, I'm sure that if she was with us, she would be writing something completely different that I haven't even thought about because she's very good at thinking outside the box. But that's certainly the extension of the arguments that she was always making. Yeah. Did you ever meet Joan Didion?

I didn't. I once saw her and I think it was it was like 15 years ago. She was at the New York Review of Books anniversary gala thing that they did at at Town Hall in New York. And she was kind of the last reader there.

And everybody kind of knew we were there to hear her read. And she came out on the stage. She was very small. And she, I remember she was wearing a very long sweatshirt. And she sat down and she read from her essay, Sentimental Journeys, which is about the Central Park Five case, speaking of Trump, who was involved there. And then, you know, she went off stage. And so, yeah, no, I never met her. But I know a lot of people who did and have a lot of great stories that kind of

make it clear that she was a very warm and funny person who loved to entertain, even though I think people often talk about her as being kind of cool and aloof from her writing. Yeah. And then I am curious how you knew you wanted to write about Didion's relationship with Hollywood and then that relationship to politics and political reporting. Because as you say, I think this is not an area that was as deeply, has been deeply explored.

Yeah, I mean, over 20, well, I guess 15 years at the time, this is kind of a five year project for me. I had written about her books as they were coming out. And you know, the film about her that Griffin Dunn made, he's her nephew. And I had admired her as a critic and a writer. But when I sort of had the idea, my agent and I had the idea that maybe I might want

want to write something about her, I said, give me a couple months so I can think about an angle because as a critic, my goal is, I mean, a lot like hers, to say something that hasn't been said before as much as possible. And

And I knew there was this really well researched, very extensive biography of her already from 2015 by Tracy Daugherty. And so I didn't want to just write a biography that seemed pointless. And it realized after a few months of research suddenly that there was this movie metaphor throughout all of her writing. It actually appeared to me like on the page suddenly reading that essay, Insider Baseball.

And then once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. And I was tracing it through all of her work and realized this is an obvious angle on her that hasn't really...

been explored and it was one that made a lot of sense for me to explore as a movie critic so that was a really exciting moment for me and that's how I got there. Listeners have you explored Joan Didion and have something you want to share about what she means to you? You can email forum at kqed.org find us on our social channels at kqed forum call us at 866-733-6786 866-733-6786 more with Alyssa Wilkinson after the break this is Forum I'm Nina Kim.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Joan Didion died in New York in 2021, but she was a Californian who famously chronicled California's culture and mythology and worked in Hollywood. And we're talking about how her relationship with Hollywood informed her analysis of the world of politics, of life. Alyssa Wilkinson has written about it in a new book called We Tell Ourself Stories, Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. Alyssa is a movie critic for The New York Times.

Listeners, what has Joan Didion taught you or how has her work affected you? Do you have a favorite quote or story about Joan Didion or maybe a story that you've told yourself about California that you're rethinking now? You can email forum at kqed.org. You can call us at 866-733-6786 or post on our social channels at kqedforum.org.

Laura writes, when I was a girl growing up in Iowa, I read Play It As It Lays. There is a scene in it where a woman is driving on the freeway while cracking a hard-boiled egg on the steering wheel, followed by the sentence, no matter what, she never forgot her body. This made me envision California as a vain place with terrible traffic, and I vowed I'd never live in such a place. And yet, here I am.

Let me go to call her. Sorry, did you want to say something? Oh, just that scene appears in the movie as well. And every time I talk to people about that movie, that's the scene in the book. That's the scene they bring up. So it clearly means a lot to think of an egg on the steering wheel. Yeah. Let me go to Rose in San Rafael. Hi, Rose. You're on. Good morning. Thank you for having me on. Listen, I...

in my life, my trajectory. I'm not a huge reader of Joan Didion, and your guest has really picked my interest in picking up some of her, obviously, extensive works. But the question I have goes to the heart of, did Joan Didion really ever be any value in life?

politics or in truly finding leaders who are real. I mean, she dug deeper than just about anybody else. And, you know, the other person that I truly admire is a speechwriter named Peggy Noonan, who was an early influencer before they called them that. So in other words,

does she ever believe that politics works? Does it work for women? I mean, she clearly thought of like someone like Ronald Reagan's wife, Nancy, as a caricature kind of. Rose. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Was, was Joan Didion optimistic? Hope we'll see value. Optimistic.

Optimistic maybe is the wrong word. I think she was a realist and had a pretty moderate view of human nature, I would say. She definitely did see the value in politics, though, which is part of why she was so frustrated when she watched politics kind of turning into entertainment, because to her it was...

subverting the whole democratic process. She has an essay where she writes about how polling, and it was the same kind of polling that the movie studios would do, how polling had basically reduced the electorate

and the Electoral College down to like a little slice of people for whom you just had to fine tune the message so they'd vote for you. And this to her was a real problem because it wasn't what she at least felt like she saw in older leaders who were who had a message that they were genuinely invested in and were trying to get out there. She just felt like it was more of a of a power game and a stardom game, I guess. Yeah.

And that that was her frustration. But certainly, you know, for her, the function of government should be to ensure the public good. And that that is something that it is capable of doing, but not if the kind of sensationalism and celebrity of Hollywood takes it over.

When did Didion go through her own political transformation? Was it exactly when the party embraced Nixon or was it more of an evolution or that was the start of it? She says it was when the party embraced Nixon. I mean, she actually was living in New York City and flew to California to vote against him in the primary. That's how invested she was in the process at that moment.

But I think that you can kind of see her questioning every orthodoxy that she had inherited increasingly throughout her life. And she has little tiny essays that ran in the Saturday Evening Post about like watching police brutality, which is an essay that hasn't been collected, but it's a very...

Interesting one to read or, you know, experiencing kind of seeing that the story that she told herself about California's independence from the federal government was actually not true at all. And by the end of her life, this is something I find really fascinating.

about her. She's writing books. She wrote Where I Was From about reevaluating all of her received ideas about California. It's a really enlightening book, but it's also, I think, rare to find an author kind of nearing the end of their life, rethinking all of the things that they've always believed their whole life and then writing about it and publishing it. So, you know, that's a big part of her story as well. Yeah. Can you talk about some of the things that she said about

as she was questioning, as you say, what she had been taught about California and what she had come to really embrace.

Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of things in that book, and I think it's really worth reading. But there's two that kind of stuck out to me. One was that she talks about a speech she gave at her eighth grade graduation that was called, like, Our California Heritage or something like that. And she said, when I read it now, it's very clear to me that it had never occurred to me that, you know, Westward expansion was not an unmitigated good for everybody. Right.

that there were people who were caught in the crosshairs, there were people whose lands were taken away, there were native people who were brutalized in the process. And that was a story that she had to rethink. And then also there is this one about independence from the federal government. So she says that her mother, who had passed a few years before she wrote the book,

was very proud that, you know, her family had never taken any money from the federal government, would never need to do that. And she said, and I just kind of realized that, like, actually we had. We were in the military. Like, our lives were subsidized by the federal government. And furthermore, you know,

A lot of people who were very proud of having never had a stitch of money from the government had actually benefited from various legislation and subsidies that came in after World War II. You know, whole towns that were built basically because people had money from GI bills. So that, you know, that's something that she really appreciated.

butted up against and it sort of stopped her short and made her write a whole book about it, which I think is remarkable. It's really remarkable to see that in a writer in their 60s and 70s who's been famous for that long.

Rob writes, Joan Didion and Eve Babbitts had a frenemy relationship, especially regarding their viewpoints on California and Los Angeles in particular. Didion took a more critical view of L.A. as a waste. Lannan Babbitts, an L.A. native, wrote about the wonder and beauty of L.A. They ultimately represent both sides of the same coin. Are you able to speak about their relationship?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a funny thing that you run across whenever you're doing Didion research because Babbitt's was always around for a stretch of her time in L.A. They Joan and John had a house on Franklin Avenue and in L.A. and they had a lot of parties and there were a lot of rock stars and celebrities and actors and people. And Eve was there as well.

And then Joan and John also basically edited one of one of Babbitt's books. So that it's a funny relationship to look at and just sort of see that and see that there was there's a wide disparity, I think, between the kinds of lives that they lived and the kinds of perspectives that they took on what they were doing as writers.

And certainly they read nothing like one another at all. But it is true that, you know, Babbitt's is very I would say she sees L.A. through sort of star shaped sunglasses and Didion doesn't see anything through rosy glasses other than John Wayne.

And then, you know, eventually the, you know, Didion actually spent more of her adult life, I think, by the year in New York City than she did in L.A. So she was very much one of the

the kind of transplants who comes in to write movies and then leaves later on. But their relationship is a subject that comes up repeatedly throughout the research when you're looking at that period in their lives. Well, Marjorie writes, what comes to mind now is a passage where Didion writes about how California agriculture promoters said that the San Joaquin Valley could become a highly productive food source just by adding water.

Then Didion juxtaposes that with a fairly detailed description of all the complicated pumping, plumbing, and power that goes into transporting water from the Delta and Northern California to just add water to the San Joaquin Valley. It's highly engaging, hilarious, and horrifying at the same time. She was a great writer. Yeah. Yeah, it's absolutely true. Let me go to caller Dave in Mountain View. Hi, Dave. You're on.

Yeah, good morning. When I woke up just a few minutes ago, I heard you talking about Reagan reminded me of what I read over at Mission College in a book called Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece about the Roman emperors. They used to go around holding plays with themselves as the stars, people like Caligula and stuff. It's the same thing.

And Zelensky, I just learned on YouTube a week or so ago that before he became president of Ukraine, he was actually the star in a TV series about the president of Ukraine. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's an insightful take, Dave. It makes me wonder, Alyssa, just in terms of like,

Given this intertwining, this adoption of Hollywood norms in the way that we evaluate our candidates, do you see a way out?

Did Joan ever talk about a way out of this? I mean, at some point you reach, I mean, this is my opinion, but at some point you kind of, you know, the box has been opened. Pandora's box has been opened. But it, you know, a lot of it, I think, is due to the fact that we want to relate to our politicians and our public servants through whatever means.

is the way that we relate to everyone else. And right now that is through the logic of fans and influencers and parasocial relationships and technology and screens. You know, so this has been a long, long rolling thing. Certainly McLuhan and Postman were writing about it in the middle of the 20th century. You know, and then, you know, prior to that, it was newspaper stories or stops on a campaign trail or songs that we would sing about

About the candidates. So American politics has always been pretty popular, I would say, and always related through whatever the media of the day is. And now this is where we are. And the only way to get rid of it, I think, would be if we either all wise up and throw out all the apps or if we find a new way through it that doesn't depend on easily manipulatable methods.

images and videos and screens. Let me remind listeners, you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Well, Marjorie writes, I was, oh, this is also another comment from Marjorie. I was first introduced to Didion's slouching towards Bethlehem and most love the essays that touched in some way on her Sacramento heritage, in part because my heritage is also from Sacramento. And I later learned one of her ancestors was co-storekeeper with one of my ancestors. Yeah.

That's awesome. Yeah. As you said, a fifth generation Sacramento and Joan Didion. What do you think she would think of Hollywood today in the way Hollywood tells stories, which has changed so much? I mean, we talked earlier about how she loved a neat story and expected certain things from a Hollywood film. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's an interesting question because she actually rarely writes about Hollywood itself and the Hollywood products. She's more interested in sort of the culture around it, the people, the business, the wheeling and dealing, the way things get made. But that does kind of bring to mind what I think is most interesting about the whole system now is that it's really predicated on

having to work across platforms right so like you can't just make one movie and then be done you have to make like five of them and then there has to be like two tv shows and some stuff on tiktok and then you have to send the the stars out and they have to kind of do like these influencer style videos and you know there's all these extra pieces to it and i think that her her most

Interesting notions are certainly around celebrity in the 21st century. I write in the book about her essay on Martha Stewart, which ran in The New Yorker in 2000. And it's really about making a person a brand and then how people relate to that brand, which I don't think is accidental. I think she's also writing a little bit about herself there. But it's really interesting to see that. And of course, I've been talking to people about this and we've been talking about how

To be a celebrity today, you can't just be on TV. You have to also have a like a liquor brand and a charity and like some kind of a maybe you have like a record that you recorded and all of these different things. And that I think is really revelatory of what we expect out of our famous people now and how you become famous in the first place. Yeah.

You also wrote about Marvel movies and their relationship with the U.S. military. You draw comparisons to Didion's concerns about post-9-11. Can you talk about that, too? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting to read her writing after 9-11. It's very much about...

fixed ideas. That's the name of her book about America after 9-11. And she it's a phrase that comes up a lot after 9-11. Just the idea that when tragedy strikes, we try to make sense of it in different ways. And one of them she sees, particularly in New York after 9-11, is the

there's only a small subset of things you can say or interpret the events through and you can't sort of make them bigger. You can't raise any questions. You know, you'll get excoriated for it. And also that that is a product of people really feeling unsafe and chaotic and wanting some kind of supernatural thing to save them. And that's where I think, you know,

you know, the Marvel movies or more broadly, the superhero genre comes in. You know, the Marvel Cinematic Universe didn't kick off till 2008, as we know it with Iron Man, which is a very, very geopolitically complex movie in contrast to later installments in the universe. But even before that, Spider-Man was supposed to come out that year.

or it did come out right after 9-11 the following year. And the ads were already running and had images of the Twin Towers and destruction. And they were pulled immediately after September 11th.

And when the movie came out, it was a massive hit. And I don't think it was just the fact that it was a fun movie to watch. I think it also really satisfied some need that people had at that moment to feel secure. And here's this kid from Queens saving us all. So that's and that's a repeated story.

throughout those movies and the Marvel movies is actually a lot of echoing of 9-11 imagery being kind of repurposed and reread through heroism and the man falling out of the building. But now the superhero sweeps in and grabs them. And, you know, I don't think I think Didion

She doesn't write directly about those, but she does write about the kind of folk heroes that we need and how for each age we invent our own folk hero that fits our idea of what a man of the people would be to save us. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Well, now, you know, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunn Archives have opened at the New York Public Library. What do you think about that?

what more we might learn from Joan Didion. I'm wondering about also if you're going to go and check your own thesis against those types of things that are there. Well, so I'm personally very excited because I know there are a bunch of screenplays in there. And I don't think it's all for movies that I know what they are yet. So I'm excited to go look at them. There's also a letter from John Wayne. There's a letter from Billy Wilder. There's a lot of like,

Stuff in there that I think builds out Didion's personality a bit, like writing from when she was very young or her and John's day books and planners, which they kept very meticulous records of their days. And you kind of see the humor and the funniness there. But mostly I'm just excited to go in and see Didion.

more of what I hopefully discovered in my research and also for other people to discover too. Yeah. Well, thank you for the book, Alyssa. We Tell Ourself Stories, Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine by Alyssa Wilkinson, movie critic for the New York Times. Really appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much. It's been great to be here.

And thank you, Caroline Smith, for producing this segment. Forum is also produced by Mark Nieto. Francesca Fenzi is our digital community producer. Jennifer Eng is our engagement producer. Susie Britton is our lead producer. Our engineers are Danny Bringer, Christopher Beal, Brendan Willard, and Christopher Greiley. Our interns are Brian Vo and Jesse Fisher. Katie Spranger is operations manager of KQED Podcasts. Our vice president of news is Ethan Tovan-Lindsey. And our chief content officer is Holly Kernan. I'm Nina Kim. Have a great weekend.

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