In 2020, film critic Alissa Wilkinson started working on a book project about Joan Didion. She wanted to explore the iconic essayist, reporter, novelist and playwright through an angle that hadn’t been considered much before — Didion’s connection to the film industry. That became the book, “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine.”
Wilkinson, who has been a critic at The New York Times since 2023 and wrote for Vox before that, was not interested in delving into Didion’s “persona or her celebrity, as much as what ties all her work together.”
“I came up with this notion of writing about her through the lens of Hollywood, both because she worked in Hollywood and wrote movies that have been produced and that we still watch today, but also because she wrote about Hollywood,” Wilkinson told Variety in a recent phone interview.
“We Tell Ourselves Stories,” which was published Tuesday, arrives just a few weeks before Didion’s archival materials, along with those of her husband John Gregory Dunne, become newly accessible to the public through the New York Public Library on March 26 (Wilkinson will appear there for a book event that same day). The archives contain Didion and Dunne’s script drafts, providing another avenue to learn about Didion’s work in film.
Wilkinson argues that Hollywood was often a vehicle that Didion used to explore a crucial idea: how narratives and storytelling function in our daily lives. The heart of the book is Didion’s eventual wariness of the impulse to create easy narratives about one’s life, about other people and about major political and cultural shifts — an inclination which can result in overly sentimental or nostalgic conclusions. That focus is evident in the title of Wilkinson’s book, taken from the opening line of “The White Album”: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Wilkinson follows Didion’s childhood growing up with John Wayne movies to her early career in New York writing for Vogue, her stint as a film critic who once had a column with Pauline Kael, to her and Dunne’s screenwriting careers in Los Angeles (they co-wrote 1971’s “The Panic in Needle Park” and the 1976 version of “A Star is Born”) and additionally, to Didion’s pivot as a political writer whose understanding of Hollywood shaped her observations of figures like the Reagans and Michael Dukakis.
Writing the book involved extensive research into Didion’s life and career, including unearthing her film reviews from the New York Public Library archives early in the pandemic — which were “these enormous, heavy, image-laden PDFs from Vogue 1954 or something like that.” Wilkinson also studied the significant political events Didion wrote about in order to contextualize the progression of her work.
Wilkinson spoke with Variety about Didion’s work as a film critic and screenwriter, what Didion understood about Hollywood and American politics and what she hopes the book provides to readers.
How much of American history and politics did you want to dive into? What appealed to you about covering those broader strokes as well?
It’s hard to extract the history of America in the 20th century in particular from the history of Hollywood. I hadn’t thought all that much about the fact that if I wrote this book, I was going to be writing about Ronald Reagan and John Wayne and Barry Goldwater, and how there’s crossover between politics and Hollywood with all of them. Same for John F. Kennedy. It felt like a very ripe way to think about topics that interest me a lot and see how they come together in the narrative, and Didion just presented as a really brilliant guide through that because it was what she actually was writing about.
I’m not even sure she realized exactly how much she was always writing about Hollywood, but I think it was the moment where I was reading an essay that she wrote called “Insider Baseball,” which is about the Dukakis campaign. And she’s basically writing an essay that says political campaigning has turned into movie production. It operates like a movie set. It works the way a movie set does, and that’s turning the presidency into just a performance that’s done for the cameras. And I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is perfect.’ So whether or not she was fully aware of how much it was a guiding metaphor in her work, I think it’s very obvious when you read through that lens.
How aware were you of Didion’s film criticism?
I wasn’t really. I mainly knew about some of the literary criticism that she had published in National Review and publications like that when she was young and living in New York. So it was a little bit of a surprise. The film criticism appears mostly in Vogue. It has not been republished anywhere. A lot of her books are made up of mainly articles she had written for other places, and then they got compiled into books. You kind of come to believe, when you’re digging through magazine archives in search of Didion articles, that everything she wrote ended up in a book. But it’s not true.
What did you learn from her film reviews?
I got them all, read them all, and started to sort of see what her philosophy was, if you can call it that, as a movie critic. I don’t think it’s something she aspired to be so much as fell backwards into. She had already been working at Vogue for many years before she picked up that movie column and wrote it for a few years. But it was really fascinating, because I don’t really agree with a lot of her reviews, and also a lot of them are of movies that, much like movies today, they kind of came out. Some people saw them, and then nobody’s ever thought about them again. A lot of it is funny because she does not take film especially seriously as an artistic medium, and I think that kind of persists throughout her life. But she’s very enamored by the business and by stardom and by the fun entertainment aspect of it all.
And then there was this one other little piece of it that I didn’t realize, which was, she wrote alternating columns with another writer. And so every other issue, she had a film review column. And for a while, the other writer was Pauline Kael in the years before she became the famous critic that she would become at The New Yorker. They did not like one another at all. They both thought the other was kind of ridiculous and silly, and they sniped at each other for many years afterwards, but it is funny that they shared a column for a while.
You write about how Didion had an almost strict, formulaic way of thinking about how film should be. Do you think Didion’s views on film evolved over her life?
It’s hard to tell because after she dropped writing film criticism for the Vogue column, she didn’t write much about movies directly. There’s a piece that I write about in the book that she wrote for The New York Review of Books, which is about Woody Allen. It was right at that height of Allen’s career when he was making “Manhattan” and “Annie Hall,” but she’s not really writing about the movies. She’s kind of writing about a way of thinking and believing about the world that she felt was in the Woody Allen films. Whenever she’s writing about anything related to the business later on, it’s often more about the culture that responds to the movies than about the movies themselves.
There is one other kind of irony, or maybe tension in here, which you can tell from her reviews, that she wasn’t a huge fan of anything that was experimental or underground or New Hollywood-driven, or at least that’s what it feels like from reading her reviews. Her reviews are very driven by a love for old school, Hollywood, Golden Age, actors playing types all the time and never playing against type.
But if you watch the first two movies that she and Dunn wrote that were produced, they are ‘The Panic in Needle Park,’ and then an adaptation of her novel, ‘Play It As It Lays,’ and they both play like the most New Hollywood movies you can possibly imagine. They’re about drugs and very disjointed, and they’ve got all these innovative filmmaking techniques, and feel like they were made for the counterculture. So it’s funny to see that contrast there. A little bit, I think, of that is just that that’s the kind of movie that people were making at that moment, and they wanted to make movies, so that’s what they did.
Could you talk about how her time in the film industry shaped her political observations, which you get into later in the book?
I’m not the first to note this, but she was very much a conservative, a Western conservative. She eventually left the Republican Party and registered as a Democrat because she hated that the California Republican Party had embraced Nixon and later Reagan, and she really had no use for the Reagans whatsoever, and that extends all the way back to their time when Reagan was Governor of California. So she’s idiosyncratic, but I think that’s true of all of her views.
But I think her views of American politics become more critical of the way the politics are done than the content of any particular ideology. And this becomes even more apparent the later into her work we get. She just felt like there was kind of a category confusion happening where show business is one thing, politics is a different thing. They have different goals. They have different aims.
Blurring show business into politics, which sort of happens because of the movies and as a corollary, television, is a problem because she knows intimately all of the stuff you have to do to make a movie or to make a TV show, and the way appearances matter, and the way you construct these iconographies and stardoms and focus groups. And when she saw that bleeding more and more into politics, she sounds not just concerned, but upset about it, and knowing that the end of that would be a hollowing-out of politics to be style over substance, and that that could only have bad ramifications for the future.
Do you see a way for American culture to try to get out of these cycles of sentimental stories and relying on nostalgia, given what you’ve researched about Didion’s writings about the topic?
Her statement that ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ it comes at the beginning of her essay, ‘The White Album,’ which is probably her most famous essay. I used a chunk of it for my title, because I felt like there’s multiple meanings there. But often I see that phrase quoted as if it is inspirational, like, ‘Oh, we tell ourselves stories, like writers matter,’ and that is not what that essay or what that statement is about at all, but it is also not her saying we tell ourselves stories, we got to stop. She does not think that’s a possibility.
To her, ‘We tell ourselves stories’ is a diagnosis of the human condition, including her own human condition. We are hopelessly sentimental, even Joan Didion. We are hopelessly tied to the stories that we tell ourselves. And to get out of them, we just tell ourselves a different story. That’s, for instance, what education should do, or that’s the value of living in pluralism.
All of those things are so valuable specifically because they remind us that there are more stories than the ones that we tell ourselves, and that other people are living with their own stories, and that the goal isn’t to stop telling stories, but to widen the story and to think about which ones match up with the truth, and which ones are ones that someone has invented and given to us to tell for their own good.
What do you want this book to add to the way we think about Didion?
I found that most people don’t really think of her as a Hollywood person, even people who know she wrote some movies. And I don’t want the book to make it sound like she was the consummate Hollywood person, because she certainly was many other things and didn’t spend her whole life making movies or anything like that. But I think it’s a new framework to look at her work and to see, hopefully, a really cohesive view of what her main obsessions were.
So I’m hoping it’ll be illuminating for people who love Didion already, but also illuminating for people who don’t really care about Didion but are kind of interested in how we got to where we are, and can see that she is more than just the picture on the tote bag, or the image that we have in our minds.
This interview was edited and condensed.
