Netflix documentary on American writer Joan Didion is a must-watch
The affectionate documentary has been made by Didion's nephew Griffin Dunne.
Here's a famous Joan Didion sentence: "We tell ourselves stories to live...". The new Netflix documentary, The Centre Will Not Hold, released on October 27, tells the story of this fiercely intelligent and glamorous American writer, the troubled times she lived in and the deeply personal losses of her husband and adopted daughter.
I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album years ago, in college. The two books showed how one could write a powerful history of the present, in essay form, with a focus on individual characters, and which was as subtle and nuanced as fiction.
She would later justify the use of the essay as reflective of the time: it wasn't possible in the late sixties to make a singular narrative; the times weren't cohesive like that.
Much later I'd read The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir of grief, of losing her husband, while her daughter struggles for her own life in intensive care: "Grief turns out to be a place that none of us know unless we reach it."
This affectionate documentary containing rare and exclusive footage, and made by her nephew Griffin Dunne, shows that Didion is more than the queen of doom, always looking into the abyss.
The documentary has its own story: Dunne shoots a trailer that goes viral, raises money on the crowd funding site Kickstarter, before the great disruptor Netflix finally snaps up the idea, enabling Dunne to make the film he wants.
It begins with Didion talking of an initial stage in her career when she is "paralysed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act." Dunne asks her about the snake motif in her writing, to which she replies: "Snakes were always on my mind, you could never avoid them."
Then she asks her nephew what he would do with snakes up in the country, to which he says he'd take a rake and kill it, to which she retorts, fading eyes still glinting with mischief, "Well, killing a snake is the same as having it."
The pitch perfect film is filled with wonderful observations and wild anecdote. Didion talks about the pervasive sense of sadness that surrounded her father growing up, going to the movies three or four times a week in the afternoons as a child, an experience that was behind her famous essay: "John Wayne: A Love Song".
At one point Didion wonders, "Don't you think so many people are formed by the landscape they grew up in?" Legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour recounts Didion's first job at Vogue, a hierarchical and quaint time when the editors wore hats and gloves while the assistants couldn't.
Didion says of her process: "I like to sit around and watch what people do. I don't like to ask questions."
This passive-active objectivity is on display in her classic essay on The Doors where she sits around the studio, while they record their third album Waiting for the Sun: "I counted the control knobs on the electronic console. There were seventy-six... There were paper bags half-filled with hard-boiled eggs and chicken livers and cheeseburgers and empty bottles of apple juice and California rosé. There was everything and everybody The Doors needed to cut the rest of this third album except one thing, the fourth Door, the lead singer, Jim Morrison."
When Dunne asks what drew her to the band, she says without hesitation: "Bad boys." According to Didion, "Rock 'n' roll people are in many ways ideal subjects to write about because they will lead their lives in front of you."
A journalist to the core, she recounts the time a source took her to a Haight Ashbury apartment where a five-year-old girl is tripping on acid: "Let me tell you what it was. It was gold. You live for moments like this if you're doing a piece." She pauses for a moment, before adding: "Good or bad." As she said on another occasion, writers are always selling out someone or the other.
She writes on the Central Park jogger's case, where a white female investment banker was assaulted in an unprovoked "wilding" attack: "It was just a natural story for me. Everything about the story was so alive."
Her career takes another turn when Robert Silvers, intrigued by her writing in Life magazine, asks her to write for the NYRB on something outside her "interest range." Didion goes on to write copiously on the prevailing situation in El Salvador, and on domestic American politics, her most memorable piece being the one on Dick Cheney, Bush and the Iraq War.
Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, also a writer, shared an incredibly close relationship over the years. "I could not not be with a writer. I didn't want to be with someone who didn't have patience with me."
The two wrote films together, even a column, where they never failed to run the final draft past each other.
From the Manson murders at Roman Polanski's residence to Didion's eccentricities (drinking chilled Coke first thing in the morning, wearing shades), this documentary is a warm and lasting visual portrait of one of the great living American writers, a heroine to many of us.
(A version of the piece appeared in Mail Today)