Writing a book about Joan Didion is a good way to discover that many people love her but far fewer people have read much of her work. In the five years since I started working on my book We Tell Ourselves Stories, I’ve surprised a lot of her admirers with things they didn’t expect: her conservative leanings, her John Wayne adoration, her political-commentary career, the fact that “We tell ourselves stories” is not meant as an inspirational slogan.
And while many love her celebrity image, far fewer know she spent much of her career in the movie business in one way or another. Some know about the movies she wrote with her husband, John Gregory Dunne—films such as The Panic in Needle Park and Play It as It Lays, the latter an adaptation of her novel. But often that’s where it ends, without delightful details like the Didion and Dunne origins of the Barbra Streisand version of A Star Is Born, or the couple’s made-for-HBO adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”
Early in my research, I was even surprised to learn that for a handful of years, Didion was a movie critic for Vogue. In January 1964, eight years after she started working at the magazine, an announcement appeared in the Movies column: a young writer named Joan Didion would be reviewing films, alternating weeks with another writer, named Paul Breslow. (Soon, Didion would briefly share the column with a pre–New Yorker Pauline Kael.)
In her introduction to her column, Didion started strong: “Let me lay it on the line: I like movies, and approach them with a tolerance so fond that it will possibly strike you as simple-minded.” Further on, she elaborated that she didn’t need her movies to be masterpieces—“neither L’Avventura nor Red River, neither Casablanca nor Citizen Kane.” She required them only to have what she calls “moments,” which translates, roughly, to points where she feels something.
Didion’s movie reviews have not yet been collected into books. That means that when I first read this column—with the help of a librarian at the New York Public Library, who in the pandemic’s early months jumped onto Zoom to help me access the Vogue archives—I was surprised. Knowing she’d been around New York’s literati for a long while by the time she took on this role, I assumed she had the taste of a young 1960s cinephile: a little snobbish, fond of underground and downtown cinema, obsessed with form and with auteur theory. She didn’t.
While not undiscerning, Didion had quite populist taste, and the more I read, the more often I disagreed. She declared that Billy Wilder, the director of Some Like It Hot, had “only the most haphazard feeling for comedy”; that Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World was almost so bad as to “not be worth mentioning”; that Sidney Lumet’s films were “dutifully rendered and almost totally unfelt.” She wrote at length about how irritating it was to watch a movie in which an actor played against type, how frustrating crime movies were when they became “cast studies of deranged individuals in a sane society” rather than old-school gangster films.
Like most movie critics, I disagree with critics—even the ones I think are great—all the time. So Didion’s film reviews intrigued me because they revealed a mindset about movies that you can trace through her later writing, heavily influenced by being brought up in the golden age of the big studios. To her (and to Dunne), movies were predominantly entertainment turned out by large-scale teams designed to tug at your emotions, rather than the gritty, artist-driven form that would come to dominate the New Hollywood.
In fact, they openly scoffed at the auteurist idea. In books such as Monster, Dunne wrote about the often absurdist grind of working with movie studios, which required writers to check egos at the door and not get too precious about anything. Screenwriting was a good way to pay the bills and hang on to that all-important Writers Guild health insurance while you were writing novels and journalism.
This mindset helped me see why Didion objected so strongly later in life to what she saw as the intrusion of a Hollywood framework into American political culture, personified by Ronald Reagan. To her, it spoke of a politics conducted all for show, all for appearances, stage-managed and directed and not at all operating how governance should.
Digging backward into her film criticism, I started to get, for the first time, where Didion’s distinctive outlook on public life came from. And all I wanted to do was read more of it.
Alissa Wilkinson is a film critic at The New York Times
