As we hurtle toward the end of this decade, every media outlet in the world is attempting to pinpoint the defining moments, events, cultural and consumer products, celebrities, etc., of the past ten years. Though I understand that such lists and articles are always subjective and written in order to be contentious and to foster discussion, I feel that they don’t always adequately capture the increasing disorder and complexity of the milieu. We still haven’t decided on what the last decade was called – the noughties, aughts, whatever – let alone to be able to describe the lasting cultural impact it will have. The increasing amount of choice in regards to what we read, watch or listen to, to how we inform ourselves via aggregated feeds, the proliferation of distinct niches means that the idea of cultural zeitgeist is almost obsolete. So, what better way to round out the decade with Joan Didion’s eloquent record of her own confusion over the meaning of the 1960s in The White Album.
Written in the late 1960s and early to mid 1970s, Didion reflects upon an American culture in turmoil, its understanding of itself torn apart by an unpopular war, mass murders, social discord, and a culture in upheaval. Though Didion herself manages to maintain her productivity, she is unable to reconcile this personal cohesion with the disruption of the era. This collection is strongest as Didion explores the complicated narratives of the time, the Manson murders, the civil rights movement and the music of the age.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. […] We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Didion also takes the time to investigate lesser known yet equally important aspects of culture and society – her ability to make the intricacies of the highway traffic system and water infrastructure engaging and enlightening way is astounding. She manages to impose on them a narrative of utter import to the structure of life. Her essay on Hollywood cinema is eye-opening, if I had read it while I was studying film theory at university I’m sure I would have dropped out or changed courses almost immediately. She logically undoes all of the prestige and glamour associated with the art:
Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place. A finished picture defies all attempts to analyze what makes it work or not work: the responsibility for its every frame is clouded not only in the accidents and compromises of production but in the clauses of its financing.
Didion’s understanding of the uncertainty and vagueness of a rapidly changing socio-cultural world is a timely reflection which offers a stark, though not entirely disheartening, way of looking upon our contemporary era as we too approach the close of a tumultuous decade.
1979, book review, December 2009, Joan Didion, non-fiction, The White Album