Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The essays in “Personals” operate in a way that differs from the first section of the book. Rather than being journalistic explorations of a figure or cultural phenomenon, these works are by and large centered around Didion’s own mind, life, and philosophy (with the exception of “I Can’t Ge That Monster Out of My Mind,” which does ground its argument in an understanding of the contemporary Hollywood landscape). The first two essays in this section are in conversation, as they both concern Didion’s lifelong habit of keeping notebooks and the way that leads her to write about encounters with past versions of herself.

“On Keeping a Notebook” is a piece of meta-self-exploration that lets the reader into Didion’s writing process. Didion is exploring the reasons for keeping a notebook, which is admittedly an act of exploring and understanding the self. The idea that Didion is less concerned with factuality in her notebook is significant, as there’s a curious disconnect between Didion as a meticulous researcher in her journalism and Didion as a self-mythologizer who actively fostered an image of herself as a cool, somewhat-mercurial woman whose life was beset by anxiety. Instead of the facts, she lands on the idea of ”how it felt to me,” which leads her to the idea that even though the notebook is full of descriptions of others, it’s actually about her own experience. The girl in the plaid silk dress is Didion herself, seen from the outside thanks to the passage of time (134).

Didion concludes that the importance of knowing who she used to be is vital; she is more self-assured now, and if she doesn’t keep where she came from in mind, that person might have sway over her that she’d rather not allow. The ending of this essay, which suggests dissatisfaction or otherwise hints that all is not well in Didion’s life at the moment she is writing, is a further act of self-mythologizing. Didion is an expert at giving the reader a blunt, tantalizing bit of who she is while still maintaining the cool, intellectual distance that projects authority.

“On Self-Respect” picks up the notebook thread (though it was first published five years earlier, so this sequencing has more to do with artful arrangement than a chronological document of Didion’s thinking on these topics) and follows one of Didion’s recurring assertions: that to have a sense of self is to have freedom, particularly the freedom to hold independent thought and opinion. Didion equates self-respect to the idea of character because she believes that a person with self-respect has the grounding to accept moral and personal responsibility for their actions, while those without it attempt to find absolution or excuse for their behavior. Didion often equates this kind of thinking with her grandparents’ generation, which would have been the frontiers people who settled in California, as they had to withstand hardship that is unknown in her time. For Didion, this comes down to the habit of discipline as an everyday practice, and to not have it means to be in the thrall of other people’s feelings and opinions of you.

In “I Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind,” Didion wields her intellectual freedom by taking Hollywood to task for its lack of creativity. The 1960s was in interesting time for the film industry. The studio system was becoming less relevant as public interest in their style of filmmaking was dwindling, and the “New Hollywood” era that is usually considered to begin with 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde was still several years away. Didion’s essay arrives in this liminal space, when she sees that studio power has indeed faded but the people making movies are still leaning on it as an excuse for what she sees as a lack of originality. The “monster” of the title is Hollywood itself, the dictatorial system that used to set rigid guidelines of what could and could not be made, and Didion posits that the people who make movies have become self-policing, which has led to a few interesting filmmakers and many who are middling. It’s interesting that she singles out Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as essentially a tame picture, as it was heralded at the time as a scathing critique of the Cold War military, but she holds her most intense criticism for the people in Hollywood who hold the double standard of wanting to be free of the studio era while still clinging to the mores of that earlier model as a way to avoid risking failure.