Why we tell stories (and other impressions from Didion’s “White Album”)
Why do we tell stories? A high school English teacher might explain that stories are how human beings communicate with each other and share their feelings and ideas. We’ve told stories around the campfire and drawn them on the walls of caves, he or she might say. We’ve told them in books and newspapers, and we tell them on Twitter and Snap. It’s what we’ve always done and what we’ll always do.
For Didion, it’s a little different. I believe she’s saying that we humans tell each other stories to help make sense of all the crazy, random events that happen to us. We take the nonsensical, absurd things that happen every day and organize them into a beginning, middle and end and then we bake in a lesson or a moral. We soften the events’ rough edges. We put a little Vaseline on the lens. Why do we do this? In order to survive. The randomness of life would be too painful — too unbearable — if we didn’t.
In “The White Album,” Didion confesses that it became particularly hard to do this in late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The things that happened — the rise of drug use, the Manson murders — were so incongruous and irrational, that it became harder and harder to mold them into a story with a logical plot line and a happy ending.
I feel that Los Angeles was not just the setting of “The White Album” but was one of the main characters. This piece had to be set in LA. Perhaps something similar was brewing in 1960’s Cleveland, say, or Boise, but if Didion had set her story there it would not have had the same power or resonance. For the last 100 years LA has had a powerful hold on the American imagination. More than any city, Los Angeles has always been regarded as the place where magic can happen and dreams can come true. It’s where waitresses and bicycle messengers become movie stars. So, by setting “The White Album” here, her story’s message became much more powerful. It wasn’t just “Things don’t make sense anymore,” but “LA’s star-making machine is broken. Instead of cranking out perfect creatures like Doris Day, all it makes is monsters like Charles Manson.” And “This place used to be where magic happens, but now it’s where nightmares happen.”
What moment from the film resonated with me? It was the moment when Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, moved from New York to Los Angeles and Didion noted in a magazine article from that time that she and her husband had moved to avoid getting divorced. The film’s narrator, Griffin Dunne, asks Didion how her husband reacted to that section of the article and Didion remarks that he actually helped edit the piece. This moment made clear to me how Didion and Dunne viewed their writing: it wasn’t just an idle past time for them or a way to put food on the table. It was everything. Writing was their top priority. Everything took a back seat to their writing, even their relationship. I’ve learned many times through the course of my career that to truly succeed at anything — whether personal or professional — one must be passionate about it. Didion and her husband took their passion for writing to an unhealthy extreme.
