Sometimes there is something wonderful in my ‘New to Netflix’ inbox. Today it was “The Center Will Not Hold”, a light biography of Joan Didion by her nephew Griffin Dunne. I came to Joan through Griffin’s father, Dominick, and his striking prose in the pages of Vanity Fair, culminating in his coverage of the OJ trial. I was predisposed to like the documentary. What little I knew of her story was that of a wandering observer, one part educated elite, one part boheme. When I stumbled upon her “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” essay I read the mesmerizing first paragraph so many times it is now committed to memory: “The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.” For me she painted a picture of being “in the middle of it” but incredible “apart”.
The biopic was just what you’d expect. Some extra color on her high-end beginnings and peripatetic writings. In a well edited interview she always seemed more “observer” than anything else, even human. She would have been the observer on the Titanic not wanting to warn anyone and spoil the “event”. I loved finding out that Harrison Ford crashed at her place and did some renovating. The tragic back story of both husband and daughter added more fine shades to her essays and I look forward to watching the doc again in six months to soak in all that I missed in the first viewing.