Netflix documentary on Joan Didion aims to translate her integrity in prose to video
The unspoken goal of director Griffin Dunne's documentary on Joan Didion -- The Centre Will Not Hold -- is to translate the integrity that resonates in her literary works to video.
"I have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary," author Joan Didion says one hour into The Centre Will Not Hold, a new 90-minute Netflix documentary on her fascinating life. Didion has denied numerous requests from other filmmakers keen to make similar movies. And the perceptible intimacy between this iconic American writer and director Griffin Dunne who, incidentally, is her nephew, proves she waited for the right moment.
Dunne unobtrusively unveils Didion's extended insight on subjects that have yielded one of the most enduring bodies of work in modern American literature: the drug epidemic in San Francisco (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1966) and the Manson murders in the 1960s (The White Album, 1977); violence wrought by civil war in El Salvador as a result of America's Cold War era foreign policy (Salvador, 1982); and the nearly debilitating grief she endured after the deaths of her husband, writer John Griffin Dunne, and 39-year-old daughter, Quintana, in 2003 and 2005, respectively-The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011).
Didion's major literary works (as well as screenplays co-written with her husband) foreground the chronology of the film. Her reflections on why and how she undertook each project are accompanied by thoughts from writers and friends on Didion's impact on their own work as well as on American literature and culture. Together, they prompt the viewer to wonder what makes her work unique and attempt to pinpoint why her work will endure-which is inevitable.
For me, the answer is the integrity that the film reveals she brought to her working life. Integrity, her life shows, is required not only to endure, but also to produce honest work, and thus, ultimately, connect with the inner life of other human beings. Integrity defines Didion's work, and the unspoken goal of the film is to translate that ideal from prose to video.
In Self-respect, Its Source Its Power, an essay Didion wrote for Vogue magazine in the early 1960s, Didion puts it this way: 'Character, the willingness to accept responsibility over one's own life, is the source from which self-respect springs. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, one we made ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it, of course, depends on whether or not we respect ourselves.'
In this spirit, the film reveals that the 'examined life' of Joan Didion has produced literature immeasurably worth reading.
