Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture
Ep. 277 Alissa Wilkinson - We Tell Ourselves Stories
This conversation with Alissa Wilkinson is a fascinating exploration of how the stories we tell ourselves - through Hollywood, through politics, through the media - shape the very fabric of our culture and our history. Wilkinson's work on the iconic writer Joan Didion provides a powerful lens to examine how the narratives we construct, often unconsciously, can profoundly influence the way we see the world and the decisions we make as individuals and as a society. What's so compelling about this discussion is the way it peels back the layers on these deeply ingrained stories - the myths of the American West, the heroic narratives of World War II, the celebrity-driven politics of the Reagan era. Wilkinson shows how these cultural touchstones don't just reflect our values, but actively shape them, often in ways that obscure uncomfortable truths or justify harmful actions. In an age where the very notion of objective reality is under assault, this conversation reminds us of the vital importance of interrogating the stories we tell ourselves. Because the stories we choose to believe - whether about our national identity, our political leaders, or our own personal histories - have real consequences. They determine how we see the world, how we make decisions, and ultimately, the kind of future we create for ourselves. So I encourage you to listen closely, to wrestle with the questions Wilkinson raises about the power of narrative, and to consider how the stories you've internalized might be shaping your own understanding of the world. It's a conversation that gets to the heart of what it means to be human in a complex, ever-shifting cultural landscape.
Alissa Wilkinson is a movie critic at the New York Times and the author of "We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine," which will be published by Liveright on March 11, 2025.
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Being able to trace things you hear now coming out of people's mouths back to something people were saying 100 years ago, can give you a kind of perspective that we really sorely need. We just don't have that kind of perspective anymore. You Joshua,
Joshua Johnson:hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, this conversation with Alyssa Wilkinson, a film critic at the New York Times, is a fascinating exploration of how the stories we tell ourselves, through Hollywood, through politics, through the media, shape the very fabric of our culture and our history. Wilkinson's work on the iconic writer Joan Didion provides a powerful lens to examine how the narratives we construct, often unconsciously, can profoundly influence the way that we see the world and the decisions we make as individuals and as a society. What's so compelling about this discussion is the way it peels back the layers on these deeply ingrained stories, the myths of the American West, the heroic narratives of World War Two, the celebrity driven politics of the Reagan era. Wilkinson shows how these cultural touchstones don't just reflect our values, but actively shape them, often in ways that obscure uncomfortable truths or justify harmful actions in an age where the very notion of objective reality is under assault, this conversation reminds us of the vital importance of interrogating the stories we tell ourselves, because the stories we choose to believe, whether about our national identity, our political leaders or our own personal histories, have real consequences. They determine how we see the world, how we make decisions, and ultimately, the kind of future we create for ourselves. So I encourage you to listen closely, to wrestle with the questions Wilkinson raises about the power of narrative, and to consider how the stories you've internalized might be shaping your own understanding of the world. It's a conversation that gets to the heart of what it means to be human in a complex, ever shifting cultural landscape. So join us as we discover the stories we tell ourselves. Here's my conversation with Alyssa. Wilkinson, Alyssa, welcome to shifting culture. Excited to have you on thank you for joining
Alissa Wilkinson:me. Yeah, absolutely thanks, and I'm so glad to be here. Yeah, it's
Joshua Johnson:going to be a great conversation. I love your book. We tell ourselves stories. It's a fantastic read. I think everybody needs to go out and get it. It's very illuminating. But before we get into the book and and culture and Hollywood movies. Joan Didion, I'd love to hear a little bit from you and your story, and I think that that helps shape where you're from, I know you grew up, you were homeschooled, you didn't watch very many movies, which is surprising to be a film critic now. And you ended up getting an IT degree. Moved to New York through financial, technology type of work. And at that time, when you moved to New York, you were able to go down the street to a small church where there were a lot of artists and people who are taking art seriously and their faith seriously, and saying that, hey, you could actually have some faith and you could do art. How did that experience shape you?
Alissa Wilkinson:Well, it was interesting. It was an interesting moment in my life, because I had, I had been in college for technology, and that was sort of what I assumed I was going to be doing with my career. And it was the early aughts. And so, you know, that was sort of the moment of the.com boom, as we used to call it back then. And so for me, you know, that I just thought was kind of what you did if you were trying to, like, have a job and pay your rent and but I, you know, was always a big reader, and I was brought up playing music, and my interests have always been far more in the era of or in the area of Arts and Humanities. Not that I was like, writing a lot when I was a kid, or something like that, but that was just where I wanted to be. And so having ended up at this church, which I just ended up at, basically because my roommate was going to it, and it seemed like, you know, the place to that I should try, and it was, it was right down the street, which was really nice. I met a lot of people who were professional artists, and, you know, or like, kind of professionally creative, or they had, like, a pretty big side interest that was, you know, they write plays, and, of course, now they're, like, a big deal. But back, you know, this is 20 years ago, so it demonstrated to me that there was a bigger world, I think, than I had known. Yeah, and that it was a place where, you know, those interests had validity, and that there was a lot to explore, and there was a lot to learn that I hadn't learned, and I was really attracted to that. And at the same time, I think I really was bored at my job. I was financial technology. It was before the housing recession hit a couple years before then. So, you know, it was big business, but it was just very corporate, and it was very boring, and I just didn't resonate at all with what I was doing. It didn't feel like it had a purpose. I was a cog in an enormous multinational corporation wheel. So sort of as a result of those things, and as a result of being in New York, where I had the opportunity to be going to museums and movies and shows, I was able to kind of expand, I think, by my frame of reference. And I ended up a couple years in applying to graduate school and going and that was sort of this start of something for me, while also basically beginning to write as a freelancer, because I just didn't know what else to do with my time. I remember telling someone I felt like I was disappearing, and writing was a way to not disappear,
Joshua Johnson:growing up the way that that you did, which is is fairly insular, and then going into New York and seeing this, the the big world, and seeing what what was out there, and then actually looking at art and movies and film and music and seeing what the the world was trying to say. How did you start to get a critical eye and seeing the movements of culture that were shifting and happening because of what was being said through the arts.
Alissa Wilkinson:Sure, you know, I don't really know all the answers to that. It's a funny you know, people will often be like, Wow, that must been, like, a real shock or something. I'm like, not, not really, I was just what I was doing. I mean, you know, if you are, if your friends are people who take art seriously, which is what was happening, then, you know, you go to a movie, and then you talk about it afterwards, and that's all criticism is, you know, I started dating my now husband, and he had gone to film school and was working in the business, but film school is very different from film criticism, even though there's obviously some overlap there. So we would go to movies and we would talk about them, but I think a lot of it was just reading. I would just go to bookstores and buy things that were on the tables and read what other people had written, or my best friend in college when we graduated, just sort of gave me a subscription to The New Yorker for reasons I don't completely understand. He was not like a big reader himself, but I read that, and I was like, wow, this is this is interesting. And I think for a lot of people, it's just I really was thinking about this the other day, and I just don't think I knew that you could think about a movie that way, that you know what was on the screen, could make something there was that there was something interesting to say about the form of the movie in addition to whatever the content was, partly because I didn't watch a lot of them, and partly because so much of the conversation, particularly in Christian media at the time about movies was very directed at did we agree with the content or not, and picking it apart for those questions. And that's just not interesting. Questions are useful and or productive. And I think, I think most people do kind of approach art that way, whether or not there in a religious framework or not. You know, you you read a lot of what people post on the internet about a movie or a painting or a whatever, and it's all about the content, and we just sort of lose the form. So I that was sort of the thing that was most interesting to me. And of course, again, when you're in New York, you get some perks that you wouldn't elsewhere. We have a thriving repertory film scene, best one in the world, I can say that for sure. And on top of it, we have, you know, you very generally, you'll just be at a movie on a Friday night, and then the director is there for a Q and A afterwards. So you're just kind of absorbing. And I've always been a pretty good sponge, so I think that was a lot of a lot of it. And then when I went to graduate school, I was learning about things that other people had studied in undergrad, and I had never even I didn't know that, like, Cartesian was the adjective that referred to Descartes, and I wasn't sure I could have completely told you what Descartes steel was. But just learning that, like, oh, people have been thinking about esthetics and beauty and all those things for a really long time, sort of activated the part of my brain that was interested in that to begin with. So
Joshua Johnson:you go back all the way, I mean, you go back all the way into the 30s. In your book, we tell ourselves stories, which is essentially about the stories that we we tell. As society through the lens of Hollywood, but you write through the lens of and the life and the work of Joan Didion. Why did you choose Joan? Why is she a good representation for us and for you to tell this story?
Alissa Wilkinson:Yeah, she came first, actually. So I was really my previous book, salty, which came out in 2022. Is a collection of essays, I guess, about interesting women and what we can learn from them through the lens of food. Just that was the only book I could conceive of writing. It was kind of a pandemic project, and it was fun. And as I was working on it, I got an email, and this is in like, may 2020, so wild times, I got an email from an agent, which is happens occasionally when you, you know, write for the internet, and she was like, Do you have representation? Would you want to have a meeting, you know? And I didn't have an agent, so I, we met on Zoom, of course. And I, you know, I sort of said, Oh, I don't know. I don't really love writing books, which is still a little bit true, although, obviously it's what we do as writers. But, you know, I've always thought I might write this book or that book, and I was sort of throwing out ideas. And she was like, well, these are all good, but the one book that I've always wanted to wrap is a book about Joan Didion. And at the time, Didion was still alive, and I was like, oh, I should write a book about Joan Didion. I just knew that was true. I had reviewed a lot of her work. I'd written about her in graduate school, in work that's not published. She's always just been, I think, my kind of esthetic and my way of writing and thinking about the world's vibes with her. You know, if I can be so bold as to say that I just really appreciate the way that she writes and thinks so, I ended up siding with my agent. She said, Well, why don't you think about what the book would look like? And I knew there was a biography of her already, which is Tracy darg is very well researched, very in depth biography that had come out many years earlier. And I am not a biographer anyhow, so I was trying to think what would, what would be the kind of book that I could write about her that would provide a, like a genuinely fresh insight into her work. And again, she was still very much alive. You know, there have been a bunch of books about her that have come out since she died, but this was prior to any of those, and I realized, Oh, of course, it should be about Hollywood, because this is something that a lot of people really don't know about her, that she was like a very successful screenwriter, that, you know, she and her husband wrote a number of produced movies, including, you know, Star Is Born, several adaptations of their novels. And also, the more I read her work, which was kind of my research process, was to read back over all of her work chronologically, I realized that she that Hollywood's logic and stories and myths, I guess really are what she's always writing about. She's often using those metaphors, whether it's before or after she was in Hollywood, whether she's writing about politics or personal things or whatever. So suddenly I realized, Oh, this is actually a bigger story. And the fact that she was, she was like, born in 1934 which is the year that the production code be started being enforced, which is basically a self censorship code in Hollywood. You know, that's interesting. And she sort of was there for major shifts in the business. And it is also true that Hollywood is the story of America in the 20th century. It's, you know, it's really how Americans conceive of who they are in the world. And often the the kind of archetypal stories that Hollywood has told, like westerns, World War Two epics, superhero stories are provide the logic that politicians and pundits used to try to, you know, convince someone to enlist in the army, or convince people to support a measure that is being, you know, voted upon in Congress, or something like that, so, or just to think of themselves as victims or Victors or all of those things. So that's something that's always interested me, is the big stories that we're telling ourselves and how they justify to ourselves, you know, the things that we do, and that became very interesting. And, you know, the more I dug into it, the more obvious it was. She was very obsessed with John Wayne, and John Wayne movies were very much a part of her mental landscape. And you know, John Wayne is a very complicated figure when it comes to not just movies, but also American politics and a lot of other things. So that was where I started, and sort of worked my way forward figuring out what was she. About at the time, what was happening in Hollywood at the time, and what was happening in the American political sphere at the time. And I don't really mean like laws and things. I mean the way people are talking and the way that politicians are presenting themselves to the American people from basically, you know, the 1930s onwards.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, it is interesting. You know, John Wayne into politics. You know Chris and COVID. Dumas wrote of Jesus, John Wayne about That's right, John Wayne in the church, and how the impact there. It is interesting that we, we often get our stories of what we say about ourselves, through, through Hollywood, through the movies, and especially we did in the 20th century. I think, you know, now I want to talk about the culture shift that we're in today, which I think is different than it was in the 20th century. But it didn't, I don't think it happened. It was there a shift in Hollywood where it started to be more of of that. The Big Hero figures, the things that we want to say that we are recontextualizing the myth of the pioneer, that that happened in Hollywood, that we actually then now tell ourselves different stories about who we were in the
Alissa Wilkinson:past, right? I mean, you know, the kind of basic building block of Hollywood mythology, I think, is the Western and, yeah, this really resonated with Didion, in part because she's a fifth generation Californian and grew up with the kind of legends of her pioneer family, her one of her great, great, great grandmothers or something, was supposed to be with the Donner party and just sort of broke off because she married a Methodist minister, and that the Donner party is actually one of the ruling legends in Didion's life. It comes up over and over and over and over in her writing, because she's clearly haunted by that sort of American Dream gone very wrong story, which, if people don't know what the daughter party is, just go look it up. It's pretty harrowing, yeah. So, you know, the Western starts out as maybe an encapsulation or a visual retelling of the Pioneer mythology, which is we left behind our loved ones and the, you know, the old country, quote, unquote, and we journeyed toward the brave new world that was out west, not knowing what we would find. And then we built something out of it. And, you know, you get John Wayne, of course, often in these because he is the kind of brave guy who isn't beholden to tradition and isn't beholden to all those Eastern ways of living. He's he's playing spoken, and he's brave and he's handsome and he's gonna take care of you. And you know, that's very comforting. And that is a figure that the sort of cowboy figure, the sheriff figure, the The Lone Ranger figure, something that figures very largely in the American mythos. And then, of course, in the, you know, middle of the century, we start seeing revisionist westerns, which start rethinking a lot of that mythology. Like, you know, were these guys the brave heroes? Or, you know, was this all as rosy as we made it out to be. And the later into the century you go, the more you get, you know, acknowledgements of things that were happening in that history, the racism, the sexism, the violence, the, you know, misogyny, and all of those things and that all keeps trickling down into American movies. But at the same time, you have the rise of the action hero, which sort of peaks around the Reagan era, and then dips, but then comes back as the superhero. And superheroes themselves were kind of created by, you know, Jewish writers during World War Two in order to fight the Nazis. And so there's just all these interesting figures that are playing against each other in the midst of very, a very tumultuous century. We've got, you know, a war, and then we've got a time of sort of uneasy, uneasy peace, I guess, at home, but the Cold War abroad, and fears and chaos and nuclear war that could be out there, all these things, 911, so just those big, bold building blocks of different eras. You always see those reflected, I think, in in the pop culture that comes out in those eras. I have a former colleague who would always say that pop culture is, you know, sort of the subconscious of America, and it tells us what we're anxious about. I think that pretty much is the right way to think about it. And Didion wrote some of those movies, and also wrote about some of those movies, but for the most part, she's thinking more about how. How Hollywood's way of thinking about a star and a hero and a production trickle into the way that we imagine our leaders from you know, she was a huge Barry Goldwater supporter, but then she had no use for Nixon or Reagan and actually switched party affiliations. Became the first Democrat in her family because she just couldn't stand either of them, both California guys. So there's a whole bunch of interesting stuff that happens. And by the time you get to the 90s, she, you know, she was always a conservative, but she was a very idiosyncratic West, Western kind of conservative, and she has very little use for either Bill Clinton or George W Bucha or any of these people, because she just sees America, the American political sphere, as having become more of a Hollywood production, which she just doesn't see a lot of meaning inside of. Then you know what it she believes it should be, which is governance and old leadership. Yes.
Joshua Johnson:So where did that, that shift take place, and why? What? What was she seeing through being inside Hollywood and then actually seeing it actually infiltrate Washington and the political system? It's
Alissa Wilkinson:Kennedy and Reagan, I would say. So she wasn't a Kennedy fan John, her husband was, but he was a Irish Catholic from Connecticut. So that made sense. There you go. Um, his family was known as the the the Dons were the Kennedys of the of where they were. She reviewed some films during the Kennedy era. She was working as a film critic at Vogue at the time, or that was one of her roles at Vogue magazine, and she was writing often also for National Review and for other publications. And she would sort of poke fun at Kennedy, as a lot of people did, as sort of a hollow vessel being, you know, the Manchurian Candidate idea was something that I think was very alive for her. And of course, we know that, you know, the Kennedy Nixon debates were the first televised presidential debates, and they're a watershed moment in media history in the US, because Kennedy kind of won because he was handsome, and that was a very important part of the story, and Reagan, or Nixon, sorry, looked kind of haggard on screen. And, you know, wasn't ready for television. Whether or not that's true, that's the sort of the legend that's emerged out of there. And certainly, television became very important. And then, you know, Kennedy knew how to use TV and film, and that's the moment that direct cinema is born, and that's the moment that, you know, when Kennedy was assassinated. I can't even remember the numbers they're in the book, but an incredible like, a third of the country turned on their TV sets and left them on for like, two days just watching. So that's a that's an important moment, and on the other hand, is Reagan. And she started writing about Reagan way back when he was when he became governor of California. And to her, he and Nancy Reagan were the kind of the embodiment of all of the vapid Ness that she saw seeping into the American political sphere, because they were, they were actors. She wrote the meanest thing she ever wrote in her life is a piece called pretty Nancy, which wasn't republished until very recently, which is about Nancy Reagan, and she just completely, I mean, it's very mean. I kind of recommend reading it, because it's just like, fascinating, and it's so mean that Nancy Reagan was still writing about it when she wrote her own memoirs decades later. It just like, really smarted. And so she said she was like, you know, anybody but this guy? This guy has no thoughts. That's basically her argument. And again, like that was a pretty bold stance for a conservative of her stripe to take at that moment. And when they got to the White House, she was just like, nah, nah. Like, this is not but, you know, at the time, she was still basically working in Hollywood and writing movies, so she really only became a political writer in the 88 campaign. And so you'll see her there's a piece she wrote called insider baseball about the Dukakis campaign, which she was on the plane for, and how it was stage managed, just like a production. So there's sort of that. It's a gradual thing, right? Nothing happens all at once, but this all came along with her re examining the myths that she had believed about California and about, by extension, America. And in oh three, she published a book called where I was from, which is her, like, very publicly, rethinking all of those California myths. And that book, I think, for anyone who's had to rethink the myths that they you. Were raised with. I think it's a really interesting book to read and see someone grappling with that real time.
Joshua Johnson:I think that's, I think it's important to grapple with the past, the myths of what we actually inherit, and the stories that we inherit, and what is real and true. And that's, that's a difficult thing. So when we're looking at the history of Hollywood, how do we see what, maybe the the subconscious of America, what we're anxious about, we're trying to tell stories about that, but we're there's also like propaganda that is that is happening in the midst of it, trying to shape the narrative of America, or that's right, World of moving directions. How do we as a as a culture? How do we start to see behind the curtain that there is some propaganda that is happening, and how did, how did Joan Didion help do that
Alissa Wilkinson:she sees behind everything she's always she would say she was looking at the surfaces of things. But what she meant by that was not that she couldn't see behind them. What she meant is you can learn more about people by how they say, what they're saying, than what they think they're saying, if that makes sense. So the words they use, the phrases that are repeated, the, you know, sometimes we talk about, like thought stopping cliches. She wrote about that all the way back in South NewsHour Bethlehem, which is her first essay collection where she was sort of poking fun at like hippies and progressive think tanks in Southern California all the way up to her late work, where she's writing about Washington. And one of her most important things, I think she wrote was a essay that was turned into a book called fixed ideas America after 911 in which she's she's writing about and very disturbed by the way that public speech was expected to take place after 911 that there was a sort of closing of the ranks around a certain way of talking about what had happened that didn't make allowances for examining the reasons that had happened or whether there was any culpability on the part of Americans. So you know all and of course, I'm, I'm 41 so I remember 911 very well. And reading that, I was like, Oh, I see exactly what she means now. And I remember that moment, and I think that's important. So you know, for me, at every moment she's looking at that, and even when she's I think what's important is even when she's not writing about Hollywood. Hollywood is very much the place, one of the major places that those myths and ways of thinking and ways of telling stories happens for her. That's how it gets disseminated most broadly, and I mean movies, but also TV to an extent. One of the most interesting books I read during the writing of this was called, I believe it's called, searching for the good war. They're searching for the good war, looking for the good war. But it's written by a historian at who teaches history at West Point, and she writes about how Hollywood created this, the war, the version of World War Two involvement that we know, American involvement, and also left out some key parts that, you know, it took us a long time to get into the war. And like, you know, a lot of people didn't know why they were there, and we sort of retrofitted it to, like, being the good guys later on. Not that that wasn't true, but that a lot of people just didn't have that mindset going into it, and then reused the World War Two narrative, which, you know, there's a million movies about, in order to coax people into other wars throughout the 20th century. And that was this historian's argument, and she shows it quite effectively with regards to Korea and Vietnam and later wars, and this was, I think, a very good approximation of what Didion was always writing about, was how we would take one story and use it to convince ourselves to act in another way later on, whatever that was, and how We're always telling ourselves stories in order to make sense of whatever the history is that we're experiencing. And when she wrote about, for instance, the summer of 69 and well, 6869 in Hollywood and the Manson murders, you know, she points out that everyone quickly invented a story about why these really grotesque murders had happened. And a lot of it was like, oh, you know, godless Hollywood, of course, they kind of deserved it, that kind of narrative. And we see those myths recycled over over the century for all kinds of things. You know, the fires in. Southern California that have broken out recently. A lot of people have been writing about, or have posted an essay that she wrote many, many, many years ago about the Santa Ana winds and the fires and the mythology of California. But I sort of, I mean, it's grim, but I sort of had to, I guess it's a gallows chuckle. But to realize, like using Joan Didion's words to sort of tell a story about why this is happening, is very much the kind of thing that Didion knew would happen. Right? It
Joshua Johnson:happens over and over and over again. And one of your books, I think your first book you wrote, taking Charles Taylor and what he thought about our modern age. And I know that we we are really in a place where we don't really have roots our identity, where identity less, these stories, are the things that we grab hold of to form who we are, our identities, and those things fall apart. And so what we've been seeing, I think probably in the last this, this century, a lot of those myths are falling apart for us, yeah, and so we are rootless. We're all over the place. We don't know what to grab a hold of, what kind of things and stories help us then become more rooted people in this rootless age that we live in that's very difficult to find who we are, and we're grasping at the stories. How do we disseminate stories and know, where do we put our roots? That
Alissa Wilkinson:was something I thought about a lot while writing this book. So some people take we tell ourselves stories in order to live, to be an inspirational phrase, which it is not at all. But it's also not meant to be a criticism, exactly. It's just descriptive. She goes on right after writing that to say, you know, we look for the meaning in the headlines. Essentially, we look we see a headline about something that's occurred somewhere, and we try to ascribe meaning to it so that we can kind of calm our nerves about it. Oh, oh, that happened because he was a smoker, right? Or, oh, that happened because it's those godless people in New York City, or whatever, like, of course, it would happen to them. And that's how we how we live, how we make sense of our lives, and we do the same thing in our private lives. You know, if we encounter some kind of difficulty, we make up a story, or we or we come to believe a story about, oh, we're being tested, or this is the moment to prove our strength, or anything. You know, everything we do is governed by stories, and we have to do that. I think Didion understand that understood this very keenly, because this is a human impulse, and it's the human impulse that without it, we literally wouldn't life, wouldn't it just be a series of things happening with no meaning or purpose, and that does not work so well for the human being to live a life. So I think what I learned from her and how I've been thinking about this is that we have to be we have to be ready to think about multiple stories, right, or at least to understand that people, including ourselves, are coming with our own stories, and think about where they come from and why we believe them. And do we believe them because they're comforting? Do we believe them because they we were told that we would like go to hell if we didn't believe them, like, you know, all these different things. And it doesn't mean that we say no story is correct, but it does mean that we're aware that our stories are necessarily flawed and incomplete, and that's why you know there are so many of them, And to see behind them requires that a little bit like it doesn't mean that you let go of your story or the thing that gives you meaning or purpose, but it does mean that you you don't assume it's the only valid story that's out there, and the only way for that to be true is to encounter many different kinds of stories. And so, you know, in her case, there is an aspect of, you know, watching movies and reading novels and all of that stuff that is understanding the wide number of stories that are out there, and then also to be able to look at the headlines and know that someone's story is behind what happened, whatever that is, and that someone, that there is nobody, who has who is just doing things from pure inclination, right? It's always some story that we're following, some story that we're telling about ourselves or about other people, and that, I think, is like, a really valuable insight of hers, even though, you know it's it's hardly unique. This is something that many people have written and talked about over centuries, but the. She pulls it out of the headlines is very useful and interesting. I you know, one of her most famous essays is about the Central Park Five case, which is a very big, sensational case in New York City in the 1980s there was a jogger in Central Park who was murdered in a very grisly fashion, and five teenage boys were accused of having committed the murder. And there was a Netflix series about this recently. But of course, back then, Donald Trump, who's just a local businessman at the time, took out ads calling for them to be executed in the major papers, and still, they've been exonerated. One of them is now a city council member, actually, but they've been completely exonerated. They figured out who did it. They've been released. They had Gears of their lives taken away from them. Racism is obviously part of this case, but, you know, he still hasn't. He still insists they they should have been executed. So, like, that's, that is the story, that's the headlines, that's the facts of what occurred. But if you, a lot of people assume Didion's piece is like an argument for their innocence, but if you actually read it, it's about the stories that New Yorkers tell themselves in order to have this even arise as a sensational headlines. It's actually about New Yorkers, very sentimental ideas about what it is to be a New Yorker and what it is to be in the energy of New York, and that, I think, is in microcosm, a really great way to see how what she is doing goes behind the headlines and behind people's rhetoric. She has another one about Terry Shiva, the woman who was on life support for many years in Florida. And you know, her piece is really like, this is a private family matter, and it became a source of, like, major cultural debate. And among a bunch of people who like have no business knowing about this, right? So I really recommend, especially her late work to people to really understand this is not a woman whose work was mainly about herself or mainly about her life or something like that. It's really her trying to get a handle on, what are the stories Americans are telling themselves, and why? Yeah,
Joshua Johnson:which is fascinating, and it's helpful for me. You know, the only thing that I read of Joan Didion was the Year of Magical Thinking, right? Which broke me and was beautiful and incredible, an incredible, incredible book. And I've, you know, I've watched some of the movies that she's written and some things, but it was so great to be able to go through that and say, What is she saying? And in your Epilog, you write, what story are we telling now? What happens when the big dream fractures and we're all dreaming on our own, it feels as if the center isn't holding, and I want to know what she would say, yeah. And so you've done a lot of work and research with Joan Didion. You've read her work, so how does that inform what you say about the stories we're telling now that you are now an extension of some of what she was doing.
Alissa Wilkinson:I mean, it's, it's hard, it's hard, it's hard to, I don't, I certainly don't want to speak for Joan. And she definitely, you know, she kind of, I guess, in case people don't know she, she died in 2021 which was two months after I sold the book to the publisher, which was wild, because suddenly I was like, Oh, well, I guess I won't be interviewing her, but I wouldn't have anyhow, but she hadn't written for few years. You know, she was pretty ill before she died, and I've thought a lot about the fact that we barely have anything from her about, for instance, the internet, or Obama, or certainly Trump. And there is a very early, I think it might have come out in 2000 which I read about in the introduction to the book. It's a piece about Martha Stewart's website. And it, I think, is the closest I've read of her writing about contemporary culture, the way it exists for us now, contemporary celebrity culture and sort of parasocial relationships that we form with celebrities who can create the illusion of closeness to us, which is very different from a John Wayne, who, You know, was on a big screen, and that's, you know, everything else you just imagined. So that, you know, I think a lot about that aspect of popular culture now that it has attempted to become so immersive that we feel like we're playing a part in it. Uh, right? Fans of franchises, for instance, feel like they should have some say in what happens in the next installment, which is sort of unheard of in history, or at least not the way it is now, and get very kind of toxic and violent over it if they don't get what they want. This affects people who make stuff in big ways. It also affects what gets made. It affects the machine behind the money that produces art, and all of those things I think she knew about, but they were they've become exacerbated, and that's a lot of what constitutes my, you know, my day job, which is writing about new movie releases most of the time, just thinking about how all of those mechanisms are changing the way we involve ourselves with art. Or, you know, now it's called content, because I don't know we that's, I hate that word very much, but that's something we have to think about. And I think, you know, I think also, there's a real aspect of chaos in current culture that feels a lot like what she was writing about in the late 60s, you know, conspiracy theories and unexplained events, and just feeling like everything is spinning out of control. And that's interesting, because again, when I think about that now, I think, Oh, I, you know, I grew up in the 90s when it felt like an interregnum moment where it was like, oh, there was that tumultuous time, and now there's peace. And people are writing about the end of history and all of this stuff, and now it's very clear that that was not that, right, and so then I think again, like, oh, what would what would Joan say? And it's like, yeah, we told ourselves a story about progress and about, you know, moving beyond certain things. And maybe we haven't actually done any of that at all. Maybe that was just a story, and maybe that's actually human history. So all of those pieces are very much part of what I'm thinking about when I'm writing and trying to help people see the story below the story, literally, the story of the movie. I've just reviewed. It just, I mean, when we're recording this, it just was published, I think, today in the paper flight risk, which is just like, it's a fine action movie, you know, where Mark Wahlberg is, like, on a plane, and he's not who he seems to be. And Mel Gibson directed it. And it's like, not, it's not a significant movie in any real respect, except that it felt to me exactly like a certain kind of action movie from the 80s where there's like, some shadowy cabal that's trying to, like, do something. And, you know, it's actually like the good hearted and flawed law enforcement person who has to save the day. That's like every action movie from the 80s. And I thought, Oh, that's very interesting that this might be coming back. Because we haven't. We've had superheroes. These are not superheroes. These are just people, you know. So anyhow, that's a long winded way to say there's a lot of different ways that looking at those stories can really be important. And also to consider how 25 years of superhero movies is affecting the way that we act and think today about real life heroes and all of those things that's
Joshua Johnson:good amps. We're looking at the ebb and flow of of culture and things a flight risk, maybe that the 80s are coming back.
Alissa Wilkinson:I mean, definitely, we'll
Joshua Johnson:see what what happens. But it usually comes back. You're also looking at, you know, I think celebrity culture, almost celebrity culture in the 80s. You know, with Reagan, an actor coming in, that's right now you have a reality star. What happens? When? When? What we see in reality TV, which is non fiction that is made to be fiction, like it is a strange like combo of non fiction and fiction, where something a reality star has actually then gotten into this place and is running. How does that play a part the reality TV type of thing, where we think it's non fiction, we think it's reality, but it's not really reality.
Alissa Wilkinson:Yeah. I mean, it is. It's, it's funny to think, you know, I write a lot about documentary, and the documentary world is like, adjacent to this, because, of course, documentaries aren't really reality either, but there's a different ethos around it. You're, you know, the fundamental thing about being a documentarian is you're not supposed to produce the thing that you're looking at you're just supposed to look at it. And in reality TV, you do produce it, right? And so those things are real in the sense that they happens, and they're real in the sense that we look at them and they have an effect in the world, but they're not, you know, they've been controlled and swerved and edited and produced. Yeah, and I think, you know, I mean, I think we just maybe answered our own question, but Didion's critique, at least, of the Reagan White House was that it was produced like a movie, you know, like a movie set, and it was sort of run like movie set. And I think we might reasonably assume that what we have ample first hand evidence of is that the, you know, the Trump White House is basically run like a reality set, which is to say, my colleague, Jim paniwosik at the Times, wrote a very good piece after the inauguration, in which he said, you know, the product that executive orders are designed to produce in the Trump era are the image of him signing it, not really the order itself. That's like, secondary to the image that people can see on their screens. And I think that's like a pretty good encapsulation of how a reality TV ethos treats the task of governing. And I do think the reason that Didion was so frustrated with the Reagans was less about the Reagan she has very few critiques of his actual policies. It's really more about creating or maybe moving the task of governing down a road that she might have sensed could end somewhere or hopefully not end goodness, but at least land somewhere like this, right? And that it's hard to imagine some elements of that not always being with us in the future, but I do very much wish she had written about the internet. But I also respect her for being like, I don't want to touch that
Joshua Johnson:Well, I think one of the things that you're we're moving we moved in the 20th century. It was almost more of a monoculture of like, we're seeing these big narratives shaped all of us now we're in in a siloed culture, or niche culture, where we can fit into a subgroup, and we could just live in that culture and not be as affected as in the broader culture, even though we are but we We could isolate ourselves. How does that play a part in some of these stories that we tell? Yeah,
Alissa Wilkinson:I mean, I think we're still figuring that out. I think one thing I think about a lot, I live in New York City. I grew up in a very rural corner of New York State, which is, what, as soon as you leave New York City, it's a very red area, like basically the whole state is, if we want to use, like, gross mischaracterizations, it's basically a very conservative place. You can go up and see, you know, Confederate flags, which makes no sense in upstate New York, but you'll see that kind of thing around all that. To say, I do kind of know what it is to be from a rural nowheresville and to, you know, all of those things. And so it's very funny to me to go back and forth between those two places, which I do, and hear what people say about the other place. Because it's not just that they have a different story, you know about it, but it's that there's no way to know your story is wrong. It feels like So living in New York, you know, and any New Yorker will tell you this, it's extremely funny to hear people say things like, Oh, do you feel safe taking the subway? Like, it's never occurred to me to not feel safe taking the subway. The subway is very safe. And on top of it, it's much less safe to get in a car and drive down the highway just statistically. I mean, I don't, you know, there's no, there's just math. And I think that's a little bit of the story thing, right? That you you are seeing a version of another place that has, I mean, you're literally seeing it as it was produced for a screen. And we don't think very critically about who's producing those images and why, I think yet, and that's the piece that I would love to instill in students going forward, and I hope for younger generations that they'll think about it, but I don't know, I don't know if that's true. It's been disheartening to realize that I've heard more of that kind of, frankly, like nonsense about New York, which I'm sure there's some, there's obviously versions of it that New Yorkers tell about other places, and that's just geographical I mean, if we go outside geography, we're really seeing that in all kinds of ways. And I think that can account for some of the rise of, I guess, tribalism. I don't love that word, but you know that that sort of ends. It forms around all kinds of things. It forms around fandoms of pop stars. It forms around, you know, what kind of a card you buy, or what social media platform Do you prefer, anything like that. And I get annoyed when people are like, Oh, you just have to step outside of your bubble, because that makes it sound like it's something that you can just sort of choose to do. But it's not actually that easy. There aren't there, you know, you don't know what you don't know. And I think that's what we see the most in that kind of fragmentation. And on top of it that we're telling ourselves stories that aren't just wrong, but actively kind of full of false heads, falsehoods about other people. And there's not, you know, we can attribute that, I think, to just natural survival instincts that humans have, but I think it also has a lot to do with the entertainment landscape, and I would include at this point the internet and short form video and things that the algorithms that are Made to basically stoke that kind of thing. Resentment is, is big business. So yes, it is,
Joshua Johnson:yes it is. Maybe I should move into that and to make some money, but we'd all be but a lot more money. We make a lot more money, but I don't want to do that. I'm trying to be sane in the midst of all of this. So what hope do you have? Alyssa, for your readers, the people who pick up we tell ourselves stories.
Alissa Wilkinson:Yeah. I mean, on one, the one hand, I think it's really useful for people to actually learn the history of these stories in Hollywood. I just genuinely don't think most people know a ton about it. And I think there are, I mean, just the fact that a lot of people don't love Joan Didion, but don't know she wrote movies, which was like her main source of income for a long time, tells me that there's a lot of pieces of history we don't know, and 20th century history is fascinating, and the version of it we learn in school is really, really, really shallow. So I'm hoping that people will find it to be an enjoyable way to pick up, kind of a scope for the 20th century. And also, I'm hoping to start asking the same kind of questions we've just been discussing. I don't give answers. I mean, the book ends basically in the aughts, and I'm not trying to give answers to any of those questions, but I think that being aware of those stories is valuable. I think just knowing that how they've shaped us is valuable, and being able to trace things you hear now coming out of people's mouths back to something people were saying 100 years ago. Can give you a kind of perspective that we really sorely need. We just don't have that kind of perspective anymore. A friend of mine is a presidential historian who is, you know, very busy these days, but she says, you know, the thing that keeps her saying most of the day, most days, is that she's like, read presidential history, right? And knowing history isn't just about not repeating mistakes. It's also just about being able to look at something and know what you're looking at. And Didion was really brilliantly great at being able to look at something and actually see it. I don't think most of us are very good at that. So that's what I'm hoping people will get a taste of. And then obviously, I'm hoping it will also drive people toward her work, especially some of the work that doesn't get read as much, because, you know, a lot of Didion fans really have read, like, maybe two books tops, and there's so much more, and so much of it is really fascinating. Yeah,
Joshua Johnson:your book is fascinating to me. I just, man, I loved it. It's fantastic. And I think a lot of people get a lot out of it. So go get we tell ourselves stories, and just buy a bunch of copies for your friends so that they could get it as well and read it and discuss it. Alyssa, I have a couple really quick questions. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give? Oh, my goodness,
Alissa Wilkinson:um, I think, I think probably to not be too afraid of the people that I was just starting to encounter. I'm proud of my 21 year old self for moving to New York, but I also was, like very fearful that I didn't fit in. So I'd like myself to have been a little little more brave.
Joshua Johnson:That's good. That's very helpful for all of us. Anything you've been reading or watching lately you could recommend, oh
Alissa Wilkinson:goodness. Well, it's January, so the movie watching is pretty bleak over on this side of the of the microphone. But let me think for a second. I mean, I've been watching a lot of screeners of the documentaries that are screening at Sundance right now. So I would say two that people should look for are called there's one. Called predators, and there's one called Zodiac Killer project, and they both are kind of deconstructions of the true crime genre. Neither of them will be out. I don't think when, when people are listening, but just keep an eye out for them, especially if you're like a true crime junkie, because I think they're, they're uniquely fascinating, and not at all what you're going to expect.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, as just a little like preparation for our conversation today, I did finally catch up with nickel boys, which was your favorite movie of last year. So, good man, one of the most empathetic movies I've ever like being in the position that I was in as a viewer. Like it was a totally different experience for me that made me feel something with movies like this that I haven't really felt as much before.
Alissa Wilkinson:And it was, yeah, it's, I think, a genuinely artistically radical movie that is also just absolutely, I wouldn't say, easy to watch. But it's not, you know, you're sucked right into it. Basically from the start,
Joshua Johnson:it's good. So how can people go get we tell ourselves stories, and where else would you like to point people to
Alissa Wilkinson:so the book will is available for pre order currently, and will be available everywhere you can buy a book. I encourage you to pre order through your local independent bookstore for this very specific reason. That is how they know to stock the book. And if they stock the book, then people will buy it, so that's my preference. But buy it wherever you want. There will be an audio book eventually too. I don't have details on that, but it's coming, and I will be touring for a lot of march on the east and west coast and doing some virtual dates, so that all will be on my website, which is Alyssa wilkinson.com, and otherwise, you can find me at the New York Times multiple times a week.
Joshua Johnson:Perfect. Well, Alyssa, thank you for this conversation. Thank you for walking us through the 20th century through the lens of the stories that we tell ourselves and the work of Joan Didion. It was fantastic. I loved our conversation. I love your book. I really want people to go out and get it. So thank you for this. It was great. Thank you
Alissa Wilkinson:so much. This has been really enjoyable. You
