Slouching Towards the Truth

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

You are familiar with thought-terminating cliches. “It is what it is.” “Vote blue no matter who.” “God is good all the time, and all the time, God is good.” These thought-terminating cliches are meant to end discussions and provide easy answers for cognitive dissonance. 

One phrase I have been surprised to see used as a thought-terminating cliche is from the late writer and journalist Joan Didion: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” In popular culture, I think this phrase is usually translated as an uncritical affirmation of humanity being narrative-driven.

But Didion, who died in 2021, may well have been mortified if she knew that something she had written was being used to shut down conversation or discourage critical thinking. In Didion’s essay “Good Citizens,” from her 1979 book The White Album, she specifically criticizes Hollywood for overrelying on this cliched thinking. “It is a way of talking that tends to preclude further discussion, which may well be its intention,” she writes.

Alissa Wilkinson, a movie critic at The New York Times and a Didion expert, is especially interested in how Hollywood continues to use such cliches when telling stories. Her newest book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion in the American Dream Machine, is an exploration of Didion’s writing in connection to the movie business and how her observations about Hollywood can help us interpret the current political landscape.

For example, one of the prevailing stories being told right now is that the more than 200 people deported from the United States to El Salvador’s maximum-security prison are gangsters and terrorists. Those labels — gangster and terrorist — are being used by politicians in order to squash discussion about the morality or legality of these deportations. Thinking about this with Didion’s insights, a popular story in the United States is that the safety of our nation is tied to the deportation of immigrants.

Wilkinson’s book is perfect for Didion fanatics because it offers a fresh perspective on Didion’s writing, focusing on her comments about Hollywood. But this book is also perfect for Didion neophytes (like me), as it pulls from a variety of sources for a blossoming reading list. In my conversation with Wilkinson, we spoke about how we sometimes don’t recognize the stories we tell ourselves, Christianity’s claim that it is the defining story of the world, movie recommendations, and whether pastors should keep pulling sermon illustrations from movies.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Josiah R. Daniels, Sojourners: Why did you want to focus on Joan Didion and what are some of the questions you are trying to explore in We Tell Ourselves Stories? 

Alissa Wilkinson: Didion is a writer who I have always admired as a model for the kind of writing I aspire to, which is rigorous, lyrical, and very careful about word choice and syntax and all of that stuff. But she’s also never beholden to orthodoxies or to “isms.” Whenever she’s writing about something, it’s often something you’ve thought about or encountered in another context, but she does it in a way that makes you see it from a different angle and challenges your presuppositions without being reflexively contrarian. I always found that very exciting and invigorating as a reader and then as a writer. 

I realized that the angle that made a lot of sense for me to write about, and that I felt was underexplored in her work and life was her connection to the movie business. Both as a writer who was influenced by Hollywood — in particular the American movie business — but also as a person who worked in Hollywood and wrote movies that have been produced with famous movie stars. [For Didion,] Hollywood was a paradigm or a vocabulary through which the rest of American culture increasingly saw itself and could be analyzed.

You write, “We seek meaning and order in the world by creating story arcs that tell us why things happen and how they will sort themselves out.”

What is one of the prevailing stories you continue to tell yourself today?

So here’s the thing: You don’t know that you’re telling yourself that story. That’s kind of the point that she makes throughout her work, starting from when she is writing The White Album where she writes the line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” But she was saying this much earlier than that, just not crystallized yet.

Everyone tells themselves stories, whether it’s stories like “this person deserves to experience this political repercussion because they are bad in this particular way,” or simple ones that the movies are always telling us like “good things happen to good people” and “follow your heart” and “don’t let anyone tell you who you are, be yourself.” Those are stories that we make up. They’re longer in story form, but those stories tell us how to live.

I think for Didion, the thing that you had to do if you were a person of any moral seriousness was to try to see the story and continually try to figure out where it came from and whether it is the right story or whether it needs modification. 

I think a lot of people have seen her work as being about how we should stop telling ourselves stories, or that it’s bad that we tell ourselves [stories], and that is not her perspective at all. I think her perspective is that this is just the thing humans do and the way to be human is to figure out what story am I telling myself continually and whether this is the right story. 

I think that there’s a certain articulation of Christianity that suggests that it is the meta-narrative. It’s the story that’s going to help you sort everything out. But as you point out in the book, Didion is working against those sort of “fixed ideas.” Why was that so important for Didion and why do you think that might be important for Christians and also people in the United States of America?

She starts using the term fixed ideas right around 9/11. I’m sure it popped up earlier, but it became very noticeable right around then. The biggest example of which is Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11.

I was a freshman in college when 9/11 happened, and there was a moment where we could have had national conversations about why this happened and what it signifies about us. What is the response that comes closest to embodying American ideals?

And what actually happened, which just tends to happen in human societies, is that very quickly there were only a few correct things you could say. And there were a number of writers, for instance, who wrote things that were published immediately after and got excoriated for it. Didion, Susan Sontag, a number of other writers. If you were a real American, you flew a flag outside your house and if you didn’t fly a flag, then what was wrong with you?

I think [Didion’s articulation of fixed ideas] is roughly equivalent to what we call thought-terminating cliches that shut down any possibility of evaluation or saying “Wait, why? Why are we saying this? Why are we using this word to mean this thing? How did this word come to mean this other thing?” And I think there’s obvious reasons that we should all be thinking about this. I think it’s not difficult to understand why this is such a relevant and terrifying thing at the moment.

I’ve had a couple of conversations with people who grew up in various strands of Christianity and American Christian culture who have reevaluated it, and I’ve said the best book you could read of Didion’s right now is Where I Was From, which is just a collection of reporting and personal essays. But they’re all her articulating and reexamining mythologies about California. She’s a fifth generation Sacramento native. I think a lot of people would find harmony there with whatever piety they’re currently reexamining in their own lives.

Didion’s writing around “fixed ideas” reminds me of what philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called “totalism.” The theologian Walter Brueggemann cites Levinas in his critique of the United States being a “totalistic” empire. Totalisms, fixed ideas, orthodoxies — these things are not partisan.

To give the answer through her lens: When we remain in those orthodoxies or whatever we want to call them, we are essentially handing over our thinking facility to somebody else. And we thus stop being able to detect when someone is using us or manipulating us. So much of We Tell Ourselves Stories is about politics taking the form of entertainment more and more throughout the 20th century. And of course, the point of entertainment, in Didion’s formulation — which I would not completely agree with, but this is how she thought about it — is that it’s something where we can turn off our brains and just get floated along on waves of emotion.

And that certainly is how we experience it. Most of us love a movie where you can just sit down and eat popcorn for two hours and not think about it too hard. I enjoy a movie like that. I don’t want every movie I watched to be like that, but I have fun watching a Mission: Impossible movie. And I don’t particularly want to think about geopolitics when I’m doing that. And the movie makes that possible for me. But our politics should not be run on the same rails.

And I think for her, the comfort of a story is that it gives us an orthodoxy or comes from an orthodoxy. And the comfort of that is that we don’t have to think for ourselves. It’s not necessary. The thinking has been done ahead of time and to her the opposite of thinking is evil.

She’s echoing Hannah Arendt, who says roughly the same thing at the same time. That influence is clear in her writing, and I think she’s very much in agreement with the idea that horrific things happen when we stop thinking.

I wonder what Didion would say about people who identify themselves as “free thinkers.” 

She does write throughout her life — from the ’60s onwards — about people who kind of fancy themselves to be free thinkers. I think for her, that’s a story they’re telling themselves. 

Everyone is thinking about something that someone else has said to them, and often it’s something you saw in a movie or a TikTok or heard someone say. And then you feel like everybody else is saying the opposite, so you must be correct. But it’s fiction as much as anything else. 

You are a movie critic at The New York Times, and while I think that’s really cool, I actually think what you say about it is cooler. You say that you’re uninterested in telling people what they should and shouldn’t like. Instead, you say your aim is to expand the reader’s understanding of the movies. With that in mind, what are some movies or documentaries that you’d like to point our readers to?

I’m hopeful that people saw Nickel Boys, which was the best movie of 2024 by a long shot. Probably one of the best American films I’ve seen in 10 years. I think it’s a really profoundly imaginative adaptation of its source material, which is a great novel in and of itself. But the novel is about how we remember trauma and the movie is about how we see it. Those are two equally important things. It’s just a remarkable movie.

If people have seen it or maybe once they see it or even before they see it, they should go and watch the other film by that director, RaMell Ross, who was also nominated for his previous movie, which was a documentary called Hale County This Morning, This Evening. It’s sort of the visual documentary equivalent of Nickel Boys. It’s remarkable. It is not very long, incredibly groundbreaking, and also just really fun and beautiful to watch. I did write something about the two of them, but I think those are important films that people need to make a point of seeing.

The thing I care about the most is documentaries. I think nonfiction films are capable of being more technologically and artistically exciting. Every documentary that was nominated for an Oscar last year was really fantastic. There are two that I think people should absolutely not miss: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which is just this incredibly propulsive film about the CIA — I guess still technically allegedly — led assassination of Patrice Lumumba, who was the first rightly democratically elected leader of the Congo. But it’s also about jazz, the CIA, and protest movements. It’s about how culture in mid-century America was linked to what was going on politically in Africa. It’s an astonishing film. It just moves at the speed of light, and it has this incredible soundtrack.

And then the other one is The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, which is on Netflix. This one blew me away. It starts out, and you think it’s just this movie about a young man who had a rare degenerative disorder and died when he was young, and that was the end of things. But then his family realized he had a blog, and they had his password he’d left out for them. So, they went on the blog and they were just gonna post “We’re sorry to say he’s passed away.” And when they did, and they started getting tons of emails from people who were like, “We loved him. He was so meaningful to us.” They kept calling him “Ibelin” and the family couldn’t figure out what was going on. Then they realized that, although he was wheelchair-bound, he had a vibrant life in [the video game] World of Warcraft.

Artists recreate the scenes in a World of Warcraft style. And then they track down a bunch of the people in real life who were in his clan and who he interacted with. It sprawls out into this whole thing about life on the internet and how it is real and a lot of other things.

There’s this thing that I remember pastors doing growing up, which I refer to as “the Jesus juke.” Braveheart, for example: “William Wallace sacrificed his life for his bride just like Christ sacrificed his life for his bride, the church.” How can Christians avoid that but still reflect on movies in a way that interfaces with their faith?

This is a question I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about in the past. I was at Christianity Today before I went to Vox and wrote for a lot of Christian media, and I think I’ve come to realize that it’s a tricky question to answer because there’s not a lot of white space between you and how people interface with art and their faith. But obviously art is a special category of thing. And I think the answer for me is to stop thinking about it in some ways. I think that we, every single person, approach movies through the lens of whoever they are at that moment and your set of beliefs.

What are the set of moral and ethical commitments you have? I think faith is something that shapes that. It’s not the only thing that shapes it, but it’s certainly a major thing that shapes it. You should be viewing art as a way to challenge and get outside of your own experience. And that means being willing to have hospitality toward the many different ways that people see the world.

The Jesus juke is such a cliche at this point because it’s so easy to see the problem with it. It’s disrespectful to use a movie as a tool in order to make your points. That’s not what art is for. It is not there for you to instrumentalize it. Braveheart is not a movie that I like very much.