From "Joan Didion’s Greatest Two-Word Sentence/The power of an ice-cold, unflinching gaze" by Molly Fischer (The Cut).
December 24, 2021
"A few months after Didion’s review [of Woody Allen's 'Manhattan'] appeared, the NYRB published a selection of responses from readers. These readers were not pleased."
"Randolph D. Pope of Dartmouth College, no stranger to sarcasm, congratulated Didion on providing 'a perfect example of how a mind too full with culture is unable to understand humor.' Roger Hurwitz (MIT) advised that she would 'do better to be alarmed by than morally superior to the attitudes, concerns and mores Mr. Allen’s characters reflect.' John Romano (Columbia) spent 647 words chastising her for — among other offenses — treating Allen’s characters’ brand of self-absorption as tiresome and distinctly contemporary, rather than placing them in an intellectual lineage that stretched back centuries. The NYRB also published Didion’s response to these letters. It reads, in its entirety, 'Oh, wow.'"
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23 comments:
I'd never read any Didion, so, merely because I'd seen her inappropriately compared to Hunter Thompson, I waded thru her self-absorbed review, wherein she projects her own opinions onto, seemingly with no self-awareness.
Randolph D. Pope: "a mind too full with culture is unable to understand humor."
More like a mind too full of itself to understand humor.
Didion: "Woody Allen character...says, to Diane Keaton, “I’ve never had a relationship with a woman that lasted longer than the one between Hitler and Eva Braun.” These lines are meaningless, and not funny:"
No, she's wrong. That line was pretty funny.
Her essay about not covering the Patty Hearst trial was rambling name-dropping, pretty awful.
Were any of Woody Allen’s movies funny? I saw a number of them and don’t remember a thing other than the ditzy Annie Hall as performed by Diane Keaton.
I won't be around long enough to see who wins the Posterity Stakes, but my bet would be on Woody Allen. He's in most people's personal Bartlett. Joan Didion probably has a better chance of heaven though.
“People in Manhattan are constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves that keep them from dealing with more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe.”
For the moment ignoring whatever it is I’m supposed to be focused on…this sentence is evergreen innit?
I’m underwhelmed by the Oh, wow.
Oh, wow…
"Oh, wow," is pretty good.
Also acceptable: "Oh, my!" or "Oh, lordie!" or "Oh goodness me!"
Completely unnecessary, but hilarious: "Oh, get stuffed."
Useful if none of the above work, "Oh, go away."
Favorite Woody Allen line:
"I'm a bigot, but for the left."
Never read her, but my mother agrees with the first comment.
Could never watch Manhattan. Given Joan's Native Daughters of the Golden West pedigree, it's not surprising she wasn't enthralled with Woody's homage to his parasitic home town.
Boy...I've learned in the past 24 hours that I've missed a lot by not reading Joan Didion. That's a great two-word response. I wish I had that kind of discipline.
I think I'm going to like reading her, but now I wonder if she has a sense of humor. Maybe that's why I missed her all these years? I loved reading Pete Hamill and Thomas Wolfe for commentary on current culture or stories of the city, but they often slipped in humor or sarcasm with their keen observations.
By the way, David Begley- Yes. Many of Woody Allen's movies were funny. Many of his takes on his contemporaries in New York were hilarious and would still apply today. And some of his movies were more serious in topic, but still on target in how humans react to various situations. I particularly loved "Hannah and her Sisters" and "Crimes and Misdemeanors". "Annie Hall" was no slouch, but I thought it was not as good as those other two, though it got that award, which...I still think was an over the top reaction. It was good, but not that good.
Joan Didion was a floating, piercing consciousness; relentless skepticism reined in short of pessimism because, in her disabused and clear-eyed view, pessimism would suggest something to be pessimistic about; the possibility of an outlook inconsistent with what physicist Sean Carroll calls the “brute facts.”
Commenters herein who have lined up with Didion’s critics vis a vis Woody Allen may upon reading the piece find that they have some affinity with it— https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1979/08/16/letter-from-manhattan/. The sensibility that she was, in 1979, perhaps the first to identify, has often been decried in these pages, though never so acutely.
In Didion one may sense a paradoxical connection with Orwell in their common ability to regard and inspect dismal facts squarely and in direct language, without rationalizing, offering a soothing gloss, or an uplifting coda. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live....We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.” The White Album.
Never saw Interiors, but my reactions to Annie Hall and Manhattan isn’t too different from Didion’s. The characters in Manhattan are almost all tedious and ridiculously immature, with the notable exception of the teenager (which I assume is the point). These are movies that entertained me but offer no real connection - I spend most of the movie rolling my eyes at the pretentiousness. I can’t quite tell if it’s fully satirical or not. My husband disagrees, but I prefer Manhattan Murder Mystery for its lightness and for the general good humor in the Allen and Keaton marriage. The characters are still uniquely Allen Manhattanites, but they’re comfortable, recognizable and actually likeable.
Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Love and Death-- all classics. Annie Hall and Manhattan have their moments, but I stopped paying much attention when he got serious later.
Midnight in Paris is a mildly amusing romcom.
Adolf and Eva had a years-long relationship, even if the marriage was one of the briefer ones on record; but that's a pedant's point and would spoil the joke.
I never read much Didion.
Didion criticized rootless modern life from the point of view of one who thought she was deeply rooted in her family and regional traditions. She came to believe that she and other Americans, especially those from the West, weren't that deeply rooted after all. In a way, her revelation or admission was an honest one, but coming to believe that she was as rootless as everyone else in the rootless world left her (changing the metaphor) adrift on an endlessly churning sea. Her work survives, but there may be a feeling that writers who were able to admit from the beginning that they were as lost in (post-)modernity as anyone else understood themselves and the world better.
Joan or Woody? I loved Woody and his pictures when I was in high school. Today, I'm at least a little ashamed of the things I thought were brilliant and hilarious back then. Manhattan and Woody's next picture Stardust Memories were a turning point. Woody was already "a comic genius." Now he was trying to be serious. It came across as pretentious. Writers and intellectuals like Didion thought Woody was poaching on their territory, defiling their Flaubert, etc. (though I suppose you could criticize Didion and her husband and brother-in-law for dropping names from the entertainment world as much as Joan could have criticized Woody for poaching in her own intellectual preserve).
Woody was also getting darker and more misanthropic, as well as becoming more moralizingly self-righteous. Woody's Isaac Davis preaching about morality while getting involved with high school girls and tossing off the usual sex jokes would have left an ugly taste in more people's mouths than just Joan Didion's. And after Manhattan it was more or less downhill (with some noticeable exceptions). Woody couldn't go back to making the earlier, simpler, "funnier" pictures, but he couldn't become the Ingmar Bergman figure he aspired to be, and the result was frustration and futility.
Joan or Woody? Both. Neither. I could go on and on. But I'll stop.
Sad as it is when celebrities die, it's heartwarming that the Scrooges in charge of magazine websites open up a little of their archives one day a year ...
Can anyone explain the Joan Didion/Nancy Reagan feud? I'm having trouble with that one. What did Mrs. Reagan ever do to Didion? I like every essay of Didion's in the White Album collection, except for the piece on Nancy Reagan. It just seems petty and catty on Didion's part. Didion is so concerned with the way Mrs. Reagan walks and how Reagan smiles. I don't understand why it matters. If Didion went after Ronald Reagan, I could see that, he actually made policy. But, a Governor's wife is even more obsolete than a President's, and for Didion to highlight such trivial matters that have nothing to do with real political issues, made no sense to me.
"Randolph D. Pope of Dartmouth College, no stranger to sarcasm, congratulated Didion on providing 'a perfect example of how a mind too full with culture is unable to understand humor.'
He's talking about Woody Allen, right?
Because Woody just isn't that funny
Roger Hurwitz (MIT) advised that she would 'do better to be alarmed by than morally superior to the attitudes, concerns and mores Mr. Allen’s characters reflect.'
One has to first be morally superior to them, before one can be alarmed by them
John Romano (Columbia) spent 647 words chastising her for — among other offenses — treating Allen’s characters’ brand of self-absorption as tiresome
But it is utterly tiresome. Which is why Allen's movies suck so much
As the piece notes, "Oh, wow" was also the essence of Didion's response when she encountered a five-year-old tripping on acid:
"It is a response that distills the Didion persona down to five letters. She was ever the observer, surveying human folly from a deliberate distance, amazed and not amazed by what she saw. This was the posture she adopted when meeting a Haight-Ashbury 5-year-old on acid. 'The five-year-old’s name is Susan, and she tells me she is in High Kindergarten,' Didion wrote in the title essay of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 'I start to ask if any of the other children in High Kindergarten get stoned, but I falter at the key words.' Years later, in an interview for his documentary on her life, Griffin Dunne asked his aunt what that moment was like. 'Well, it was—' Didion said, and paused. 'Let me tell you, it was gold.' (Oh, wow.)"
Can anyone explain the Joan Didion/Nancy Reagan feud?
As half-pint, sharp-tongued, boney-assed ice queens, they were practically required to hate each other.
inappropriately compared to Hunter Thompson !? No one who can read would liken Didion to Thompson; but anyone would group them together with other journalists whose moment began in the 1960s and stretched on from then, and who wrote in essay form, often at length, with the aim of defining our culture while still in flux. "Don't speak to soon, for the wheel's stll in spin" was not advice to be regarded.
Posterity Stakes
Joan or Woody?
Critic and Artist aren't in direct competition for posterity. They stake separate claims, in the whole of their work; their encounter is just one incident. It so happens that the argument between them, the issue they quarreled over, also lives on -- another separate entry in the Posterity Stakes. Its chances look pretty good right now, but I'm watching not betting.
funny?
Allen broke in as a stand-up, and a gag-writer for Sid Caesar's TV show. He brought that air to his first few movies, which were ramshackle but likeable. As his confidence in the medium grew, he took the path Lurker21 describes. In the later movies, even the funny ones aren't that funny. But Radio Days stands out.
Maybe Joan saw something in Nancy that she didn't like in herself. Joan had left Northern California for New York City, and the left New York for Los Angeles, a city she either despised or felt she ought to despise on principle. It was not hard to make the Reagans the symbol of the pretension and artificiality that she abhorred in wealthy Southern Californians, and despising the Reagans meant that she could condemn their Los Angeles affectations, yet also hold onto illusions about Sacramento or Manhattan or her own LA circle.
Howard
"his parasitic home town."
New Yorkers pay far more to the federal government than they get back but according to Know Nothing Howard, posting from Enid, Oklahoma, they are parasites.
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." But the stories Didion is talking about are all about things that really happened, not made-up fictions (unless every story is in some way a made-up fiction).
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