The White Album

“I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.”

By using figurative language, Didion demonstrates the near omnipresence of the media. It would have her think of life like a movie story, but she doesn’t have a script and only sees spliced scenes. Thus, Didion announces her independence from mediatized narratives.

“As a matter of fact almost everything Huey Newton said had the ring of being a ‘quotation,’ a ‘pronouncement’ to be employed when the need arose.”

Didion depicts media and storytelling as dictating the words of Black Panthers Party leader Huey Newton. He speaks in quotes to make himself consumable for the media or for the Black Panther narrative about him and his situation.

“During the years when I found it necessary to revise the circuitry of my mind I discovered that I was no longer interested in whether the woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor jumped or did not jump, or in why. I was interested only in the picture of her in my mind: her hair incandescent in the floodlights, her bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge.”

Didion uses figurative language to compare her mind to an electric system. She announces her departure from linear narrative and her fascination with images. This passage serves as something of a guide for these essays, establishing what the reader can expect: images and impressions or, at best, fragmented stories with puzzling meanings, not narratives with clear or neat conclusions.

“I also know that in 1975 Paul Ferguson, while serving a life sentence for the murder of Ramon Novarro, won first prize in a PEN fiction contest and announced plans to ‘continue my writing.’ Writing had helped him, he said, to ‘reflect on experience and see what it means.’ Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on ‘Midnight Confessions’ and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.”

Didion juxtaposes herself with Paul Ferguson. They both write, but Ferguson seeks meaning, while Didion doesn’t. The comparison arguably makes Didion seem ironically more harrowing and problematic than the murderous brother.

“This sense that the world can be reinvented smells of the Sixties in this country, those years when no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring, and in a way the Sixties were the years for which James Albert Pike was born.”

Didion uses figurative language, “smells,” to link the tumult of Pike’s life to the chaotic 1960s. She uses alliteration by placing “memory” and “mooring”—two words starting with the same letter—beside one another. In addition, her diction is curious: When she writes, “no one […] seemed to have any memory or mooring,” she might be referring to herself.

“In practice this requires prodigious coordination, precision, and the best efforts of several human minds and that of a Univac 418.”

Didion comments on how the California State Water Project’s systems require people and machines to achieve an objective goal. These people aren’t working for the media or telling themselves a story—they’re accomplishing an impersonal aim: delivering water.

Didion exposes the conflicting narratives and identities surrounding Reagan’s tawdry governor’s mansion. The people who tell a story that presents the mansion as a symbol of bad taste likely live in similar homes themselves.

Didion exposes the conflicting narratives and identities surrounding Reagan’s tawdry governor’s mansion. The people who tell a story that presents the mansion as a symbol of bad taste likely live in similar homes themselves.

“Here was a museum that would be forever supported by its founder alone, a museum that need never depend on any city or state or federal funding, a place forever ‘open to the public and free of all charges.’”

J. Paul Getty has enormous wealth, so he has privilege and control. He builds and operates his museum the way he wants. Ironically, or unexpectedly, the museum appeals to the public and not elitist critics.

“All ‘The Diamond Lane’ theoretically involved was reserving the fast inside lanes on the Santa Monica for vehicles carrying three or more people, but in practice this meant that 25 per cent of the freeway was reserved for 3 per cent of the cars, and there were other odd wrinkles here and there suggesting that Caltrans had dedicated itself to making all movement around Los Angeles as arduous as possible.”

Using the example of freeways, Didion highlights what happens when people impose subjective viewpoints on systems. The people at Caltrans create the Diamond Lane to encourage people to use public transit and carpools, but instead it brings havoc to the freeway. Objective systems and subjective narratives don’t mix.

“Social problems present themselves to many of these people in terms of a scenario, in which, once certain key scenes are licked (the confrontation on the courthouse steps, the revelation that the opposition leader has an anti-Semitic past, the presentation of the bill of particulars to the President, a Henry Fonda cameo), the plot will proceed inexorably to an upbeat fade.”

Didion highlights how the media often dominates Hollywood’s perception. Using satire and irony, she ridicules how some in the movie industry view societal issues and thus exposes their detachment from reality. Life isn’t a movie.

“He suggested that we watch Nancy Reagan pick flowers in the garden. ‘That’s something you might ordinarily do, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘Indeed it is,’ Nancy Reagan said with spirit.”

The media dictates Nancy Reagan’s reality. She picks flowers for the TV newsman. Didion uses dialogue to complicate the relationship between reality and media. Reagan likes flowers and gardens regardless of media attention, yet in this moment she’s in the garden because of the media.

“I saw nine of them recently, saw the first one almost by accident and the rest of them with a notebook. I saw Hell’s Angels on Wheels and Hell’s Angels ‘69. I saw Run Angel Run and The Glory Stompers and The Losers. I saw The Wild Angels, I saw Violent Angels, I saw The Savage Seven and I saw The Cycle Savages.”

Didion uses repetition to emphasize the predictability and unoriginality of the biker movies she has seen. Many of their titles use similar words like “Hell” and “Angels.” In addition, Didion reveals in the same essay that these subpar movies help frame her opinions on biker gangs. Thus, the movies impact Didion’s perception of the biker gangs’ reality—if it’s the reality at all.

“The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having. The minorities seemed to promise more, but finally disappointed: it developed that they actually cared about the issues, that they tended to see the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus as real goals, and only rarely as ploys, counters in a larger game.”

Didion uses irony and juxtaposition to expose the contrived narratives people often place on marginalized groups. The “have-nots” don’t want revolution or to be a part of “larger game.” They just want what others have.

“More and more we have been hearing the wishful voices of just such perpetual adolescents, the voices of women scarred not by their class position as women but by the failure of their childhood expectations and misapprehensions.”

With a cutting tone, Didion argues that the women writers of the feminist movement have privileges. They don’t belong to an oppressed class. They create a narrative for themselves that turns them into the oppressed because they don’t want to face the upsetting reality of adult life.

“[T]he movement is no longer a cause but a symptom.”

Didion continues to focus her irony and wit on the feminist movement. The word “symptom” casts feminism as an indication of societal illness or disease rather than a laudable purpose.

“Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment’s high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple’s ranch, the freeway sniper who feels ‘real bad’ about picking off the family of five, the hustlers, the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lost children, all the ignorant armies jostling in the night. Acquaintances read The New York Times, and try to tell me the news of the world. I listen to call-in shows.”

Using a litany of haunting images, Didion reveals her fascination with violence, death, pain, and danger. By juxtaposing call-in radio shows with The New York Times, she suggests that her media consumption impacts her worldview and reality.

“[A]ny mention of continuing casualties was made to seem a little counterproductive, a little demode.”

Didion’s societal diction, “demode,” reveals the conflict between her world and reality. In reality, a deadly war is happening. For those in her privileged space, it’s impolite to talk about something beyond their control, like dying soldiers.

“I have never been sure whether the extreme gravity of From Here to Eternity is an exact reflection of the light at Schofield Barracks or whether I see the light as grave because I have read James Jones.”

In this quote, Didion notes how the relationship between media and reality can easily blur. Didion can’t say whether the way she sees the light at the place stems from her perception of its reality or from having read James Jones’s best-selling novel.

“And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger.”

In describing how she deals with recurring migraine headaches, Didion personifies the migraine as an entity she must live with and thus tolerate. The migraine becomes an expected acquaintance whose bad behavior she can anticipate—a painful reminder of reality—rather than a vile stranger who may wreak unknown havoc.

“I stopped reading newspapers and started relying on bulletins from limo drivers, from Mouseketeers, from the callers-in on call-in shows and from the closed-circuit screens in airports that flashed random stories off the wire (‘CARTER URGES BARBITURATE BAN’ is one that got my attention at La Guardia) between advertisements for Shenandoah. I gravitated to the random. I swung with the nonsequential.”

Didion comments on the many forms of media that she sees while on her book tour. She juxtaposes credible media sources, newspapers, with suspect sources of information. Why Didion needs to know any of this information or whether it has any impact on her immediate situation is beside the point; she’s highlighting media’s omnipresence.

“Why had the American film industry not made films about the Vietnam War, was what the Colombian stringer for the Caribbean newspaper wanted to talk about. The young Colombian filmmakers looked at him incredulously. ‘What would be the point,’ one finally shrugged. ‘They run that war on television.’”

Through dialogue, Didion shows how war becomes a media product. The film industry doesn’t have to make movies about the Vietnam War because it’s already airing on TV. It’s as if the war is a script or a show.

“If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be in error. It was a premise which still seems to me accurate enough, but one which robbed us early of a certain capacity for surprise.”

Didion notes how because humans are flawed, they tend to create imperfect institutions. The quote reveals Didion’s weary outlook: People are imperfect, so it doesn’t shock her when their organizations and societies fail.

“On the whole the lifeguards favored a diction as flat and finally poetic as that of Houston Control. Everything that morning was ‘real fine.’ The headquarters crew was ‘feeling good.’ The day was ‘looking good.’ Malibu surf was ‘two feet and shape is poor.’”

Simile—a comparison using a connecting word (in this case, “as”)—links the lifeguard system to astronauts. Didion includes their diction to show how the system minimizes subjectivity and leaves the lifeguards with a precise, almost objective vocabulary.