Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they knew how to look: the movies and the newspapers.” 

One of the themes of this essay is the way that people from the suburbs construct the narratives of their lives, and Didion is clear that the media is having an outsized influence on that process.

“What was most startling about the case that the State of California was preparing against Lucille Miller was something that had nothing to do with law at all, something that never appeared in the eight-column afternoon headlines but was always there between them: the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.”

Like the previous quote, this one illustrates the idea that the fictions that people consume has begun to shape them, as Didion describes in Lucille Miller’s case and the way she conducts herself in her affair.

“I tell you this neither in a spirit of self-revelation nor as an exercise in total recall, but simply to demonstrate that when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.” 

For many of Didion’s generation, John Wayne functioned as the epitome of stoic masculinity, and his movie-star persona has a profound effect on Didion’s thinking when she is confronted with the real man.