The Gift of Gold
“ Let me tell you, it was gold. You live for moments like that if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.”
—JOAN DIDION
IN THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD, Griffin Dunne’s Netflix documentary about his aunt, the writer Joan Didion, he references a passage in Didion’s book Slouching Toward Bethlehem. In an essay, written in the 1960s about the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood of San Francisco, Didion meets a five-year-old girl given LSD by her mother. Dunne asks Didion, creative non-fiction’s queen of icy surveillance, about interviewing a child tripping on drugs. “Let me tell you,” she says, “it was gold. You live for moments like that if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.” Gold, in all its dark complexity, is non-fiction’s greatest gift, and, for the documentary filmmaker, an absolute prerequisite for memorable work.
Didion’s response to Dunne’s question leads The New Yorker’s review of The Center Will Not Hold: “…what makes Didion’s words…so compelling is that she offers no high-minded defense of her motivation, beyond that of writing the best story she can. What we see, instead, is the raw thrill that journalism can deliver to its practitioner—the jolt of adrenaline that one experiences when just the right scene is witnessed.” Gold’s payoff is immense. But so, too, is its cost to the work’s subjects and creators.
Alan Zweig, in his breakout film (2000), about the obsessive peculiarities of record collectors, knew gold when he saw it,
