![]() Her father, on a job hunt after several decades at one company, competes for a software job with his son, who inevitably bests him, the interviewer an overly jocular bro-type, brand new to the industry. Smartphones peek over the horizon: Lady Bird’s cool boyfriend tells her, ominously, that one day the government will be able to track you via your cell phone. Its blue skies are clouded by the specter of the next great territory of manifest destiny: the Internet. Little does Marion know that the California Gerwig has recreated in Lady Bird is on the brink of yet another chapter in its history of “boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss” (in Didion’s words), one that even Tower Records would not survive. She never mentions Didion in the movie, but the walls of Lady Bird’s bedroom are covered in posters, artwork, and scribbles it’s not hard to imagine that her favorite quotes from The White Album are among them. As a high school senior in 2002, Lady Bird wants to go to college in New York, where “the culture” is, and where artists and writers live (according to her, they also live in “Connecticut or New Hampshire”). It signals, like her rebellious dyed-red hair, that Lady Bird is a product of that same disillusioned Didion-ian Sacramento. It’s also the epigraph that opens Greta Gerwig’s new film Lady Bird, the first feature film she has written and directed solo, and one that is inspired by her own childhood in “the Midwest of California,” as Gerwig’s titular heroine puts it. In a profile by Michiko Kakutani in 1979, she said what is now, probably, the only well-known phrase about the city, its anti-motto: “Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.” This second postwar California of chain retailers, tract homes, and strip malls, empty promises of prosperity and security, is what Didion eventually became famous for describing. Tower Records, opened in 1960 and perhaps the city’s most well-known export (aside from Didion) belongs to the other. Arden Middle School signifies one, with its rich frontier history the school building was in the middle of fields even when Didion was a student there, in the 1940s when Sacramento was still primarily agricultural. ![]() The question was intended to get at the two Californias of Didion’s imagination. A reporter from Sacramento asked Joan Didion a few years ago if she knew that her old middle school was near the grounds of the first Tower Records store.
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