Naomi Klein, Box Office Poison, Didion & Babitz: Pajiba November 2024 Book Recommendations Superpost!

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

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Following the US election, I was one of many people seeking some sort of clarity. Looking for answers to chaos like this can be aggravating, as well as an obvious set-up for culty snake-oil bullsh*t. Still, it felt like the right moment in time to finally read Doppelganger, which had been sitting on my Kindle unread for several months now. I made the right choice.

‘If your Naomi be Klein, you’re doing just fine. If your Naomi be Wolf, oh buddy, big oof.’ It’s a rhyme that went viral on social media as the two public intellectuals found themselves frequently confused with one another. Naomi Klein writes about capitalism and the climate crisis. Naomi Wolf specialized in 3rd wave feminism and the Occupy movement. For Klein, it was a mild irritant to be confused with another Naomi for so long, but then it became a problem once Wolf sank further into the rabbit hole of right-wing radicalism, anti-vax propaganda, and palling around with Steve Bannon. She had a doppelganger, a strange mirror version of Naomi who represented everything she opposed, and still, so many people thought they were interchangeable. What was a political expert to do?

Exploring her own doppelganger led Klein to dissect the wider issues of the modern age of conspiracy. New Age wellness has become indistinguishable from anti-government alt-right grifting. ‘Pro-freedom’ protestors align themselves with wannabe despots. The advent of AI-generated images and texts saturating the internet have only exacerbated vastly funded misinformation campaigns. Often, it feels like people prefer the lie to the truth, even if the former is so ludicrously obvious and easily debunked. As Klein explains, there’s something curiously reassuring for many in these conspiracies. They’re easier to immerse ourselves in than the prickly realities of real-world power struggles that are both more mundane and more damaging than fairy stories about pizza restaurants.

As Klein savvily notes, nobody is immune to this. It would have been easy to surmise that Naomi Wolf would be far more sceptical about conspiracies aligned with misogynistic grifters who oppose everything she used to stand for. And there are plenty of legitimate reasons to, for example, be cynical about big pharma or government overreach. Yet there is a tipping point. Criticizing the ways that companies made billions in profit from the COVID vaccine is never the driving force of the anti-vaxxers. It’s always something more nefarious and less realistic.

I found Doppelganger to be nourishing. It did feel like the book I needed post-election, but with that came the same aggravation that Klein admits she spiralled into herself. Ultimately, however, it’s a hopeful book, a cultural critique that is so astute that made our endless world of disaster seem a little less dark. Frankly, I think it should be required reading.

Box Office Poison by Tim Robey

Everyone loves a flop. There’s something fascinating and often highly enjoyable about a hyper-expensive display of creative hubris and obvious misguidedness. As films and TV become more expensive to make and studios are less likely to take risks with their precious IPs, true flops feel fewer and farther between these days (exceptions like Megalopolis aside.) So, why not reflect on the funniest, weirdest, and most inexplicable failures in Hollywood history? After all, it’s part of the film world’s heritage.

Critic Tim Robey’s Box Office Poison offers a breezy guide through a century of flops. This is my field of work so I was familiar with most of the titles, but there were still a few I was less knowledgeable on, and one or two I’d never even heard of. Robey starts with Intolerance perhaps the most enduring mega-flop of the silent era thanks to D.W. Griffith’s overspending and delusions of grandeur. He wanted to encompass the vast breadth of humanity’s struggle against prejudice through the ages (ironic given that this is the dude who revived the KKK’s popularity with The Birth of a Nation.) It was the epitome of ‘go big or go home’, and it left a crater-sized impact on the business. Thus was born the cinematic mega-flop.

Not every flop is so ambitious. Some are studio-mandated sequels to hit that nobody asked for (Speed 2: Cruise Control), others are earnestly created projects that fell apart through mundane studio meddling or too many cooks spoiling the broth (the forgotten Supernova.) Robet is kinder towards some than others, although one could hardly blame him for being pro-The Magnificent Ambersons (his defence of Gigli, however…) He’s not blind to so-called genius, though. Tod Browning is heralded for casting disabled actors in Freaks but not excused for his sadistic behaviour and on-set bullying (from decade to decade, white dudes have gotten high off their own supply.)

Box Office Poison ends on Cats, a beloved catastrophe that already feels like a relic of a bygone age. The ‘nervous unoriginality’ of the industry was already in effect when Tom Hooper was worrying about feline buttholes, but with Cats being the last major flop pre-COVID, things only became more risk-averse. Robey wonders if it’s worth mourning the loss of the mega-flop, because at least they’re more interesting to talk about than the financial disappointments that look and sound like every other movie on the market. I’m inclined to agree with him. Then again, I did hate Megalopolis…

Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik

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If you’re a fan of Eve Babitz then the chances are you’re also a fan of Joan Didion. They’re the ultimate cool girls of American creative non-fiction, the endlessly photogenic and magnetic Californians whose work helped to define a particular view of their home state in the age of flower power and Vietnam. Didion was the figure of clarity and ambivalence while Babitz was a proud partygoer who revelled in the excesses of the era. While the former’s legacy was secured over decades of work, it took a lot longer for Babitz’s reputation to be elevated to the stature of icon. Nowadays, they’re frequently mentioned in conversation with one another, viewed as both sides of the same coin. Their relationship during their lifetimes wasn’t quite so strong, and according to Lili Anolik, there was far more drama to this than history has detailed.

Lili Anolik is frequently credited with being a key figure in the modern revival of Babitz’s image, although the New York Review of Books probably has a stronger claim to such a title. Her biography, Hollywood’s Eve, was an unabashedly fangirlish celebration of the writer, partly built from the time Anolik spent with Babitz in her final years. As she lets readers know at the beginning of Didion and Babitz (and endlessly throughout), she’s made her choice: she is 100% Team Eve and doesn’t really like Joan’s work. In her follow-up, she cites previously undiscovered and unsent letters by Babitz to Didion and others as the basis for her ‘explosive’ claims, largely about Didion. This is the foundation of her sloppy and smarmy book that can be summed up with, ‘Eve rules, Joan drools.’

Anolik’s fervent and self-confessed fetishistic love of Babitz means that the writer can basically do no wrong by her subject. Her gaze is uncritically adoring for 90% of this stretched-out read, and even her critiques are cushioned to the point of pillow-like softness. It’s a tedious approach made truly insulting by how much glee she takes in treating Didion, no saint herself, as a literary punching bag. Where Babitz is praised for her semi-autobiographical work, Didion is slammed as craven in the ways she appropriated her life for art. It’s not a terrible idea to puncture that carefully crafted image of the Didion brand that made her a star and ‘icon’, but Anolik’s gossipy snideness goes from insightful to mean very quickly. She claims, based on some anecdotal quotes from men in Didion’s life (almost always men) that she never truly loved her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne (who she also claims was probably gay), and that his sudden death, the basis for her bestselling memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, was an exciting boon for her career. A supposed bombshell about Didion’s first love is elevated to near-myth by Anolik, even though his presence in Didion’s life was not the secret Anolik claimed it to be.

And the basis for this entire argument of Babitz and Didion being frenemies is a couple of unsent letters from the former. This ‘evidence’ is scant to the point of inconsequential. Anolik’s arguments are further weakened by her frequent interjections of ‘I think’, ‘I imagine’ and other such assertions that her biased and stalker-ish speculation is objectivity. She’s projecting her fangirling and bitterness so thoroughly that she’d be a credit to any cinema screen.

In the opening of Didion & Babitz, Anolik instructs Didion fans who may find her disdain for the author to be objectionable, ‘Don’t be a baby.’ I probably should have stopped reading after that point because it told me everything I needed to know about the book and author alike. Perhaps her anti-Didion screeds should have been saved for a snark subreddit. Or her own unsent letters. Skip this and read Babitz and Didion’s own words. They at least possess some self-awareness.