In a world of disorder and mayhem, literary icon Joan Didion dedicates her life to finding some meaning to it. The 2017 documentary, “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold,” gives a mediocre attempt in reflecting her peculiar pieces and her personal life.

Directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne, the documentary switches from a current interview with Didion herself, to pictures, clips and excerpts of her past works and her past self. As a novelist and journalist, Joan Didion discusses her books with respect to her life and the time period. Between absurdities and abnormalities, Didion believes that observing makes aspects of life less scary, and that one must confront pain in order to know where it is. As Didion says, “If you kept the snake in your eye line it wasn’t going to bite you.” Completing the most painful tasks as a writer and journalist, she contributed to forming the culture of American society, uncovering themes that are central to our lives.

Within the documentary, Didion explains her most prominent works according to the significant times in her life, starting with “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” a collection of essays.  It is based on her ventures observing the “hippiedom” of the sixties: the self-absorbed euphoria intertwined in the youth of California. She wrote the history of her own time period: the horror of disorder, the chaos of the time period masked by the euphoria, the effects of the beat movement and counterculture. Didion intertwined the idea of character, an important attribute in culture, where the overall taste of people has been lost in the time period. The sixties ended 1969 with the Manson murders, in which Sharon Tate and others were murdered by what Charles Manson dubbed the Manson family. This horrified the nation, ending the assumed euphoria of the time period.

Following “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” was Didion’s book of essays, “White Album,” which revolved around the late 60’s early 70s – the decade directly after the time of her last book: a time which Didion described to be incohesive, an ominous time where she “doubted the premises of the stories she told” and participated in the paranoia of the time period. It was the dark times following the sixties. Her marriage was turning rotten, and she lost faith in social contract and human endeavor, writing dark stories. The documentary follows, addressing her other books according to her own personal life and the world around her.

The heart of the documentary is the theme that the center does not hold: the culture, air and  madness of America does not hold together. It is the title of the documentary in reference to the first line of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “The center is not holding.” It was within her books that the center held, where people were able to draw clarity and find meaning in the randomness of life. She writes to understand, willingly taking on painful writing tasks in order to find a story with her keen observations.

Despite this constant theme in her writing, the documentary makes a mediocre attempt at reflecting on this paranoia in Joan Didion’s life. It was a time of chaos: the center was not holding. Her work was a warning for humanity. While she may be portrayed as stoic, the documentary misinterpreted her, portraying her in the past as serene and calm. The documentary did not touch upon the anxiety or the migraines and auras as a result of such, the constant pain that came from constant observation and analyzation of the horrors she finds in society.

After reading her works, one may be unsatisfied that the documentary did not fully cover the eccentricities and peculiarities of her mind and how it influenced her life and writing. Didion was portrayed only as a quirky woman who wore round sunglasses and had a cigarette and salted almonds every morning. While the documentary showed a personal background to her works, adding anecdotes from her marriage and the deaths of her daughter Quintana and husband John, the documentary at times felt dry, that they were solely skimming the surface of Didion. While it definitely is a documentary to see, especially to those unfamiliar with the influential American writer, fans may be disappointed.