“Interminable Movie” - “On Self-Respect”
Joan Didion explains “To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening.” The movie is allegorical of an assortment of an individual’s flaws which he or she is not enthusiastic to embrace. The faults are perceptible, but a deficit of self-esteem hinders an individual from admitting and taming them.
“Lie awake” - “On Self-Respect”
Joan Didion states, “To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness.” The wakefulness embodies the uneasiness that is characteristic in the lives of the individuals who are lacking of self-regard. Agitation indicates one cannot sleep serenely in the backdrop of adverse feelings credited to inferiority attitudes.
‘Golden land’- “Some dreamers of the Golden dream”
Joan Didion explicates, “This is as tory of love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain was an alien place: not the Coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but harsher California.” Didion’s location of the story depicts ‘the golden land’ the setting for the unqualified American dream whose accomplishment is augmented by ‘golden’ milieu.
