Neither Here Nor There: San Diego and the Noir of Nowhere

From "Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana" (City Works Press, 2025)

Wave Surfer Painting by Perry Vasquez

by Mark Dery

“There is a touch of the desert about everything in California, and about the minds of the people who live here.”— Raymond Chandler, letter to Blanche Knopf, August 23, 1939 (The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959, ed. Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane)

“Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is ‘nothing.’”— Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“I have lived my whole life on the edge of nothing.”— Raymond Chandler, letter to Michael Gilbert, July 25, 1957 (The Raymond Chandler Papers)

Predictably, there are few mentions of San Diego in Joan Didion’s work—“predictably” because, for most social critics, too many California historians, and just about every member of New York’s smart set, Southern California ends more or less where L.A.’s megasprawl fades into the vast generica beyond Long Beach.

There’s a fleeting mention of the city in Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays (1970) but it turns out, on closer inspection, to be the San Diego Freeway she’s referring to. Endlessly, aimlessly orbiting L.A. in what Didion has described as “a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway,” her protagonist, the B-list actress Maria Wyeth, spends her nights driving “the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura.” There’s a throwaway reference to the city in “Insider Baseball,” a New York Review of Books dispatch on Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential run. Describing a lackluster “lunchtime ‘rally’” for the candidate, she notes that the non-event is being held in “a downtown San Diego office plaza,” adding, inscrutably, that “people who work in San Diego do not think of themselves as ‘working people,’” a Delphic pronouncement that probably sounded zingy over drinks at Elaine’s but would’ve been greeted with derision by my stepdad and his fellow machinists at Rohr aerospace corporation in Chula Vista. As it happens, CeeVee makes an appearance in the title essay to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, when, surveying the teenage wasteland left behind by the ‘60’s, Didion eulogizes the death of meaning for kids bereft of “society’s values,” rootless drifters “who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here.”

Between Long Beach and the border, the consensus holds—the consensus being the glibly disaffected, haute-bourgeois view from “a piano bar in Encino” (Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook”)—here’s nothing but a whole lot of nullity. San Diego, from this perspective, is neither here nor there, which is to say: nowhere. For one of the most populous cities in the United States and, as the first European settlement on the West Coast, the “Birthplace of California,” the city is oddly nonexistent in American myth. L.A. has Chandler, James M. Cain, Nathaniel West, the Black Dahlia murder, the Zoot Suit riots, The Big Sleep (the Chandler novel and the Howard Hawks movie), John Fante, Bukowski, the Manson family, Chinatown, Blade Runner, the Rodney King riots, Barton Fink, The Player, The Big Lebowski (the Coen brothers’ affectionately parodic homage to The Big Sleep), earthquakes, apocalyptic wildfires, and, quintessentially, Hollywood, the infrastructure of the nation’s dream life. To quote Mike Davis quoting Michael Sorkin (in Davis’s magisterial City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles), “L.A. is probably the most mediated town in America, nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers.”

San Diego, by comparison, is mythless; most Americans, even other Californians, know it (if they know it all) from the San Diego Zoo, Top Gun (1986), hometown boy Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (2000), Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), and, more obscurely, Nobody’s Son (Tijuana-born Luis Alberto Urrea’s memoir about growing up biracial in S.D.), Kem Nunn’s surf-noir classic, Tijuana Straits (2004), and “The Pump House Gang,” Tom Wolfe’s essay, now little read but still taught in undergrad journalism classes, about the proto-punk surfers at La Jolla’s Windansea Beach who defended their turf, in the summer of ’65, by any means necessary.

(Fast Times at Ridgemont High [1982], based on Crowe’s year undercover at Clairemont High, from 1978-’79, should be on that list: its National Lampoon humor belies its sociological merits as a time-capsule portrait of every permanently baked, OP-clad, strenuously dude-ly surfer bro in my high school class of ’78. Regrettably, it’s disqualified: the screenplay relocates Crowe’s San Diego setting to the San Fernando Valley—yet more evidence that, even on a clear day, you can’t see San Diego from a Hollywood studio.)

“Historically, it seems San Diego cannot represent itself, and is barely represented by others,” writes David Reid, in his foreword to Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See by Davis, Kelly Mayhew, and Jim Miller, still the only serious counterhistory of “the most corrupt city on the West Coast,” let alone the only radical one. “In history and in literature, though America’s seventh largest city at the millennium, it scarcely registers.”

When I was growing up in Chula Vista in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, San Diegans shared that sense of mythlessness. It sprang, in large part, from the existential given that the past was weightless—a series of half-remembered, unremarkable events, irrelevant to the timeless now of a place where the climate seemed less “Mediterranean” than unchangingly Martian (in the Ray Bradbury sense); where, on a summer day when the Pacific was smooth as glass from here to the horizon, time itself seemed becalmed and your sense of yourself—of even having a self—seemed to waver in the heat waves. A place where nothing ever happened, at least in the middle-class white suburbs. A place where you could live next door to someone for decades and not know much more about them than when they left for work or watered their lawn. A place without philosophy but no end of “nature and climate,” as Henry James put it, while sojourning at the Hotel del Coronado in the spring of 1905.

It wasn’t that San Diego had no history, just that San Diegans lived ahistorically, mostly because we weren’t confronted by the fossil record of architectural styles that reminds New Yorkers of the pre-war 20^th century, as the Beaux-Arts Grand Central Terminal does, or Angelenos of the Chandlerian L.A. of the ‘20’s and ‘30’s, as do the downtown Central Library, the Griffith Observatory, and Musso and Frank (whose neon sign still proclaims, as it did when Chandler, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were getting pickled in the back bar, “Since 1919—oldest in Hollywood”).

All but ignored in our grammar-school curriculum, San Diego history was haphazardly absorbed through field trips to Old Town, The Junípero Serra Museum on the Presidio, the Cabrillo monument, and the Museum of Man in Balboa Park; Scott O’Dell’s YA novel, Island of the Blue Dolphins; garbled retellings, on family outings to Ramona, of the novel that was its namesake, Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 romance of Old California (which no one had read, but everyone knew of); and campfire musings about the Indigenous Kumeyaay people, whose metates and manos (stone mortars and pestles used to grind acorn flour) we found in the Laguna mountains. “In the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history,” writes Didion, in her memoir-cum-cultural critique, Where I Was From. “In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.”

§

Mike Davis, the Marxist Jeremiah of California studies, was not, in his later years, a Didion fan—partly, I suspect, because he thought she never quite shook off the reactionary sensibility of her Silent Majority roots (despite her left turn in the Reagan ‘80’s, in titles like Salvador—“an awful book,” he told a Guardian interviewer in 2022, “with El Salvador as a country of dead bodies, not a people, not a culture”); partly because the screenwriter in her could write a flip, facile line like “the oral history of Los Angeles is written in piano bars” (“Los Angeles Notebook”), an affront to an obsessive, omnivorous scholar like Davis, who seemed to master entire disciplines and devour whole libraries when researching his books; and partly because Didion was an incurable neurasthenic who scrutinized the world from behind her bug-eye sunglasses with a mixture of amused contempt and neurotic agita. Davis, by contrast, went drinking with old Wobblies and dreamed of dying on the barricades.

Didion, Davis implied, was too busy looking for “the social or moral lesson in the murder of five” (as she puts it in the quoted-to-death opening sentence of her essay “The White Album”) when she should have been flaying bare the pathologies of power, race, and class. Noting, in Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, “the sinister campaigns involving the FBI, the district attorney’s office, and both the LAPD and LA County Sheriffs, to destroy the Panthers, Brown Berets, and other radical groups” in 1969, Davis* observes,

This is the true context underlying the creeping sense of dread and imminent chaos famously evoked by Joan Didion in her 1979 essay collection, The White Album. If “helter skelter” was unleashed after 1970, the Manson gang were bit players compared to the institutions of law and order.

(*He co-authored the book with Jon Wiener but this tart quip has the unmistakable ring of Davis’s deadpan wit.)

Davis was a hardboiled Marxist; Didion was a sunbelt existentialist. Davis played it close to the vest, writing in the first person only when it served his polemical purpose—inevitably, the anatomization of power. In Didion’s cultural criticism, the line between nervous breakdown and cultural “atomization” (a recurrent word, a kind of tonal center, in her ‘60’s essays) is blurred; the one feeds into the other, in fearful synergy.

Thus the cultlike devotion of her acolytes, many of them young women, specifically writers, perhaps MFA grads whose “creative nonfiction” descends from the cooly observed yet confessional New Journalism she pioneered or maybe just adherents of the mindfulness regimen of journaling. Didion’s tendency, in the essays everyone remembers, to refract the social through the self, the political through the personal, makes her the perfect prism for trauma culture, whose wound dressings include the personal essay, the memoir of loss and grief (such as Didion’s bestselling Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, about her husband’s sudden death and, shortly afterward, the death of her daughter), and, paradigmatically, the journal (like the notebooks Didion kept).

Casting a skeptical eye on “the cult of Saint Joan,” Daphne Merkin seems surprised, in her New York Times essay of the same name, that, “for all her insistent elitism, young readers have embraced Didion.” She shouldn’t be. In these post-traumatic times, the psychic toll taken by the COVID pandemic, the farcical nightmare of the Trump years, the far right’s unrelenting assault on democracy, mass shootings, and the disaster movie we’re all living in the age of eco-pocalypse can be measured out in suicides, murders, and prescriptions for antidepressants. Unsurprisingly, young readers are turning to Didion not as a jaundiced chronicler of American decline or deflater of California Dreamin’ but as the migrainous patron saint of the “trauma narrative.”

But isn’t that a bit reductionist in its black-or-white binaries? Also, don’t its hierarchical oppositions align a little too uncomfortably with gender caricatures? Didion’s turn toward more explicitly political journalism, in the Reagan ‘80’s, produced pieces that, while not certifiably Marxist, forced the Sontagian intelligentsia that reads The New York Review of Books to reckon with the horror in the mirror: the bodycount racked up America’s covert adventures in South America (“In El Salvador,” November 4, 1982), the trail of wrecked lives left by moral grotesques like Dick Cheney (“Cheney: The Fatal Touch,” October 5, 2006), the lynch-mob bigotry that’s as New York as a dollar slice (“New York: Sentimental Journeys,” January 17, 1991). In her last book about California, Where I Was From, she drew on a body of research worthy of Davis to expose the socioeconomic roots of cities’ love affair with the prison-industrial complex, among other pathologies of late capitalism. Notably, she used the c-word (“class”), a discouraging word that never was heard in the class-conscious home she grew up in—“It’s not a word we use,” her mother told a teenaged Joan. “It’s not the way we think”—and which had been little more than a spectral presence in her previous post-mortems of the California Dream.

Then, too, both Didion and Davis cared about style. (Not all writers do, and fewer do now than ever before, in a culture where the flat, characterless Style of No Style taken to the bank by Malcolm Gladwell is the dominant voice in bestselling nonfiction.) Davis wrote a kind of mordant Marxist noir, somewhere between leftist writers on California like Carey McWilliams and Louis Adamic on one hand and William Gibson and J.G. Ballard on the other, speculative urbanists passing as science-fiction novelists. Didion distilled her malaise and alienation into an aloof, ironic, world-weary voice, scalpel-sharp and chilled to subzero. At her best, writes Merkin, Didion transposed “what is essentially a solipsistic outlook, specializing in malaise, into a form of bleak collective truth.”

Because noir is the mother tongue of any Angeleno writing about the city, both writers owe a debt to the genre, specifically to the gimlet eye, bleak wit, and wiseacre cynicism of Raymond Chandler. Ruminating on the furnace-blast Santa Ana winds in her essay “Los Angeles Notebook,” Didion quotes those Chandler lines every writer loves to quote: “On nights like that, every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.” Davis told The Guardian, shortly before he died, “I hate Raymond Chandler, yet I’ve read him and reread him so many times. He’s a fascist, and I mean this in a precise sense. He represents the small businessman being trampled by outside forces. Each of his novels has an openly racist section. But of course, you care about the writing, and you end up forgiving things that really aren’t forgivable.”

Or you don’t. “I’ve never been a fan of Joan Didion since I read Salvador,” said Davis, in a 1993 interview with the Chicago Review. Then, he said something I’d missed when I skimmed it, first time around—a certified jaw-dropper: “I might as well say it—I adore Joan Didion. Her book on El Salvador I feel to be despicable. Otherwise, I just have uncritical adoration for her as a writer, and I think she wrote the absolutely finest thing ever written about the experience of growing up in California, ‘Notes from a Native Daughter’” (in Slouching Towards Bethlehem).

“Of course, she doesn’t live here anymore,” the interviewer interjects.

“Well, I think she spiritually lives here,” says Davis.

As so many of us who leave still do.

§

During the lockdown days of the pandemic, I found myself returning, during my ineffectual attempts at mindfulness meditation, to the Tijuana sloughs where I spent nearly every day of the summer of ’76, the summer my parents divorced, or the scalloped coves at the foot of the sandstone bluffs standing sentry over Torrey Pines beach. The fireball sun vaporized my depression with the same ease it burned off the morning fog.

I’ve lived in New York since 1983 but part of me still lives in San Diego “spiritually,” or as spiritually as an atheist with an autoimmune response to even parts-per-million traces of the New Age can be said to live. It has something to do with my sense that the abyssal depths of my unconscious lie somewhere off the coastal shelf of Imperial Beach and La Jolla and Torrey Pines. I spent long stretches of those endless summers gazing vacantly out to sea, not so much lost in thought as in non-thought. Part of me dove deep into the limitless vastness of the Pacific and never resurfaced.

It’s the oceanic version of the “baptism of solitude” Paul Bowles experienced in the sand seas of the Sahara, described in his essay of the same name:

You leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call le baptisme de la solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.

In the absence of myth, we map our own psychogeographies, reading geography through psychology, as the word suggests; superimposing past on present, biography on topography, whether built environment or wild nature.

Davis and Didion shared an appreciation for the poetry and politics of the land, and the presumption that we’re shaped as much by nature as by culture. “What I think about more often than anything else these days is the death of California,” Davis told an interviewer, a few months before he died in 2022 (in San Diego, it should be noted, where by odd coincidence Chandler also died, in 1959). “The death of its iconic landscapes. ... How much of the beauty of the state might disappear forever. No more Joshua trees. No more sequoias. I’ve exulted in the beauty of California my entire life. ... There’s so much I wish my kids could see, could have seen, that they’ll not see. And that, of course, is happening everywhere in the world.” “Don’t you think sometimes people are formed by the landscape they grow up in?” says Didion, in the documentary The Center Will Not Hold. “It formed everything I ever think or ever do or am.”

I do think that, emphatically. There’s something about San Diego, a mystery I’ve been trying to solve all my life: the mystery of the haunted emptiness, literally and figuratively, of its bedroom communities; the intellectual and spiritual vacuum of the suburban wastelands where I grew up, where everyone kept their curtains drawn against the heat and people sat in the air-conditioned half-light, watching TV, on a radiant summer day; the gnawing isolation and loneliness of a time and a place where all I can remember about the neighbors who lived next door for the whole of my childhood and adolescence is that their son went on the requisite ‘60’s pilgrimage to India, then became a follower of the “sex guru” Rajneesh, then died of a mysterious wasting disease that turned out, in retrospect, to have been AIDS.

Near the end of her life, a life spent trying to unpick the mystery of what the Golden State means,Didion was still perplexed. “California has remained in some way impenetrable to me, a wearying enigma, as it has to many of us who are from there,” she says, inWhere I Was From. “We worry it, correct and revise it, try and fail to define our relationship to it and its relationship to the rest of the country.” If being Californian means forever trying to unriddle what California means—“to find the ‘point’ of California, to locate some message in its history,” as she says—being San Diegan means wondering why there’s notherehere.

Mark Dery is a cultural critic, essayist, and the author of four books, most recently, the biography Born To Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. He has taught journalism at NYU and “dark aesthetics” at the Yale School of Art; been a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome; and published in a wide range of publications. Dery knew Mike Davis, who liked to refer to him as his “Chula Vista homeboy,” and is grateful to Mike’s wife, Alessandra Moctezuma, for her insights into Mike’s thoughts on Didion as a critic—and creator—of California myth.

To buy Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana, go here