Although of Course You End Up Pretending to Be Someone Else

    I went to see End of the Tour last night with my brother. I know a lot of you guys were swearing some kind of fatwa against the film, I guess for daring to depict the Patron Saint of White GenX Writer Dudes, David Foster Wallace, but ultimately I decided that I was curious and I fundamentally didn’t give a shit about that stuff. Maybe it’s because I didn’t come to be a DFW fan — if you could call me that — until after he died, but I don’t have an attachment to the guy that makes me respond viscerally in that way to the idea of Jason Segel putting on a bandana and pretending to be him. It might also be that by the time he died, it was 2008, and even if I had been into him I don’t think I would have felt his death on a gut-punch level, mostly because I was 28 by then and hadn’t felt anything in that way since the night they found Kurt Cobain’s body 14 years earlier. And maybe it’s just that I don’t believe in authenticity, so I don’t find it possible for DFW’s to be violated by a graven image. I don’t know, this is coming off as snotty. Maybe I’m just a contrarian. It’s probably that.

    Anyhoozy, I was curious to see how completely the movie would commit to the conceit of the book upon which it is based. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (a much better title, by the way, than End of the Tour) consists of a brief introduction by David Lipsky, who is listed as the author and is played by Jesse Eisenberg with his usual intense nervousness in the film, and then 200-odd pages of transcripts of a 5-day-long interview-cum-car-trip that Lipsky took with DFW towards the end of DFW’s Infinite Jest book tour. It’s an interesting book, but claustrophobic, because it’s about two profoundly neurotic people negotiating a social interaction, mediated by a tape recorder, in an enclosed space. I actually thought that this had the potential to make for a really interesting movie, if the filmmakers had the balls to overcome their famous subject and the movie-star pedigrees of their actors.

    They almost pull it off. The film is basically a low-key take on an old genre long since gone to seed, the road picture, and there are really only two characters with personalities, DFW (Segal) and Lipsky (Eisenberg). They talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and then they eat, and then they talk some more. Ideas are kicked around, emotions bruited and then retracted, and on the whole Segal really bursts out of the comedy-doofus, live-action-Muppet persona that has made him rich and famous, playing Wallace as reserved and funny and moody and physically intimidating. (Eisenberg, by contrast, basically just Eisenbergs. You’ve seen this performance, or a version of it, in Adventureland and The Facebook Movie. Don’t get me wrong, it’s effective, but it’s nothing new.) A frigid midwest winter landscape scrolls behind them as they drive, walk, eat, talk, fly, and generally try to figure out how much they like each other, how much they’re allowed to like each other, how much they’re supposed to like each other, and whether it’s okay if they maybe don’t really like each other all that much. A lot is made of Lipsky’s envy of Wallace, which I suppose is an accurate reading of the way Lipsky portrays himself in the book.*

*I know a lot of people who loathe book-Lipsky, but I actually think it was fairly brave of him to be totally up-front about the small, ugly feelings he was having all through the experience.

    Inasmuch as the movie fails, it fails because it doesn’t have the courage to just let the conversation be the movie. There are various attempts to wedge a narrative into the movie: is Lipsky going to ask Wallace about whether or not he was a heroin addict? Is Lipsky going to mess up DFW’s sobriety by drinking in front of him? Is DFW going to lose his shit when it’s clear that his ex-girlfriend is kind of into this nebbish reporter who is following him around? I heard an interview with Lipsky in which he claims the love-triangle thing actually kinda-sorta happened, but the movie spends much too much time on it, and doesn’t really have the daring to let the viewer wonder whether or not DFW is totally off his rocker: in the movie, it’s clear that Lipsky is hitting on DFW’s ex, in a way that would be fairly innocuous if not for the fact that the character knows the girlfriend has history with DFW, who is literally always in the room as it goes on. This sequence doesn’t sink the film by any means — at least a hint of it is necessary to understand the dynamic between Lipsky & DFW in the film’s second half — but it drags, and feels a little bit ham-fisted.

    More egregious is a framing device, in which an older Lipsky (Eisenberg in a bad wig) hears of DFW’s death and is moved to listen to the old tapes of the interview and write the book. It’s cheap, and fairly poorly-written, and mostly just feels hammy and unneccessary. I guess the spectre of DFW’s suicide hangs over everything ever written or said about or by him, and the movie probably shouldn’t assume that (A) everybody knows what happened or (B) people will understand that context years in the future, when they may be watching the film clean. I don’t have a suggestion for how to do it better, other than maybe to give Eisenberg a better wig and not show him openly weeping at a reading at the movie’s end, which feels manipulative and dishonest.

    In the end, the movie was pretty good, and its strongest passages all consist of simple conversation between its two principle characters. I do think that the film — like a lot of the people that I know — is a little over-invested in the idea of Wallace-as-saint, leading to some overly-safe choices. In addition to making Lipsky’s designs on DFW’s ex a little too transparent, there’s also slo-mo passage of Segel, still dressed as a photograph of DFW from 1996, dancing alone-but-in-a-crowd at a church, after a kinda funny monologue about how he likes to do the electric slide. This is DFW the angel, the otherworldly agent of good who has seen through the cyicism and irony and pierced to the sincere, authentic heart of life, and it strikes me as basically bullshit, meaning reverse-engineered from the fact that DFW was a small-town, small-c conservative who also happened to have addiction issues and mental health problems. DFW spends the entirety of Lipsky’s book, and the movie based on it, anxious about the portrait that would be painted of him once the interview was over — worried that Lipsky would try to make him look edgier, or meaner, or more venal and materalistic, than he actually is. The truth of the matter is that making every depiction of the man into a hagiography is just as much of a lie, if not more of one. My experience of the guy was that he had a deeply sour personality and a petty streak that was deeply unbecoming in a wealthy, famous man in middle age. Is that a saint? No, because there’s no such thing as a saint. He was just a guy.

Wallace Agonistes

    Oh, good, another essay about David Foster Wallace.* We actually don’t have a lot to say about the bastard — and let us reiterate that, in our brief experience of the man, he was in fact a complete bastard — that you haven’t already heard. Yes, we lement the rapid beatification of the weird ghost of him that lives on in media. Sure, we ape his style — we all ape his style, especially yr. corresps., who came to the great writer’s work late but with voracity and a certain convert’s zeal that led to a brief but transformative period of post-adolescent growing pains, replete with page-long sentences and a 900-word vocab list on our hard drive that we have cribbed from every book, article, podcast, and yes (even**) television show we have watched for the last four years. And sometimes we worry about escaping his shadow, as do all white GenX male writers with a penchant for footnotes and a sneaking suspicion that we aren’t so much tortured artists as, you know, assholes. The irony being is that yr corresps haven’t actually finished Infinite Jest yet, though we talk about it every summer, though we own 3 or maybe 4 copies of it, though we’re quite proud, to the point of mentioning it rather too often, that we’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow and V. (twice!) — this could be a compensatory gesture, not unlike a man with a micropenis buying a candy red Hummer — and found both tomes to be rewarding and really, honestly, not all that difficult.

*by us or by anybody

** especially?

    But we read this piece in Vulture earlier today and it has been eating away at yr corresps ever since. Much of the piece is admirable and wonderful and accurate and high and true and fine and moist and sticky and lovely, especially the bits about the beatification above-mentioned. But —

    Oh, fuck it, I’m not going to go all in on that device, it was killing me. Go read “Big Red Son” . DFW, the bastard, does it way better than I ever could anyway. Suffice it to say that if you read that piece, and then you read basically anything I’ve written on this blog in the last oh, say, forever, you’ll notice a certain resonance between DFW’s style and my own — not a shock — and that, in general, he does it way better than me and I should probably give up on this writing thing and go into refrdigerator repair — refridgerators, those aren’t going to get phased out like home phones and VCRs, are they? Aren’t billions of us still going to need to find a way to keep our food from rotting without burying it in the ground with a block of salt?

    I’m off track. Anyway, not that the people at Vulture care, but I have a super-complex relationship with their output, which is often admirably thoughtful and does a good job of executing the necessary postmodern task*** of taking all media seriously and not being snobbish about television or new media.† But there’s also a strong strain of twittishness in a lot of their criticism, emblamatized by the site’s obsequeous stance towards the mean, soulless, manipulative, gimmicky and unverisimilitous Mad Men. (I don’t like Mad Men. And yes, I’ve watched most of it. Leave me alone.) In attempting to make sure everything is taken seriously, sometimes things that are fundamentally not serious (like costume soaps about vacuous asshats who work in advertising) end up receiving a lot of praise that feels to me disingenuous, or at least — what? — a little blind.

***one at which DFW failed, BTW

† I’ve long thought that the reason DFW failed at this, by the way, is that he had just unremittingly dreadful taste in everything other than books. The occasion for all these effing essays of late is probably the release of the certain-to-be-horrifying End of the Tour, based on a book-length interview with the much better title Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Wallace’s taste in movies runs the gamut from great action — Die Hard — to terrible action — Braveheart — to, basically, camp — anything by David Lynch. He’s revealed to be a lover of disposable grunge queen Alanis Morrissette. (When I met him, the rumor was going around that he was into the execrable Xian grunge band Creed, which, ugh.) And TV, my god — it was hard not to have bad taste in TV for a long time, but in truth he seems more concerned with game shows and commercials than the rather long list of quality, non-cynical stuff that has been airing on TV since way before the modern “golden age”: I challenge you to mount a serious argument that Barney Miller was cheap or ugly. It wasn’t.

    Nope, still off track. Anyway, what I was trying to say is that I actually kind of liked the DFW essay, but I have some complicated feelings about the author’s thoughts on “This Is Water”, DFW’s Kenyon College graduation address that has, since his suicide, become a sort of touchstone of the beatification movement. I mean, some of those are rooted in my complicated feelings about DFW and his apparent feeling that there was a crisis of sincerity in the world and part of his mission was to lean in to his own feelings, break through the impenetrable distance between minds, and calm said crisis with his genuineness. I’ve never felt any crisis of sincerity. I’ve leveled the criticism at DFW before that he has a tendency (as do we all) to universalize his own problems; he performs a sort of spiritual metynomy by which his alienation comes to stand for the human condition, and I don’t know that that’s accurate.˚

˚That said, the alienation is, I think, real, at least for a lot of us — it just manifests differently. I have no problem genuinely feeling things; sometimes it feels like I feel too many things, which is why I avoid human contact a lot of the time. But I do, despite having no reason to, feel completely apart from humanity, if we define “humanity” as “the ongoing project of keeping the species of homo sapiens sapiens alive and in progressively better circumstance."

    Christian Lorentzen, the Vulture author, performs precisely the same move in criticizing “This Is Water”. If you haven’t read “This Is Water”, there’s an extended passage about a generic you who is going to the supermarket after the end of a long day, and struggling with the effort of not growing impatient, or angry, or judgemental, or any of those things. Lorentzen writes:

Perhaps I’m an outlier, but I’ve mostly enjoyed my visits to grocery stores over the years. In any event, it strikes me that there are more difficult things about adulthood than navigating the express-check-out line, and more that it demands of us than overcoming self-centeredness and reflexive sourness. What Wallace describes as a universal rite of passage into maturity seems more to me like the daily struggles of a serious depressive, which he was. To me, it’s the least interesting version of himself he ever put to the page.

Fairplay if you find this version of DFW boring. I don’t. But this feels like a willful misreading of what the essay is about. This isn’t meant to be “a universal rite of passage into maturity”. It’s about this one huge thing, a thing that it is transparently obvious that nearly every human struggles with — empathy.†† The example of the grocery store seems esepcially apt to me, simply because it is mundane, because it happens to nearly everybody at one time or another that they are in a public place with a bunch of strangers and the combination of exhaustion and neon lights and screaming babies and bad news on the radio and a crappy job and so on and so forth just erases empathy and turns them into a vat of seething grievances. It’s not that it’s like this all the time. It’s that it’s like this for everybody sometime. If it’s never been like that for you, then congratulations, you are the greatest human of all time and the rest of us are shitty little assholes.

†† It seems to me that the only people who don’t struggle with empathy are sociopaths. They just don’t have it, or ignore it.

    You can hear me starting to get pissed off. I’m going to dial that back. But this is just another example of a trend in criticism that has been cropping up over the last few years — a sort of ad hominem, bad-faith criticism that assumes the worst of an author and engages mostly in smug self-congratulation. My instinct is to say that this is an outgrowth of the infinite combination of the internet and the fetishization of authenticity, but I don’t really know enough about the former or care enough about the latter to make an informed judgment. Anyway, it blows.

    Okay, this is too long now. I’m done. Don’t be a jerk.