You’re watching this film knowing that the man being interviewed will one day commit suicide. But the man interviewing him all those years ago doesn’t know that. And what prompted him to conduct the interview was based on the gap between his reaction to the critics reacting to the author and his book [Infinite Jest] before and after he had actually read it. In other words, he thought the reaction of the critics was hyperbolic to say the least. How could a book – any book – really be as good as the reviews that he was reading? Then he read it. And the book so astonished him he managed to convince the publishers of Rolling Stone magazine to let him interview the author.
David Lipsky is the interviewer. And he is a good writer – a published writer – himself. But he is also a writer who recognized the gap between himself and a great writer like Foster. So part of his reaction is awe and part is envy. Maybe even resentment. It’s that feeling anyone of us might have when we read something and know that, however much we want to be recognized as a great writer too, there is simply no way that we ever will. And we know this because someone writes a book like Infinite Jest and we recognize immediately that it can never be us.
[Also, having attempted suicide myself many years ago, I am always fascinated with those who actually do it. I’m looking for anything that might link us together – either in terms of circumstances or a state of mind. And I have always been partial to the idea that when the two come into sync you are much more likely to attempt it…and much more likely to succeed.]
It’s hard for folks like me who dreamed of becoming David Foster Wallace to imagine what frame of mind would prompt him to just flush it all down the toilet.
So maybe it somehow revolves around this:
David: …why are we - and by “we” I mean people like you and me: mostly white, upper middle class, obscenely well-educated, doing really interesting jobs, sitting in really expensive chairs, watching the best, most sophisticated electronic equipment money can buy - why do we feel empty and unhappy?
We also catch a glimpse or two of a man who could really be quite the asshole. Plenty of chinks in this armor. Or in what he calls his “regular guy-ness”. But it still always comes down to him being a very complicated man with an extraordinary mind. And thus folks like you and I will always ever only be scratching the surface in understanding him.
IMDb
[b]Although this is never made clear or followed up on in the movie, David Lipsky never published the article he was assigned to write on David Foster Wallace in Rolling Stone.
When Lipsky gives Wallace his book to read at the end of the film, Wallace is frustrated that Lipsky was allowed to choose his own cover art for a relatively unknown book. It is well known that David Foster Wallace had no say in the original cover art of “Infinite Jest” and hated what his publishers settled on. Aside from being a light hearted in-joke amongst fans of Wallace, this also provides irony to the story, providing a comedic payoff to Lipsky’s envy of Wallace’s success. [/b]
at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_Tour
trailer: youtu.be/DBk1Mrb4RyM
THE END OF THE TOUR [2015]
Directed by James Ponsoldt
[b]Lipsky [on phone]: Hey, Bob, what’s up?
Bob: Listen, according to this unconfirmed report… David Wallace is dead.
Lipsky: What? No no no no, must be a college prank or something…
[Lipsky googles “david foster wallace"]
Bob: I thought if anyone might know if it was true…
…
Bob [off screen on the radio]: Now a remembrance of writer David Foster Wallace. He was found dead, an apparent suicide, on Friday night. Wallace’s novel, “Infinite Jest,” brought him fame and a wide audience. Writer David Lipsky has this appreciation.
Lipsky: To read David Foster Wallace was to feel your eyelids pulled open. Some writers specialize in the away-from-home experience. They’ve safaried, eaten across Italy, covered a war. Wallace offered his alive self cutting through our sleepy aquarium, our standard T.V., stores, political campaigns. Writers who can do this, like Salinger and Fitzgerald, forge an unbreakable bond with readers. You didn’t slip into the books looking for story, information, but for a particular experience. The sensation, for a certain number of pages, of being David Foster Wallace.
…
Lipsky [reading from the newspaper to Sarah]: "Next year’s book awards have been decided.” Can you believe this? “The plaques and citations can now be put into escrow.” Unbelievable. “With Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - a plutonium-dense, satirical whiz-kid opus that runs to almost a thousand pages - not including footnotes - the competition has been obliterated. It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on Jeopardy! The novel is that colossally disruptive. And that spectacularly good.” That’s the fucking opening paragraph!
Sarah: What if it actually is that good? You know? You may just have to read it.[/b]
Cut to him reading the book.
[b]Lipsky: How many times have we interviewed a writer in the last ten years? Guess.
Bob: Um… how many?
Lipsky: Zero. I checked.
Bob: Maybe that’s because Rolling Stone doesn’t interview writers.
Lipsky: There hasn’t been a writer like this one. Once in a generation, maybe. Hemingway, Pynchon. Let me have this story.
Bob: What story?
…
Lipsky: It’s a nice view.
David: Thank you. I can’t take credit for it.
…
David: I have this terrible problem, I just really hate to hurt people’s feelings. So I did something kinda cowardly.
Lipsky: Unlisting your number’s not cowardly.
David: It kinda is. I mean, I changed my number so these folks couldn’t find me anymore. There was this computer operator in Vancouver, lived in a basement. Who I found really moving. In terrible terrible pain.
Lipsky: What did he want from you?
David: Wasn’t clear, and when I would sort of ask him, he’d get angry, and that’s when it got scary.
…
Lipsky: What’s wrong?
David: It’s just, you’re gonna go back to New York and sit at your desk and shape this thing however you want. And that to me is extremely disturbing.
Lipsky: Why is it disturbing?
David: ‘Cause I would like to shape the impression of me that’s coming across. I can’t even tell if I like you yet ‘cause I’m too worried whether you like me.
…
David: I can’t stand to look like I’m actively trading on this sexually. Which of course I would be happy to do. In retrospect, it was lucky that I didn’t.
Lipsky: Why?
David: Basically, it just would have made me feel lonely.
Lipsky: Why lonely?
David: Because it wouldn’t have had anything to do with me, it would have just been…
Lipsky: Your fame?
David: Yeah.
Lipsky: You’re famous. You can say that. Except if they’re responding to your work, and the work is so personal then trading on it is actually another way of meeting you, isn’t that right?
David [impressed by Lipsky’s analysis]: That is so good.
…
David: The minute I start talking about this stuff, it sounds, number one: very vague. And, two: really reductive.
Lipsky: I don’t think you’re being reductive or vague at all.
David: Because it’s like, I don’t have a diagnosis, a system of prescriptions. You know? Like, why are we - and by “we” I mean people like you and me: mostly white, upper middle class, obscenely well-educated, doing really interesting jobs, sitting in really expensive chairs, watching the best, most sophisticated electronic equipment money can buy - why do we feel empty and unhappy?
…
David: I’m not saying TV is bad or a waste of your time. Any more than, you know, masturbation is bad or a waste of your time. It’s a pleasurable way to spend a few minutes. But if you’re doing it twenty times a day, if your primary sexual relationship is with your own hand, then there’s something wrong.
Lipsky: At least with masturbation, some action has been performed, though, right?
David: Yes, you’re performing muscular movements with your hand as you’re jerking off. But what you’re really doing, I think, is you’re running a movie in your head. You’re having a fantasy relationship with somebody who is not real… strictly to stimulate a neurological response. So as the Internet grows in the next 10, 15 years and virtual reality pornography becomes a reality, we’re gonna have to develop some real machinery inside our guts to turn off pure, unalloyed pleasure. Or, I don’t know about you, I’m gonna have to leave the planet. 'Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that’s fine in low doses, but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die.
Lipsky: Well, come on.
David: In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.
…
Lipsky: Being a writer. It comes with the territory, though, doesn’t it? Self-consciousness?
David: Well, there’s good self-consciousness. And then there’s this toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins selfconsciousness.
…
David: …There’s a Mitsubishi plant, and then there’s a lot of farm-support stuff, like Ro-Tech, Anderson Seeds…
Lipsky: What are you doing here? I mean, why aren’t you in New York?
David: Every time I go to New York, I get caught up in this - there’s this enormous hiss of egos at various stages of inflation and deflation. It’s me-me-me-me.
…
Lipsky: So, I gotta ask: What’s with the bandanna?
David: What? What do you mean?
Lipsky: People think it’s a way you’re trying to connect with the younger reading audience.
David: Is that what people think? I don’t know many Gen-Xers who wear ‘em. Jeez. I don’t know what to say. I guess I wish you hadn’t brought this up.
Lipsky: Why?
David: Because now I’m worrying that it’s going to seem intentional. Like if I don’t wear it, am I not wearing it because I’m bowing to other people’s perception that it’s a commercial choice? Or do I do what I want, even though it’s perceived as commercial - and it’s just like one more crazy circle to go around.
…
Lipsky: Did you think you were done then?
David: Yeah. I was pretty sure life was over.
Lipsky: This is after your suicide watch?
David [his whole demeanor changing]: How’d you know about that?
…
Lipsky: You were at McLeans, right? How long were you there?
David: Eight days, I think.
Lipsky: Why were you there?
David: Mostly ‘cause I was scared I would do something stupid. I had a friend from high school who tried to kill himself by sitting in a garage with the car runnin’. And what it turned out was, he didn’t die, but it really fucked up his brain. And I knew, that if anybody was fated to fuck up a suicide attempt, it was me.
Lipsky: So there you are still in your twenties somewhat in pain about your desire to become a sort of successful literary person…
David: I think probably the not very sophisticated diagnosis is that I was depressed. 'Cause by this time, my ego’s all invested in the writing. It’s the only thing that I’ve gotten, you know, food pellets from the universe for. So I felt really trapped: Like, “Uh-oh, my five years is up. I’ve gotta move on, but I don’t want to move on.” I was really stuck. And drinking was part of that. But it wasn’t that I was stuck because I drank. It was like, I really sort of felt like my life was over at twentyeight. And that felt really bad, and I didn’t wanna feel it. So I would do all kinds of things: I mean, I would drink real heavy, I would like fuck strangers. Oh, God – Or, then, for two weeks I wouldn’t drink, and I’d run ten miles every morning, in a desperate, like very American, “I will fix this somehow, by taking radical action” sort of thing.
…
Bob [on the phone]: Well, what does he have to say about the heroin rumors?
Lipsky: I haven’t gotten to that.
Bob: What are you waiting for? LIPSKY What am I supposed to say: “Is it true you were a heroin addict?”
Bob: Yes. That’s your story.
Lipsky: Okay. It’s hard.
Bob: Why? Because you like him?
Lipsky: Well…Yeah.
Bob: David. You’ve got to press him. Be a prick if you have to. You’re not his best buddy, you’re a reporter.
…
NPR host: My guest today is David Foster Wallace, who has burst on the literary scene with his 1,079-page, three-poundthree-ounce novel, Infinite Jest. Jay McInerney called it “something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola.” David Foster Wallace, welcome to our show.
David: Thank you, glad to be here.
NPR host: You have said that you saw yourself as - quote - “a combination of being incredibly shy, and being an egomaniac, too.”
David: I think I said “exhibitionist, also.”
NPR host: Meaning?
David: Well, I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the extent that it makes it difficult to be around other people.
NPR host: Difficult for you, or difficult for the other people?
David: I suppose a little of both
…
Lipsky: So, is that what you think Infinite Jest is about, loneliness?
David: I think if there is sort of a sadness for people under forty-five or something, it has to do with pleasure and achievement and entertainment. And a kind of emptiness at heart of what they thought was going on, that maybe I can hope that parts of the book will speak to their nerve endings a little bit.
…
David [regarding the literary critics praises]: It’s like, if you’re used to doing heavy-duty literary stuff that doesn’t sell well, being human animals with egos, we find a way to accommodate that fact by the following equation: If it sells really well and gets a lot of attention, it must be shit. Then, of course, the ultimate irony is: if your thing gets a lot of attention and sells really well, then the very mechanism you’ve used to shore yourself up when your stuff didn’t sell well is now part of the Darkness Nexus when it does, so you’re screwed. You can’t win.
…
Lipsky: You make a point of holding back - there’s something obvious about you holding back your intelligence, to be with people who are younger or maybe not as agile as you are…
David: That would make me a real asshole, wouldn’t it? I don’t think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion. But I think one of the true ways that I have gotten smarter is, I’ve realized that I’m not much smarter than other people.
Lipsky: Yeah, right.
David: There are ways in which other people are a lot smarter than me. Like, I don’t know, it makes me feel kinda lonely…
…
David: And, you know what, this is a very clever tactic of yours. Get me a little pissed off, a little less guarded, I’m gonna reveal more. Yes, it’s true: I treasure my regular-guy-ness; I’ve started to think it’s my biggest asset as a writer, that I’m pretty much just like everybody else. You know what? I’m not doing any kind of faux thing with you; I’m not gonna say it again.
Lipsky: Okay, but the faux thing - what you just said - is an example of the faux thing. You don’t want to take the risk of giving the full you.
David: Look, I don’t know if you’re a very nice man or not. It’s very clear that you don’t believe a word I’ve said.
Lipsky: All your protesting… “I’m just a regular guy.” You don’t crack open a thousand-page book ‘cause you heard the author’s a regular guy. You read it because the author is brilliant. Because you want him to be brilliant. So who the fuck are you kidding?
…
Lipsky: Well, if you’re deriving your satisfaction from talking about your work, as opposed to writing, then, yeah, I guess you’d get a lot less done.
David: Exactly. And there’s nothing more grotesque than somebody who’s going around, “I’m a writer, I’m a writer, I’m a writer.” I don’t mind appearing in Rolling Stone, but I don’t want to appear in Rolling Stone as somebody who wants to be in Rolling Stone…To have written a book about how seductive image is, and how many ways there are to get seduced off any kind of meaningful path, because of the way the culture is now…? What if I become this parody of that very thing?
…
David: It may be what in the old days was called a spiritual crisis or whatever. It’s just the feeling as though the entire, every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and you were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn’t function.
…
David: Well, I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the extent that it makes it difficult to be around other people.
…
David: I was not, I never was a heroin addict.
Lipsky: Okay. The rumor I heard… was that in the late ‘80s, when you were at Harvard, you’d gotten involved with drugs and had some kind of breakdown…
David: I don’t know if I had a breakdown, I got really really depressed. I told you that. It had nothing to do with drugs. I mean, I’m somebody who spent most of his life in libraries. I never lived that kind of dangerous life. I would never stick a needle into my arm.
…
David: Part of my reticence about this whole drug thing is that it won’t make very good copy for you. Because, no, I was not like that at all! I’m also aware that some addictions are sexier than others. My primary addiction my entire life has been to television. I told you that. Now, television addiction is of far less interest to your readers than something like heroin, that confirms the mythos of the writer.
Lipsky: A myth I do not believe, okay?
David: I know you don’t believe that. I’m also aware that one of the things swirling around here is you want the best fucking article you can have! Why don’t you write whatever the fuck you want, but the fact of the matter is, it was not a Lost Weekend sort of thing. Nor was it some lurid, romantic writer-as-alcoholic-sort-of-thing. What it was, was a 28-year-old person who exhausted a couple other ways to live, really taken them to their conclusion. Which for me was a pink room, with a drain in the center of the floor. Which is where they put me for an entire day when they thought I was going to kill myself. Where you don’t have anything on, and somebody’s observing you through a slot in the wall. And when that happens to you, you become tremendously…unprecedentedly willing to examine some other alternatives for how to live.
…
David [later to Lipsky after mulling over what had just been exchanged]: I was just thinking… It wasn’t a chemical imbalance, and it wasn’t drugs and alcohol. It was much more that I had lived an incredibly American life. That, “If I could just achieve X and Y and Z, everything would be OK.
[pause]
David: There’s a thing in the book when people jump out of a burning skyscraper, it’s not that they’re not afraid of falling anymore, it’s that the alternative is so awful. And then you’re invited to consider what could be so awful, that leaping to your death seems like an escape from it. I don’t know if you’ve had any experience with this kind of thing. But it’s worse than any kind of physical injury. It may be what in the old days was known as a spiritual crisis. Feeling as though every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and you were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you can’t fucking function. And it’s really horrible. I don’t think we ever change. I’m sure there are still those same parts of me. I’ve just got to find a way not to let them drive. Y’know? Well, anyway…Good night.[/b]
Isn’t this basically what I struggle with in my posts here?
[b]David: I’m not so sure you want to be me.
Lipsky: I don’t.
…
Lipsky [at a bookstore reading from the nook this film is based on]: I see David and me in the front seat of the car. We are both so young. He wants something better than he has; I want precisely what he has already. Neither of us knows where our lives are going to go. It smells like chewing tobacco, soda, and smoke. And the conversation is the best one I ever had. [/b]