In the late fall of 1997, I got a phone call from David Foster
Wallace. Wallace had been a model of gentlemanly calm throughout the
editing process on his essay about David Lynch for Premiere
magazine, where I worked at the time. (It wasn’t until our third session
that he stopped calling me “Mr Kenny.”) But now he sounded close to panic. A
friend of his, Wallace said, had been listening to an NPR segment about the Noah Baumbach film Mr Jealousy and had
heard one of the actors name-check Wallace as an inspiration for the character
he played. Wallace was freaked. And he didn’t live near a cinema where the
indie film was playing. So he asked me to do him a favour and investigate the
situation.
A day or so later, I assuaged his fears by assuring
him that Chris Eigeman’s
character in the picture was not in any way mimicking Wallace. I even (somehow)
checked out the NPR segment, and it turned out the invocation of his name had
been pretty generic: Eigeman had described playing a male “voice of his
generation” type of writer, mentioning both Wallace and Jay
McInerney, the latter a fellow whose public persona is almost the precise
inverse of Wallace’s.
Wallace’s sigh of relief when I gave him this news is
something I remember pretty vividly.
That conversation came to mind again when, last week,
I read a statement from Michael
Pietsch, Wallace’s longtime book editor and friend, to the Los Angeles
Times about the new film The
End of the Tour. “David would have howled the idea for it out of the room
had it been suggested while he was living,” Pietsch wrote. Pietsch’s statement
did not prevent the newspaper from titling the piece “How
End of the Tour became a very David Foster Wallace kind of film”. It
proceeds to slather praise upon the film, and on Segel’s performance as
Wallace, while the objections voiced by Pietsch and others are included
perfunctorily, with a weary sense of satisfying a tiresome journalistic-balance
requirement.
Sundance
2015 review: The End of the Tour – Jason Segel passes infinite test of
playing David Foster Wallace
James Ponsoldt’s
compassionate, fascinating – and unauthorised – study of the great, late
American novelist focuses on a five day road trip with a foe-turned-bro journo
played by Jesse Eisenberg
This is less and less of a surprise these days.
Something I’ve noticed since Wallace’s suicide in 2008 is that a lot of
self-professed David Foster Wallace fans don’t have much use for people who
actually knew the guy. For instance, whenever
Jonathan Franzen utters or publishes some pained but unsparing observations
about his late friend, Wallace’s fanbase recoils, posting comments on the
internet about how self-serving he is, or how he really didn’t “get” Wallace.
This trend has played out again in the press around
The End of the Tour. When the film, an adaptation of the journalist David
Lipsky’s book Although
Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
was announced, the David Foster Wallace Trust registered its objection. The
writer Maria Bustillos (who styled herself a kind of Wallace expert by
republishing, with precious little real insight, juicy marginalia about his
mother from his marked-up books) promptly contributed a tetchy piece to the Awl
titled The Dead
Cannot Consent. Referring to “The Trust” as if it were some Orwellian
construct rather than a small entity headed by Karen Green, who
was married to Wallace from 2004 until his death, Bustillos sniffed: “Why
even speculate on the sad and unfathomable question of what Wallace would or
would not have consented to, had he not committed suicide?”
I would dare say the question is not particularly
unfathomable to Green, or to Bonnie Nadell, Wallace’s literary agent, or,
indeed, to Pietsch. For them, his wishes are not, and never were, abstract
intellectual questions. “I know journalism is journalism and maybe people want
to read that I discovered the body over and over again, but that doesn’t define
David or his work,” Karen
Green tried to tell people in an interview with the Observer in 2011. “It
all turns him into a celebrity writer dude, which I think would have made him
wince, the good part of him.” They’ve been left to weigh all they knew about
him against the weirdly proprietary claims of his fans.
I did not know David Foster Wallace as well as Green
or Pietsch or Nadell did, but I knew him well enough that I could, while he was
alive, refer to him as “my friend” in print and he wouldn’t balk. He also
granted me the nickname The Mollifier in the acknowledgements to his 1997 essay
collection, A
Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. I spent a weekend in Las Vegas
with Dave in 1998 at the AVN awards, which he later wrote up as Big Red Son.
(There, he called a version of me “Dick Filth”.) When he was in New York, I’d
sometimes have a meal with him. We maintained friendly relations even after the
handling at Premiere of what became Big Red Son made him angry enough to use
the word “bowdlerized” (entirely accurately) in a note in Consider the
Lobster. We mostly spoke on the phone, and after 2004, the biggest portions
of our conversations had to do with how fortunate we were to have met our
respective spouses. The last talk I had with him was in May 2008, and he was
very encouraging after I bitched to him at length about losing my day job. He
died that September.
Even from that limited vantage, I found The End of
the Tour risible. In my own film criticism I’ve often defended work that comes
up short on historical accuracy, insisting that each picture is a circumscribed
world in and of itself, for better or worse. This posture of detachment went
out the window the first time I saw the movie. It follows fictionalised
versions of Lipsky (played by Jesse Eisenberg) and Wallace (played by Jason
Segel) over a five-day period in 1996, bookended by scenes set in 2008 in which
Lipsky’s character reflects on Wallace’s death and legacy. And the in many ways
very conventional independent film left me so angry I actually had trouble
sleeping the night I saw it. I lay awake obsessing over the best phrase that
could sum up Jason Segel’s performance as Wallace. I came up with “ghoulish
self-aggrandisement”. For me, it recalls a line from a Captain Beefheart song:
“I think of those people that ride on my bones.”
When I try to look at the picture from a less
personal perspective, eg, as a movie about two bro-ish dudes in the 90s doing
Writer Stuff, and then years later one of them kills himself, The End Of The
Tour is still lacking. As is Segel’s performance. Far from being a “channeling”
of Wallace, as
some have called it, Segel’s performance is, to me, more of a feast
of Heavy Indicating. A tic here, a tic there. Much brow furrowing. Even when
the camera captures him from behind, you can see him thinking really hard about
what it’s like to be such a tortured genius. Wallace the artist and
Wallace the conversationalist take a distant back seat to Wallace the eventual
suicide. Even when he’s cracking wise, there’s no light or lightness to the
character. When uttering lines like “I’d rather be dead” or “I’m not so sure
you want to be me”, Segel might as well be nudging the viewer in the ribs. He,
and the movie, insists that suicide loomed over everything Wallace did a full
12 years before the end.
Segel’s Wallace is never really dark, either. He’s
just Kinda Sad. The Wallace who would suggest intense immersion in pornography
as an alternative to self-castration never rears his head in The End of the
Tour. Nor does the author of the impossibly knotty short story Octet, whose
vertiginous finale begins: “You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer.” This
is a movie for those people who cherish This
Is Water as the new Wear
Sunscreen: A Primer For Life. Who believe the simplistic claim, most
recently put forward in the above-mentioned Los Angeles Times piece, that
Wallace was “fiercely opposed to irony”. What Wallace was opposed to was cheap,
reflexive irony, not literary irony, but neither Lipsky’s own book nor its
resultant movie are terribly concerned with the literary; they present a
Wallace happier to talk about Alanis Morissette than John Barth. The literary
critic Christian Lorentzen noted, in
a recent New York magazine essay, that the movie manages to betray
Wallace’s thought in Wallace’s own words, and that’s almost exactly true.
And in the end, having sat through the film twice, I
haven’t been able to resolve the contradiction of my experience and the film’s
portrayal of Wallace. In the opening of Yourself, Lipsky describes Wallace
speaking in “the universal sportsman’s accent: the disappearing G’s, ‘wudn’t,’
‘dudn’t’ and ‘idn’t’ and ‘sumpin.’” Segel takes Lipsky’s cue. But in my
recollection, Dave spoke precisely, almost formally, the “Gs” at the ends of
gerunds landing softly, not dropped. Physically, Segel’s got Wallace all wrong
too: bulky, lurching, elbowy, perpetually in clothes a half size too small.
This, too, contradicts my own memory of Dave as a physically imposing but also
very nearly lithe and graceful person. But as Segel’s exuberantly horrible
dancing at the end of the film practically blares in neon, this awkwardness
represents Segel’s conception of a Genius Who Was Just Too Pure And Holy For
This World. This extends, too, to the aforementioned talking-about-Alanis-Morissette
business. A what-would-you-do-if-you-met-her exchange appears in Lipsky’s book.
Wallace’s response to the idea is sceptical with respect to celebrity dynamics,
but not hapless. As rewritten by screenwriter Donald Margulies and acted by
Segel, it makes Wallace come off like a high-IQ Beaky Buzzard.
Meanwhile Eisenberg’s Lipsky is given to us
deprecatingly at first, as a pushy city slicker who wants what Wallace has –
genius, fame or more specifically, literary “it boy” status – and can’t
understand Wallace’s ambivalence about those same things. It turns out the
self-critical perspective is there to better valorise Lipsky at the film’s end,
in which he’s portrayed as the still-living writer who carries the message of
Wallace, to NPR, to bookstore readings – everywhere he goes. Like Johnny Appleseed,
I suppose.
Is it just me? Dave hasn’t even been dead 10 years.
And if I have not made it clear with my own humble example, his death is still
a very raw thing to those who survived him.
The movie’s reverence actually works in reverse; it’s
stifling. Margulies’ script almost seems to be pleading with Wallace itself,
saying “Look at this, look at this tribute, why don’t you want this, why didn’t
you want this?” The reason the question is a bad one, I think, is that nobody
involved in the film perceives that “this” with the unsparing acuity with which
Wallace did. Instead, they all worked very hard and delivered a “celebrity writer
dude” portrait on an admittedly very tasteful plate. “Too soon,” indeed.
