About twenty minutes into the recently released David Foster Wallace biopic, The End of the Tour, the journalist David Lipsky, played by the appropriately leptosomic Jesse Eisenberg, eagerly (that is, enviously) questions Jason Segel’s DFW about the attendant benefits of his newfound fame. “This is nice,” Wallace responds, before adding, with a cryptic lack of emphasis, “This is not real.”
In the years since his death, Wallace’s legacy has undergone countless metamorphoses, although the various threads of interpretation, for the most part, have remained discrete and self-contained, failing to interact with one another—and so it’s no wonder that a critical or popular consensus has yet to crystallize. For some, Wallace was a prophet of the internet age and the deleterious effects of hyper-connectivity. For others, he was a disillusioned wunderkind whose genius was to realize and insist that he was disillusioned, while simultaneously denying he was a wunderkind. Some people even sense in Wallace a much-needed codifier of the frayed strands of postmodernity, which were left dangling by the preceding generation of novelists.
And still others, marshaled by the furiously second-rate Bret Easton Ellis, think he was an overly educated hack whose sole value was in being able to craft, occasionally and as if by accident, a glistering sentence—though this camp, it’s probably important to add, seems composed entirely of lapsed Wallace acolytes, those who’d ardently extolled his virtues only a few years ago.
The End of the Tour gracefully sidesteps this welter of cross-purposed opinion, and presents a relatively fluid viewing experience that is enjoyable, most of the time. Segel is good, Eisenberg is okay; there are plenty of laughs, and the film never exactly lags. And yet, while it does a respectable job of depicting the problem of authenticity—one of Wallace’s major concerns, encapsulated by the difference between what is “nice” and what is “real”—the film nevertheless fails to embody this problem, and in so doing it becomes a neutral, nonreactive substance: mere display.
Maybe it’s unreasonable to demand that the film interact with Wallace’s work and his manifold obsessions, that it engage with and interpret the vast and irreducible corpus. But the nature of Wallace’s work—each piece of writing seems to run on a perpetual engine of reflexive thought—almost requires that any subsequent interpretative work run up against the same roadblocks. In presenting a self-contained narrative that merely vocalizes Wallace’s concerns, The End of the Tour becomes a sort of coda-cum-memorial that offers only a manufactured closure, the banal précis of which amounts to something like: He was a good guy, with some problems.
Wallace’s great subject, as should be no surprise, was the apparently unbridgeable rupture between one thought and another. For instance, he could never quite make the unbearable fact of his falsity gel with the self-imposed imperative to be sincere; How, he seemed always to be asking himself, could these two realities have emerged from the same mind? Instead of maximalizing this gap and working it up into a howling Cartesian void, however, he circumscribed it, brought it to bay with a hyperactive bricolage of nervous second-guessing and hypothesizing.
For Wallace, the gap between self-consciousness and literary activity was not an interminable morass in which the mind wallowed. Instead, it was an asymptotic antinomy in which the mind was always an atom away from touching the truth, from grasping true expression—though the joining never occurred, as if the last, crucial synapse were perpetually misfiring. Out of this inability to connect swirls the frenetic gyre of “bad” self-consciousness that marks so much of Wallace’s work—what he once described as the “toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic Bedouins self-consciousness.”
If all of this is getting a little too theoretical, I’d draw your attention to a particular scene near the end of the film. Lipsky has just finished savaging Wallace and laying bare the apparent falsity of the author’s desire to be a “regular guy”; to make up for this, he offers to treat Wallace to a fancy meal. The film then cuts to both our writers emerging from a McDonald’s, arms overloaded with cheap patties, sodas, and fries.
The transition is a little jarring, because the film’s awareness of the conflict here—in effect, it has transformed the conundrum into a silly joke—is overridden by a willingness to simultaneously explore and exploit Wallace’s nebulous persona and his slippery, ever elusive concerns. Watching The End of the Tour, you get the impression it would benefit from some filmic equivalent of Wallace’s famed footnotes, or his extensive use of parenthetical asides—devices that allowed Wallace to consider the problem of falsity on a multitude of wavelengths, simultaneously. As is, the film appears to present a simple binary of awareness and ignorance, when in reality Wallace’s self-consciousness was a penumbra—it was always engaged to an uncertain extent.
For Wallace, there was never a clear, continuous argument at hand that might disprove his own falsity; his second-guessing never followed fluidly from a prior assertion—and if it did, it simply became another proof of said falsity. The spectacle of David Foster Wallace was that of a man attempting to solve this problem—to circumscribe and compress it—with an ad hoc mélange of intellectual vigor and stylistic brio, and trying to do so (we had to assume, at least some of the time) sincerely.
We read Wallace for this madcap entropy, in order to experience a roiling cauldron of thought that struggles constantly to define itself. And even if this frantic activity strikes us as unhealthy—even if we know it is unhealthy, and are forced to admit, at times, that it seems more the fevered ravings of a wounded beast than the product of a first-rate mind—it is still, undeniably, alive.
After watching the film, a friend remarked to me that its portrayal of Wallace lacked the vague and indefinable “edge” that was always apparent in the author’s real-life interviews. In these interviews, Wallace was sometimes cruel, often abstract, and nearly always oblivious to his immediate surroundings—and yet, they remain compulsively watchable, because they encapsulate the evasive inscrutability we’ve come to associate with Wallace.
There is little of this “edge” to be found in The End of the Tour. If Wallace is inscrutable here, it is not because we struggle to keep up with the thundering progress of his thought process—it’s because the film has made him into a diagnosed neurotic, unable to grasp the simplicity right under nose.
By Bailey Trela ’16
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