I saw The End of the
Tour and have let it stew for several weeks. There are many fine reviews,
A.O. Scott’s being the best, and both Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg are in
the conversation for Oscar nods for playing David Foster Wallace and David
Lipsky respectively. However, buzz and conversation about the film has blown
itself out, and as it goes, what was intensely talked about has now fallen into
silence.
When times were more noisy, all of three months ago, most of
the debate seemed to be about who owns the character of Dave Wallace (to use
that moniker of familiarity that seems to separate, at least at a cursory level,
those who knew him and those who did not). Fans saw Dave Wallace in one way.
Family and friends see him in quite another. Then there is another level: the
Dave Wallace that Wallace was (a fantasy that we can never know) and the Dave
Wallace that Wallace wanted to present to the world (of which ample evidence
exists). Much of the dilemma over the film, it seems, resides in Wallace’s
depiction as a type of “writer guy.” Fans want this writer guy, according to
Wallace’s close associates, at the expense of the work it takes to square with
who Wallace actually was and the writing that he produced. Apparently, this
depiction would have turned Wallace stomach. To paraphrase a joke Wallace
liked, in the film we get to read Wallace, but not personally.
I saw the movie and I cannot say one way or another whether
or not it fulfilled any sort of vision of Wallace I had in my mind (Segel is
still separate from how I imagine Wallace). I found Lipsky’s book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming
Yourself, enlightening in only rudimentary ways: I smiled at all the junk
food consumption and, like everyone else, I was surprised at the Alanis poster
(though I shouldn’t have been), but I kept getting angry at Lipsky’s distance
and journalistic skepticism. D.T. Max’s biography, Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story, presented other data. It turned
out that Wallace’s life was tougher, fussier, and more ramshackle than I
thought, but, like most readers, both professional and amateur, I found Max’s
bio simply dutiful and ultimately uncooked.
Now that the silence has set in, however, I find that the movie
does have something to say, but what it is saying is somehow a function of the silence:
the P.R. engine has stopped, Segel and Eisenberg have completed their talk show
rounds, the movie will go to Netflix or another portal, I’ll see it on the
little stand of movies at Target, and IMDB will upload red carpet photos from
award shows. However, now that the cycle of the film is over, it seems to me
even more painful to discover, yet again, that Wallace’s mind is still silent
and that he will write no more books.
Paradoxically, it is Wallace’s fiction that steps forward
now that the silence has arrived. The silence allows the debate to quiet, for
the actors to get onto their other projects, for what really matters in a film
to make itself known. For me, the snow pushed back from roads, the shitty cars,
the convenience stores, the one story house in which Wallace lived (just the
outside), all of those wind swept and less than cozy winter locals have become,
for me, the purpose of the movie. So much so that I, at times, wished Eisenman
and Segel would have disappeared entirely. Whereas the “writer guy”, by a
function of his celebrity and the designated role that fans need him, is someone
that is seen and someone, who in Wallace’s mind, could analysis, negotiate, and
take apart the mechanism by which and through which he is seen, the locations
in The End of the Tour are not used
to being looked at. It is hard to get Bloomington wrong and the cameras
certainly did not.
Wallace’s fiction and Wallace’s particular realism lives in
these exteriors and thus, even if Wallace was wrong and the movie character did
damage to what the writer was like in reality, a certain recovery can be made
in thinking about these environments. I cannot help but think how Wallace located
density in emptiness, how he could turn the open and banal space of an Illinois
cornfield, or, famously in his Kenyon commencement speech, a supermarket
check-out into a drama of existence. These scenes are boring. The people inside
of these scenes should be and have to be bored. Thus, when I encounter these
scenes in the movie, I step into the reality of Wallace’s world, one of the
bored joining the bored.
If Eisenman and Segel would have disappeared, it wouldn’t be
a stretch find Ken Erdedy standing in line at the convenience store for
munchies (having forced himself to leave his house) or Lane Dean getting into
his muddy car (leaving a brown streak on the cuff of his pants). It was easier
for me to imagine Rémy Marathe in the hotel room in Minneapolis than Wallace
(and Wallace as played by Segel was right in front of me). In fact, the
exteriors were so vivid to me that Wallace faded away and the actual characters
of the books came forward. Wallace may have exited the back of the bookstore to
read Infinite Jest, but it was
Geoffrey Day who was in the audience.
This is different from how I’d previously thought about
Wallace. I was merely fan of Wallace, perhaps even one, in the words of Glenn
Kenny, who thinks Wallace was a “Genius Who Was Just Too Pure And Holy For This
World” and perhaps even worse, one “those people who cherish This Is Water as the new Wear Sunscreen: A Primer For Life.”
There is evidence of this failing in myself. I typically thought of Wallace
rather than Wallace’s fiction and writing (which typically means reading
Wallace’s journalism rather than his novels over and over). I sentimentalized
Wallace. I wondered if he ate at Some Crust Bakery in Claremont and whether he
liked the Danish as much as I did. I stared intensely at U of A tennis courts
when in Tucson and when I was in my friend’s dingy apartment adjacent to
Harvard, well, I thought of Wallace. I wanted to call him Dave.
However, now that the film is over and all I have are the
books and have forgotten all the performances in favor of those empty locales
that I see every day around me, that way of thinking is silly, damaging and
awful. I have the books. Wallace’s friends can keep Wallace and the fans can
make Wallace whatever they want. There’s Don Gately cleaning the floors of
Ennis House on a cold night, the same cold night in the film, the same cold
night that I know for damn sure that Wallace experienced personally. I also
have my sweeping to do. The only question is whether or not my sweeping will
dull me, make me paradoxically happy and fulfilled, or kill me.