With a gift rare among recent writers, David Foster Wallace cut through the deadwood of jargon, hype and shallow enthusiasm. He restored life to language. At his best, his words were small miracles, peeling off the scales and helping his readers see again. Wallace was famous but shied away from fame, trying to keep distance between himself and an often depressingly inane world. He took his own life in 2008.
Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky visited Wallace at the author’s unremarkable ranch house, facing a county trunk highway in snowbound rural Illinois, and shadowed him on a publicity junket. Lipsky’s book about his encounter, Although of Course You End up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, is dramatized in the film The End of the Tour.
Jesse Eisenberg (the weasely Mark Zuckerberg from The Social Network) plays Lipsky, an aspirant who convinces his reluctant, hard-of-thinking editor that Wallace, the literary voice of his generation, is worth a Rolling Stone feature. Jason Segel (better known for comedies such as This is Forty) plays Wallace as a sad-eyed giant, an intellectual tiger uncomfortable under his skin. Not unlike Kurt Cobain, he is vexed by stardom, especially the expectations and attention heaped on celebrities. Even his customary bandana has been interpreted as emblematic of his brand. Wallace doesn’t want to be a brand, yet if he discards the bandana, which serves him as a security blanket, will the media misread this as a statement? What to do, he frets, but hide his head.
Director James Ponsoldt and screenwriter Donald Margulies have transformed a series of conversations into a thoughtful, human-scale film; they even endow the cinematically unpromising material with a dramatic arc. Lipsky and Wallace connect instantly, then descend into squabbles and sullen silence as the reporter, driven by the inquisitorial imperatives of journalism, intrudes into the private spaces of an already private man. Did Wallace have a breakdown at Harvard? Is he an alcoholic? How about those rumors of heroin? Wallace will confess only this: an addiction to television, a drug that inspires and sickens him.
Wallace is confronted by banality at every turn. In the novel he is promoting during Lipsky’s visit, Infinite Jest, Wallace mocks a nation of lonely individuals amusing themselves to death. Masturbation, he tells Lipsky, is like “running movies in your head about a person who is not real.” People were already living their lives through images on screen, the needle of self-absorption wiggling into the red zone. He never lived to see the rise of the selfie, but he wouldn’t have been surprised by its popularity.
Wallace felt too strongly and saw too clearly to be satisfied with the world as he found it. He was, as The End of the Tour implies, on a spiritual journey, seeking perhaps to escape the slippery meaning of words into silence.
The End of the Tour
3 and a half stars
Jesse Eisenberg
Jason Segel
Directed by James Ponsoldt
