The movie’s adapted from Lipsky’s book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, which was published two years after Wallace hung himself. Rolling Stone never published Lipsky’s profile, and the book consists solely of the transcripts of the conversations he and Wallace had over five days in 1996, chiefly about one’s genuine self versus the self that worries about how an audience assembles a false you from your fiction, and about how what they have read shades into a construction of who they think you are. In the movie, Wallace is presented as a guy who was just too sensitive for this world, which strikes a certain emotional chord with younger viewers and especially actors. He’s portrayed as an angelic Pop-Tart-sharing schlub, a heartwarming populist, a tortured everyman who loves dogs and kids and McDonald’s, who exudes “realness” and “humanity.” But the movie completely omits any reference to the other Wallace: the contemptuous one, the contrarian, the jealous asshole with a violent side, the cruel critic—all the things some of us found interesting about him. This movie prefers Saint David of the Kenyon commencement called “This Is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life,” a speech some of his staunchest defenders and even former editors have a hard time stomaching, arguing that it’s the worst thing Wallace ever wrote, but which became a mini viral sensation. This Wallace is the voice of reason, a sage, and the movie succumbs to the cult of likability, but the real David scolded people and probably craved fame—and it’s hardly rare that writers are both suspicious of literary acclaim and curious to see how that game’s played out. Wallace was cranky and could be mean and caustic, but this David Foster Wallace is erased, which is why the movie is so resolutely one-note and earnest.
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This isn’t the David Foster Wallace who voted for Reagan and supported Ross Perot, who wrote a scathing and deliciously cruel putdown of late-period John Updike, who posed for glamour-puss photos in Interview magazine (years before Infinite Jest) and appeared on Charlie Rose’s show a couple of times—all of which The End of the Tour strongly suggests was absolute agony for the David who keeps naïvely fretting about his real self being co-opted by a fake self, as if a man as intelligent as he was would really care one way or the other. I admire David Foster Wallace’s ambition and talent and wide-ranging literary experimentalism, even though for the most part I thought he was a fake-out artist whose disingenuous personality belied his genuine complexity. (See, for instance, his remark that “AIDS’s gift to us lies in its loud reminder that there’s nothing casual about sex at all”—a line I would’ve loved to have seen Jason Segel’s puppy dog David try to deliver sincerely.) It’s the rewritten construct of what Wallace became—misinterpreted by a generation of fans who see him as a hip motivational speaker and most importantly a victim—that is the central problem: the masking of an actual man in favor of a figure many of them don’t mind and seem, in fact, to prefer.
The very thing that Wallace always feared might happen to him is happily encouraged and actualized by The End of the Tour, and it’s kind of mind-blowing that the movie either didn’t figure this out or chose to simply ignore it. Minute by minute, scene by scene, the film rejects everything David Foster Wallace supposedly stood for and believed in. It’s a massive contradiction that leaves one somewhat dumbfounded by the adolescent hubris of both the portrayal and the conception, which seems determined to deliver something that its star keeps saying he doesn’t want—to become a character—and the movie willfully ignores this complaint. This is what the Wallace in the film is bothered by in scene after scene after scene—and what does the movie do? It keeps filming him. And what does Segal do? He keeps playing a particular idea of David Foster Wallace, which is why the movie would have driven Wallace insane. The Wallace estate as well as his editor have disavowed the film, not because it gets anything factually wrong but because it does exactly what Wallace never would’ve tolerated: it turns him into an actor. “Be a good guy,” Wallace begs Lipsky in their last scene in The End of the Tour, taking him to task, almost pleading, and though this might be an honorable way to live your life as a bro, it’s a terrible idea for a writer.
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Wallace didn’t start writing fiction until he was twenty-one. The origin story is that he purportedly saw the success of the literary Brat Pack, and of other young novelists who started selling books and making money in the mid-’80s, and thought, Why not give it a shot? There are traces of Less Than Zero’s influence in his first novel, The Broom of the System—though he later disavowed this influence even as he continued to publicly praise Less Than Zero. I went on a Twitter rant a few years ago—caused by a mix of insomnia and tequila—when I was reading D. T. Max’s biography of Wallace. This rant had less to do with David than his growing audience, who were conflating the suicide and the Kenyon address into an aspirational narrative that—if you’d read everything by and about Wallace, and had followed his trajectory—felt abjectly sentimental. As with many of the peers who interested me, I had read all of David’s work (except, of course, for Infinite Jest, which I hadn’t been able to find a way into despite its snazzy and prescient central idea of corporations taking over the American entertainment industry) and, except for a few early stories and sections from The Broom of the System, I failed to connect with his work for numerous aesthetic reasons. I often considered David the most overrated writer of our generation, as well as the most pretentious and tortured, and tweeted as much that night along with other things that bothered me, including how the culture had reinterpreted him and how naïve I thought David was to believe he could control this. The sincerity and the earnestness he began trafficking in seemed to some of us a ploy, a kind of contradiction—not totally fake, but not totally real either, a kind of performance art in which he’d sensed the societal shift toward earnestness and accommodated himself to it. But I still liked the idea of David and the fact that he existed, and I also think he was a genius.
While my feelings about him were—yes—contradictory, they were also honest. An increasing problem in our society is people’s inability to bear two opposing thoughts in mind at the same time, so that any “criticism” of someone’s work is routinely blamed as feelings of elitism, or feelings of jealousy or superiority. The notion of pushing the “like” button on everything, of shutting people down for voicing differing opinions is something Wallace would have certainly bristled at, since he could be a demanding, even decimating, critic himself. Predictably, people reacted to the late-night tweets (I had misspelled “douche bag”) with how-dare-you outrage and labeled me a hater and a jealous troll. But I didn’t have any personal problems with David and was never jealous of him; the tweets were more of a tirade against fans who’d ignored the negative and unpleasant aspects of his life and willfully pretended that the sometimes cruel dick who walked among us had never existed. There wasn’t anything David wrote that I was ever envious of, because our work had nothing in common with each other’s in style or content or temperament. (However, Jonathan Franzen’s another story, and The Corrections is a novel I’ve often said that I wished I’d written.) This tweetfest was merely an aesthetic judgment—an opinion—that somehow registered as a crime.
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In an appreciation of the pop singer Sky Ferreira for the LA Weekly in the summer of 2016 the young writer Art Tavana rhapsodized:
Sky Ferreira has a name that reads like a turbo-charged Italian sports car, or the kindred spirit to second generation Italian-American pop-star Madonna, the most ambitious woman to ever wear a pink cone bra. Both Sky and Madonna have similar breasts in both cup size and ability to cause a shitstorm…America has already established that Ferreira looks a lot like Madonna but we almost never have the audacity to admit that her looks offer the most appeal to the American consumer. To pretend looks don’t matter in pop music is ridiculous. Looks matter, they always will.
Tavana then wen
t on to describe how Ferreira had moved past this idea: “She’s too nasty to be anyone’s schoolgirl fantasy…She’s the pop star who’s so personally cool that her record label Capitol doesn’t need to hire a team to mold her.”
Tavana praised Ferreira as a fashion icon and an accomplished actress and related how she was hated by elitist snobs in the indie scene and decried by feminists when she refused to condemn the photographer Terry Richardson, an accused pornographer and misogynist, adding that she never let her past history of sexual abuse define her. Tavana also pointed out how pop stars profit off their beauty, and that their sexual allure attracts fans. The piece reminded me of how when Blondie broke through, so many guys in my high school who hadn’t been particularly interested in New Wave suddenly started drooling over Deborah Harry and turned into big fans of it all, even ignoring previous favorites like the Eagles and Foreigner. The same thing happened again with Patty Smyth and Scandal, and later on with Susannah Hoffs and the Bangles. But this looks-ism goes back to Elvis Presley’s beauty and to the Beatles and Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison and Sting and every single boy band that ever existed, yet somehow there’s still something different about these male and female narratives.
Women are looked at and judged and appropriated or demeaned a lot more frequently than men will ever be, but in an era driven by the dreaded idea of inclusivity for everyone, no matter what, beauty now seems threatening, a separator, a divider, instead of just a natural thing: people who are admired and desired for their looks, individuals stepping away from the herd and being worshipped for their beauty. For many of us this is a reminder of our own physical inadequacies in the face of what our culture defines as sexy, beautiful, hot—and yes, men will be men, boys will be boys, and dudes will be dudes, and nothing’s ever going to change that. But to pretend that looks and hotness, whether you’re a guy or a girl, shouldn’t make you popular is one of those sad stances that can make you question the validity, or the reality, of this cult of inclusivity. Tavana’s ode to Sky Ferreira might not have been especially well written, though it was clearly an honest account by a man who was looking at a woman he might have desired and writing about that desire, even as it overshadowed what he thought about her music. So the question became: What if he’s honest about objectifying her?
Social-justice warriors from LAist, Flavorwire, Jezebel, Teen Vogue and Vulture couldn’t let this innocuous piece go unnoticed without throwing hissy fits, and so pissed-off and supposedly offended that they were obliged to denounce Art Tavana. When reading similar pieces by young journalists, some of whom should’ve known better, I wondered when liberal progressives had become such society matrons, clutching their pearls in horror every time anyone had an opinion that wasn’t the mirror image of their own. The high moral tone seized by social-justice warriors, and increasingly an unhinged Left, is always out of scale with whatever they’re actually indignant about, and I wasn’t surprised that this hideous and probably nerve-wracking tendency had begun to create an authoritarian language police. Teen Vogue found the use of “boobs” and “knockers” misogynistic and lodged a rather insipid complaint about the male gaze. Whenever I hear an objection to the male gaze—hoping that it will…what? Go away, get rerouted, become contained—I automatically think, Are people really this deluded and deranged or haven’t they had a date in the last ten years? The writer piping up in Teen Vogue about Tavana’s insensitive misogyny then lectured us that women needed to be respected and not judged by their looks—and yes, the irony was delicious coming from Teen Vogue—and it sounded pretty childish, as did all the other commentators across social media by saying he’d “reduced a woman’s art to whether you want to fuck her or not” or, more directly, “You’re trash—fuck you.” (I couldn’t help but wonder what Joan Didion would have made of all this.) There was also the suggestion in some of these pieces that Tavana knew exactly what he was doing—inciting feminist hysteria to see if these people would take the bait, and that maybe he didn’t find Ferreira attractive at all, which was what he hinted at later when questioned about the piece. But, of course, they always take the bait.
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I also kept wondering, throughout that week in the summer of 2016, what if all I wanted to do was bang Nick Jonas (a question still) and maybe wrote a fifteen-hundred-word ode, talking about his chest and his ass and his dumb-sexy face and the fact I didn’t really like his music—would that have been a dis on Nick? Or what if a woman wanted to write about how she really hated Drake’s music but found him so physically hot and desirable that she was lusting for him anyway? Where would that put her? Where would that put me? Would either of these pieces raise any eyebrows? Were we then equal? No, not even close, because in our culture social-justice warriors always prefer women to be victims. The responses from Jezebel and Flavorwire and Teen Vogue all recast Ferreira as a victim, reinforcing her (supposed) violation at the hands of a male writer—the usual hall-of-mirrors loop people find themselves in when looking for something, anything, to get angry about, and one where they can occasionally, eventually, get tripped up. The reality is that men look at women, and men look at other men, and women look at men, and women especially size up other women and objectify them. Has anybody who’s ever been on a dating app recently not seen how our Darwinian impulses are gratified by a swipe or two? This, in order for our species to survive, is the way of the world and it’s never going to be modified or erased. I somehow knew, during that week, that this fake controversy, which seemed both misguided and pompous, would blow over in about twenty-four hours, and that ideally Ferreira might have defended the LA Weekly piece—though she never did. What bothered me most was that since Tavana’s article was only his opinion, why were people getting so outraged about it?
The sad ending of this story was that the LA Weekly, which had edited and posted the piece, felt they needed to apologize for it in the wake of all the online howling—for a piece where someone had clearly written honestly, sometimes embarrassingly so, about an entertainer and how he judged her. That was it. That should be allowed. The overreaction epidemic that’s rampant in our society, as well as the specter of censorship, should not be allowed if we want to function as a free-speech society that believes—or even pretends to—in the First Amendment. At the same time, I never really believed that Jezebel or Flavorwire cared about any of this. Did they actually want to vilify a man for confessing that maybe he thinks Sky Ferreira’s hot? Or were they just venting away in the continuous vacuum of their own invention? By now, just months before the election, it truly felt we were entering into an authoritarian cultural moment fostered by the Left—what had once been my side of the aisle, though I couldn’t even recognize it anymore. How had this happened? It seemed so regressive and grim and childishly unreal, like a dystopian sci-fi movie in which you can express yourself only in some neutered form, a mound, or a clump of flesh and cells, turning away from your gender-based responses to women, to men, to sex, to even looking. This castration was something no one really hoped for, I didn’t think, during that summer—but maybe everyone was willing to go along with it because it might fill a column or two, and who didn’t need a little more clickbait?
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Back in 2015 on my podcast I began talking about ideology versus aesthetics in the arts and how one seemed to be trumping the other just then in terms of reactions from the media and certain factions of the Left. “Look at the art, not the artist.” The first time I heard that line was in an interview with Bruce Springsteen about thirty years ago, and it has stayed with me ever since. (That this hero of mine would later get Trumped by releasing his worst single ever—the anti-Trump rant called “That’s What Makes Us Great”—was one of the cultural low points in 2017.) Art should stand as the artist’s truth, and the artists themselves? Well, you’ll probably be disappointed so just look at the art and let that speak for itself. Yet now Springsteen’s remark had started to sound like an antiq
uated slogan, something only a man of a certain age (either a boomer or one of the first Gen Xers) would believe in, because we were constantly being reminded that this was now supposedly a different world altogether—and, more chillingly, we were told, an “enlightened” and “progressive” one that fully acknowledged our “identities”—even while there was so much evidence that didn’t support this claim. To me, it seemed like a highly reductive view. But I also realized that certain reevaluations had occurred to me when I saw how people responded to my own identity as an artist—and, therefore, to my work.
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