by Tom Bissell
—2007
GREAT AND TERRIBLE TRUTHS
David Foster Wallace
In the autumn of 2005, an email with the unpromising subject header of “Thought you’d like this!!!” landed in my inbox. The sender, a family friend, was an incurable forwarder of two-year-old John Kerry jokes, alerts for nonexistent computer viruses, and poetry about strangers who turn out to be Jesus. This latest offering contained not the expected link to a YouTube video of yawning kittens but several dozen paragraphs of unsigned, chaotically formatted text. It bore this title: “Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address—May 21, 2005.” Before I had reached the end of the first paragraph I believed I could identify the author. A quick search verified it: the commencement speaker for Kenyon College’s graduating class of 2005 was, indeed, David Foster Wallace.
The novelist Richard Ford spoke at my college graduation; thirteen years later, I can recall precisely nothing of what he said. Which does not mean it was bad. The commencement address—not quite an essay, more intimate than a speech—is a highly particular literary form. It is also a uniquely disposable one. Imagine you have written the greatest commencement address in history. What do you with it, once it has been delivered? The answer: nothing. I wrote a rather nice one a few years ago for the graduating class of my hometown community college. Would anyone like to read it? I suspected as much. When the graduation caps are thrown into the air, the commencement address’s only obvious utility is jettisoned along with them.
Wallace’s address managed to avoid this fate not because it was great (though it was). The address was saved, rather, thanks to the enterprising soul who transcribed it from video and posted it on the Internet, where, somehow, it came to the attention of my family friend—a woman who would not have known David Foster Wallace if he fell on her. Thanks to the enthusiasm of people like her, and the magic of the cut-and-paste function, the address became a small sensation and must now rank high among the most widely read things Wallace ever wrote.
Wallace was often accused, even by his admirers, of having a fatal weakness for what Nabokov once referred to as “the doubtful splendors of virtuosity.” Standing before the graduates of Kenyon College, Wallace opted for a tonal simplicity only occasionally evident in the hedge mazes of his fiction. He spoke about the difficulty of empathy (“Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not the absolute center of”), the importance of being well adjusted (“which I suggest to you is not an accidental term”), and the essential lonesomeness of adult life (“lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation”). Truthful, funny, and unflaggingly warm, the address was obviously the work of a wise and very kind man. At the edges, though, there was something else—the faint but unmistakable sense that Wallace had passed through considerable darkness, some of which still clung to him, but here he was, today, having beaten it, having made it through.
I knew Dave Wallace well enough to have responded to the news of his September 2008 suicide with overwhelming grief, though I did not know him nearly well enough to have had any knowledge of his decades of depression. In my shock I sought refuge in the only oasis I could find: his work. While I knew no answers would be found there, I hoped that rereading Wallace would provide some vague, analgesic insight into his (then) unfathomable decision. Many others were doing the same, and a number of commentators pointed to a passage in Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement speech, where he discusses “the old tired cliché about the mind being ‘an excellent servant and a terrible master.’” Wallace goes on to say, “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master.”
“Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address—May 21, 2005” now has a proper title, This Is Water, and a colophon belonging to Little, Brown, Wallace’s longtime publisher. In it, part of the above passage has been gently removed, and it is not difficult to understand why. Any mention of self-annihilation in Wallace’s work (and there are many: the patriarch of Infinite Jest is a suicide; Wallace’s story “Good Old Neon” is narrated by a suicide) now has a blast radius that obscures everything around it. These are craters that cannot be filled. The glory of the work and the tragedy of the life are relations but not friends, informants but not intimates. Exult in one; weep for the other.
Over the last six months, at least, this is what I have been telling myself. For all the obvious extraliterary reasons, This Is Water is often an extremely painful reading experience, and in this opinion I cannot imagine I will be alone. When Wallace defines thinking as “learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” when he describes his own mental “default setting” as one of selfishness and solipsism and despair and then explains that part of being an adult is developing the discipline “to care about other people and sacrifice for them, over and over,” and when he suggests that the “capital-T Truth” of life “is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head,” his intended audience of college graduates floats away and the haunting, answerless questions crowd suffocatingly in. To whom, you wonder, was he really speaking?
While some may question the decision to publish Wallace’s address as a book—and its interior design of one sentence per page is not much of a rebuttal to that question—it would take a small, charred heart to find any impure motives here. Future readers of This Is Water will have less trouble reconciling what it says with what its author ultimately did, and they, I think, are the audience this book is meant for.
The terrible master eventually defeated David Foster Wallace, which makes it easy to forget that none of the cloudlessly sane and true things he had to say about life in 2005 are any less sane or true today, however tragic the truth now seems. This Is Water does nothing to lessen the pain of Wallace’s defeat. What it does is remind us of his strength and goodness and decency—the parts of him the terrible master could never defeat, and never will.
—2009
CINEMA CRUDITÉ
On a bathwater-warm night in Portland, Oregon, several hundred people waited outside Cinema 21 to see a six-year-old film that was widely available on DVD. Nearly everyone here had seen the film at least once, and some had seen it twenty times. It was around 10 p.m.; show time was not for another hour. I walked up and down the line, gravitating toward anyone who seemed particularly displaced or puzzled. One young woman was staring fixedly into space, her grinning boyfriend beside her. When I asked what brought her out, she thumbed toward the boyfriend. “It’s so poorly made,” he said, exultantly.
A large shaggy kid in a black leather jacket walked by with a handheld camera—an aspiring journalist, it turned out. He wanted to document tonight’s premiere; he hoped that, as soon as tomorrow night, his movie would be up on YouTube, where it would join many other, similarly homegrown opening-night chronicles. “This is amazing!” the aspiring journalist said, as people recounted for him their favorite lines from the film: “Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!” “I feel like I’m sitting on an atomic bomb waiting for it to go off!” “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!”
A man wearing a tuxedo-print T-shirt and in the obvious employ of the theater began to work the line, dispensing rubber-banded bouquets of plastic spoons. Soon, all along the line, the spoons were clicking like castanets in the hands of the impatient crowd.
By 11:15 I was in my seat. The film itself, meanwhile, was in no danger of starting. After a while, the young man in the tuxedo-print T-shirt bounded to the front of the theater and climbed onto the stage. He introduced himself as Ian and told us that he “got on his hands and knees to get this movie here.” He urged us to keep in mind while watching the film that its director, one Tommy Wiseau, submitted it for consideration to the Academy Awards in 2003. Ian reminded us of the spoons he had handed out and specified when we were supposed to throw them at the screen. “Don’t blow your wad on spoons
all at once,” he said. “You’ll have plenty of chances.” Finally, he warned those who had not yet seen tonight’s film that the first twenty minutes “are kind of... unusual. This movie doesn’t work in the way other movies work. Or in the way reality works. You have to acclimate to it.” With a carnival barker flourish, Ian raised his hands as the curtains behind him parted. The WISEAU FILMS logo appeared onscreen to a volley of spoons. The opening bars of the film’s tasteful, insipid piano-and-bassoon soundtrack resulted in the first of several standing ovations. Following that, potted shots of San Francisco’s Golden Gate, Alcatraz, the Bay, a trolley car—all filmed at defiantly diverse times of day. The equally unrecognizable names of the cast and crew cycled by to various levels of applause. The last name to appear was that of Tommy Wiseau. The first character to appear was played by Tommy Wiseau. His first line in the film (“Hi, babe!”) is a tiny miracle of inorganic delivery, but no one that night could hear it: half of the audience was still chanting his name.
When The Room was released in 2003, it was marketed as a drama with the searing intensity of “Tennesee [sic] Williams.” Independently produced movies that lack the garlands of film-festival approval are rarely marketed at all, but The Room came backed by a multidisciplinary campaign: television and print ads, a making-of companion book, and a gaudy Los Angeles premiere to which Tommy Wiseau—the film’s director, writer, star, producer, executive producer, and distributor—pulled up in a rented limousine. At some of The Room’s first screenings, half of The Room’s first audience walked out after twenty minutes; the other half, according to one witness, was paralyzed by laughter. Its two-week take cashed out at a reported $1,900. At that rate, in order to earn a return on Wiseau’s $6 million investment in the film, The Room would have had to play for another twelve decades.
The artist gambles, the art emerges, both withdraw in disgrace. A shapely, sad, familiar story—and it should have ended there. But among The Room’s costlier marketing ploys was a billboard, on which, looming over L.A.’s Highland Avenue, could be seen a one-story-tall reproduction of Wiseau’s strikingly asymmetrical face, which resembled nothing so much as the mug shot of a man arrested for solicitation after a sixty-hour meth bender. Despite The Room’s disastrous first run, Wiseau paid to keep the billboard up for one year, then two, three, four. By the time it was taken down in 2008, the billboard had turned into one of those odd, Brown Derby-ish landmarks in which Los Angeles specializes. (Wiseau, who is known to bat away all questions regarding his personal life, has never revealed how much the billboard set him back, but he has said, “Let’s put it this way: It cost a lot of money. You can buy a brand new car. Maybe two.” The average monthly rate for Hollywood-area billboard rental is around $5,000.)
Thanks to the billboard, and Wiseau’s efforts to convince one Los Angeles theater to offer monthly viewings of The Room, word of the film, and its mysterio creator, slowly got around. By 2006, The Room was a cult hit in Los Angeles. Today the film is playing as a midnight movie in two dozen cities around the country; it recently opened in Toronto and London, and screenings are being planned in Scotland and New Zealand.
Wiseau, meanwhile, has been forced into a peculiar marketing position. The serious drama heralded by The Room’s original campaign was now being called by its director a “quirky new black comedy.” The marketing copy branded on the film’s DVD case typifies this doublethink. “Can You Really Trust Anyone?” the first, sober tagline reads. Just below it: “It’s a Riot!”
A disinterested plot summary of The Room might go as follows: A kindhearted San Francisco banker named Johnny is caught in a love triangle with his fiancée, Lisa, and his best friend, Mark. Among those pulled into the orbit of the affair are Denny, Johnny’s quasi-adopted ward; Claudette, Lisa’s stingily calculating mother; and Peter, Johnny’s psychologist friend. Although The Room opens with Johnny arriving home to a tableau of seeming domestic bliss, we soon learn that, because Johnny is so “boring,” Lisa no longer loves him. Shortly thereafter, Lisa seduces Mark, who at first cavils (“Johnny is my best friend”) but quickly caves. The remainder of the story is a somewhat inert game of cat and mouse: Lisa gets Johnny drunk on a peculiar mixture of vodka and whiskey (which Room fans have christened the Scotchka) in order to accuse him of hitting her; Johnny overhears Lisa admit she is having an affair, after which he begins taping her phone calls; Lisa throws a disastrous surprise birthday party for Johnny in which her sundry deceptions are exposed, after which Johnny busts up their condo, somehow finds a gun, and exacts his revenge.
“So bad it’s good” is the prevailing wisdom on why The Room has become such a phenomenon. In this view, The Room stands ineptly beside other modern paragons—Showgirls, Roadhouse—of the midnight movie. The first time you see The Room, there seems little in this position to quarrel with. Wiseau’s osmium-dense, east-of-the-Carpathians accent, for example, which falls somewhere between early Schwarzenegger and Vlad Dracul, makes for an incomprehensible leading man. The dialogue, meanwhile, is interplanetarily bizarre. At one point, Lisa proclaims to Mark, “I’m gonna do what I wanna do, and that’s it.” Pause. “What do you think I should do?” At another point, Johnny walks out onto his apartment building’s rooftop in a state of savage agitation, having just learned that Lisa has accused him of hitting her. “It’s not true!” he says to himself, throwing aside his water bottle. “I did not hit her! It’s bullshit! I did not hit her! I did not!” He then notices Mark sitting off screen. “Oh, hi, Mark,” Johnny says pleasantly, having a seat beside him. “What’s new with you?” Mark proceeds to tell Johnny a horrible story of a woman who was beaten and hospitalized by her cuckolded boyfriend. In response, Johnny laughs with ghoulish warmth. Later, when Mark presses Johnny for some business information, Johnny lectures him that such information is confidential and, without missing a beat, asks, “Anyway how is your sex life?”
This is not a frivolous question: The Room’s characters enjoy hearty coital appetites. Altogether the film’s quartet of sex scenes takes up almost 10 percent of its total running time. The first and longest such scene, between Johnny and Lisa, unforgettably occurs five minutes into the film. Much of it is shot through diaphanous white bed curtains and what appears to be a hotel-lobby water sculpture. Whereas the rose petals Johnny picks up and decoratively drops onto Lisa’s breasts and the adult-contemporary R&B soundtrack both come straight from the école du Cinemax, the vision of Johnny’s strangely mispositioned alabaster behind pistoning up and down upon what appears to be Lisa’s navel has no cinematic precedent.
Technically speaking, The Room is a difficult film to extol. Wiseau takes pride in the fact that The Room was filmed simultaneously with two cameras, one a standard 35-mm and the other hi-def. Wiseau’s most mystifying decision was to shoot The Room’s several rooftop vignettes against a panoramic green screen, against which a shimmering digital vista of the San Francisco skyline was later badly composited. Wiseau’s unbudgeable insistence7 on filming The Room with two cameras and preference for expensive technology that could have easily been done without are triple-play rarities in modern filmmaking: at once financially improvident, visually unsatisfying, and definitively unnecessary.
The Room’s narrative strategies, meanwhile, amount to one kamikaze after another. In one scene, Lisa’s mother Claudette offhandedly mentions that she has just received some upsetting medical-test results. “I definitely have breast cancer,” she tells her daughter, with an annoyed little shudder. The dramatic impact of Claudette’s cancer revelation, which is never mentioned again, is nicely captured by the scene’s DVD chapter title: “Claudette and Lisa/Cancer.” Late in the film, during Johnny’s surprise party, Lisa is confronted by an agonized, furious man who has just caught her canoodling with Mark. This man expresses his disgust for Lisa’s behavior and speaks of his fear that what she is doing to Johnny will destroy their friendship. We have never met this man. We have no idea who he is, why he is worried, how he knows Johnny or Lisa, or what he is doing at the pa
rty.
The centerpiece of The Room is a scene involving a character with the typographically striking name of Chris-R. A goateed thug and drug dealer, Chris-R finds Johnny’s ward, Denny, dribbling a basketball on the green-screen-corseted rooftop. After a brief argument, Chris-R pulls a large silver handgun on Denny and holds it to his head. Johnny and Mark appear, intervene, and hustle Chris-R off camera. With that, Claudette and Lisa somehow materialize, and Lisa and Denny proceed to have this escalatingly hysterical exchange:Denny: “I owe him some money.”
Lisa: “What kind of money?”
Denny: “I owe him some money.”
Lisa: “What kind of money?”
Denny: “I bought some drug off of him.”
Lisa: “What kind of drugs, Denny?”
Denny: “It doesn’t matter! I don’t have them anymore!”
Lisa: “WHAT KIND OF DRUGS DO YOU TAKE?”
Denny’s explanation for this worrisome turn of events is a logic sinkhole. As he explains to Lisa, he needs to “pay off” some debts. Which suggests that he was buying the drugs to sell them. Why, then, if he has already bought the drugs, does he owe Chris-R money? Is Chris-R running some kind of drug layaway program? Why does Lisa appear to believe there are different kinds of money? None of these questions get answered, or even addressed, because the matter of Denny’s drug buying or drug abuse (or whatever it is) immediately joins Claudette’s breast cancer in the foggy narrative beyond.
I have not mentioned the fact that The Room’s male characters frequently play football while standing three feet apart from one another, sometimes while wearing tuxedoes; or that one character, for no detectable reason, collapses in pain in the middle of an otherwise procedurally sane scene; or that Johnny and Lisa have around their apartment several enigmatically framed portraits of spoons.8
