For me, at the end of a full day of Managed Fun, Nigel Ellery’s act is not particularly astounding or side-splitting or entertaining—but neither is it depressing or offensive or despair-fraught. What it is is weird. It’s the same sort of weird feeling that having an elusive word on the tip of your tongue evokes. There’s something crucially key about Luxury Cruises in evidence here: being entertained by someone who clearly dislikes you, and feeling that you deserve the dislike at the same time that you resent it. All six subjects are now lined up doing syncopated Rockette kicks, and the show is approaching its climax, Nigel Ellery at the microphone getting us ready for something that will apparently involve furiously flapping arms and the astounding mesmeric illusion of flight. Because my own dangerous susceptibility makes it important that I not follow Ellery’s hypnotic suggestions too closely or get too deeply involved, I find myself, in my comfortable navy-blue seat, going farther and farther away inside my head, sort of Creatively Visualizing a kind of epiphanic Frank Conroy-type moment of my own, pulling mentally back, seeing the hypnotist and subjects and audience and Celebrity Show Lounge and deck and then whole motorized vessel itself with the eyes of someone not aboard, visualizing the m.v. Nadir at night, right at this moment, steaming north at 21.4 knots, with a strong warm west wind pulling the moon backwards through a skein of clouds, hearing muffled laughter and music and Papas’ throb and the hiss of receding wake and seeing, from the perspective of this nighttime sea, the good old Nadir complexly aglow, angelically white, lit up from within, festive, imperial, palatial… yes, this: like a palace: it would look like a kind of floating palace, majestic and terrible, to any poor soul out here on the ocean at night, alone in a dinghy, or not even in a dinghy but simply and terribly floating, a man overboard, treading water, out of sight of all land. This deep and creative visual trance—N. Ellery’s true and accidental gift to me—lasted all through the next day and night, which period I spent entirely in Cabin 1009, in bed, mostly looking out the spotless porthole, with trays and various rinds all around me, feeling maybe a little bit glassy-eyed but mostly good—good to be on the Nadir and good soon to be off, good that I had survived (in a way) being pampered to death (in a way)—and so I stayed in bed. And even though the tranced stasis caused me to miss the final night’s climactic P.T.S. and the Farewell Midnight Buffet and then Saturday’s docking and a chance to have my After photo taken with Captain G. Panagiotakis, subsequent reentry into the adult demands of landlocked real-world life wasn’t nearly as bad as a week of Absolutely Nothing had led me to fear.
1995
The following people helped make various of the foregoing better than they (i.e., various of the foregoing) would have been otherwise and are hereby thanked:
Mary Ann Babbe, Will Blythe, Mark (“Action Boy”) Costello, Will Dana, Richard Ellis, Jonathan (“This Isn’t Nearly as Bad as One Might Have Expected”) Franzen, K. L. Harris, Colin (“Let’s Explore Once Again Why This Doesn’t Quite Work”) Harrison, Jack Hitt, Jay (“I’m Suffering Right Along With You”) Jennings, Steve Jones, Glenn (“The Mollifier”) Kenny, Nora Krug, Michael Martone, Mike Mattil, Bill McBride, Michael Milburn, Steve Moore, Bonnie Nadell, Linda Perla, Michael Pietsch, Erin Poag, Ellen Rosenbush, Greg Sharko, Lee (“What, Aren’t All Page Proofs Set in Tocharian B?”) Smith, David Travers, Paul Tough, Kristin (“The Blunt Machete”) von Ogtrop, Amy (“Just How Much Reader-Annoyance Are You Shooting For Here, Exactly?”) Wallace Havens, Sally F. Wallace, Deborah Wuliger.
David Foster Wallace is the author of the novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System, as well as the story collection Girl with Curious Hair. His writings have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Playboy, Premiere, Tennis, and other magazines. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Paris Review Prize for humor, and an O Henry Award. He lives in Bloomington, Illinois.
Praise for David Foster Wallace’s novel
INFINITE
JEST
“The next step in fiction…. Edgy, accurate, and darkly witty…. Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis. Think.”
—Sven Birkerts, Atlantic Monthly
“Uproarious…. It shows off Wallace as one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything.”
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“What weird fun Infinite Jest is to read…. Truly remarkable.”
—David Gates, Newsweek
“A virtuoso display…. There is generous intelligence and authentic passion on every page.”
—R. Z. Sheppard, Time
“A blockbuster comedy of substance abuse, family dysfunction, and tennis, set in the postmillennial future…. No other writer now working communicates so dazzlingly what life will feel like the day after tomorrow.”
—Gerald Howard, Elle
“A work of genius…. A grandly ambitious, wickedly comic epic on par with such great, sprawling novels of the 20th century as Ulysses, The Recognitions, and Gravity’s Rainbow.”
—Paul D. Colford, Seattle Times
“Exhilarating, breathtaking…. The book teems with so much life and death, so much hilarity and pain, so much gusto in the face of despair that one cheers for the future of our literature.”
—Dan Cryer, Newsday
“Infinitely readable, even better than its hype…. It shows signs, in fact, of being a genuine work of genius.”
—Will Blythe, Esquire
“Spectacularly good…. It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on Jeopardy!”
—Walter Kirn, New York
“Brilliant…. Wallace’s talent is immense and his imagination limitless.”
—David Eggers, San Francisco Chronicle
“So brilliant you need sunglasses to read it, but it has a heart as well as a brain…. Infinite Jest is both a vast, comic epic and a profound study of the postmodern condition…. Wallace offers huge entertainment.”
—Steven Moore, Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Bigger, more ambitious, and better than anything else being published in the U.S. right now…. Infinite Jest unerringly pinpoints how Americans have turned the pursuit of pleasure into addiction.”
—David Streitfeld, Details
“Brashly funny and genuinely moving…. Infinite Jest will confirm the hopes of those who called Wallace a genius.”
—Bruce Allen, Chicago Tribune
1 This, and thus part of this essay’s title, is from a marvelous toss-off in Michael Sorkin’s “Faking It,” published in Todd Gitlin, ed., Watching Television, Random House/Pantheon, 1987.
2 Quoted by Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness, Harvard U. Press, 1981; subsequent Emerson quotes ibid.
3 Bernard Nossiter, “The F.C.C.’s Big Giveaway Show,” Nation, 10/26/85, p. 402.
4 Janet Maslin, “It’s Tough for Movies to Get Real,” New York Times Arts & Leisure Section, 8/05/90, p. 9.
5 Stephen Holden, “Strike The Pose: When Music Is Skin-Deep,” ibid., p. 1.
6 Sorkin in Gitlin, p. 163.
7 Daniel Hallin, “We Keep America On Top of the World,” in Gitlin’s anthology, p. 16.
8 Barbara Tuchman, “The Decline of Quality,” New York Times Magazine, 11/02/80.
9 M. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vintage, 1945 edition, pp. 57 and 73.
10 I didn’t get this definition from any sort of authoritative source, but it seems pretty modest and commonsensical.
11 Don DeLillo, White Noise, Viking, 1985, p. 72.
12 Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire, Harvard U. Press, 1974, pp. 103–118.
13 This professor was the sort of guy who used “which” when the appropriate relative pronoun was the less fancy “that” to give you an idea.
14 If you want to see a typical salvo in this generation war, look at William Gass’s “A Failing Grade for the Present Tense” in the 10/11/87 New York Times Boo
k Review.
15 In Bill Knott’s Love Poems to Myself, Book One, Barn Dream Press, 1974.
16 In Stephen Dobyns’s Heat Death, McLelland and Stewart, 1980.
17 In Bill Knott’s Becos, Vintage, 1983.
18White Noise, pp. 12–13.
19 Martone, Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List, Indiana U. Press, 1990, p. ix.
20 Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Harmony/Crown, 1990, p. 82.
21 Mark Crispin Miller, “Deride and Conquer,” in Gitlin’s anthology, p. 193.
22 At Foote, Cone and Belding, quoted by Miller—so the guy said it in the mid-’80s.
23 A similar point is made about Miami Vice in “We Build Excitement” Todd Gitlin’s own essay in his anthology.
24 Miller in Gitlin, p. 194.
25 Ibid., p. 187.
26 Miller’s “Deride…” has a similar analysis of sitcoms, but Miller ends up arguing that the crux is some weird Freudio-patricidal element in how TV comedy views The Father.
27 Lewis Hyde, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking,” American Poetry Review, reprinted in the Pushcart Prize anthology for 1987.
28 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review #146, Summer 1984, pp. 60-66.
29 Pat Auferhode, “The Look of the Sound,” in good old Gitlin’s anthology, p. 113.
30 Miller in Gitlin, p. 199.
31 Greil Marcus, Mystery Train, Dutton, 1976.
32 Hyde, op. cit.
33White Noise, p. 13.
34 A term Gitlin uses in “We Build Excitement.”
1 (I haven’t yet been able to track down clips of the N.B.C.C. spots, but the mind reels at the possibilities implicit in the conjunction of D. Lynch and radical mastectomy….)
2 “M.o.L,” only snippets of which are on BV’s soundtrack, has acquired an underground reputation as one of the great make-out tunes of all time—well worth checking out.
3 (’92 having been a year of simply manic creative activity for Lynch, apparently)
4 Dentistry seems to be a new passion for Lynch, by the way—the photo on the title page of Lost Highway’s script, which is of a guy with half his face normal and half unbelievably distended and ventricose and gross, was apparently culled from a textbook on extreme dental emergencies. There’s great enthusiasm for this photo around Asymmetrical Productions, and they’re looking into the legalities of using it in Lost Highway’s ads and posters, which if I was the guy in the photo I’d want a truly astronomical permission fee.
5 (And Dune really is visually awesome, especially the desert planet’s giant worm-monsters, who with their tripartitely phallic snouts bear a weird resemblance to the mysterious worm Henry Spencer keeps in the mysterious thrumming cabinet in Eraserhead.)
6 Anybody who wants to see how the Process and its inducements destroy what’s cool and alive in a director should consider the recent trajectory of Richard Rodriguez, from the plasma-financed vitality of El Mariachi to the gory pretension of Desperado to the empty and embarrassing From Dusk to Dawn. Very sad.
7 (using MacLachlan perfectly this time—since the role of Jeffrey actually calls for potato-faced nerdiness—plus Eraserhead’s Jack Nance and Dune’s Dean Stockwell and Brad Dourif, none of whom has ever been creepier, plus using Dallas’s Priscilla Pointer and everything’s Hope Lange as scary moms…)
8 TIDBIT: HOW LYNCH AND HIS CINEMATOGRAPHER FOR BV FILMED THAT HELLACIOUS FORCED “JOYRIDE” IN FRANK BOOTH’S CAR, THE SCENE WHERE FRANK AND JACK NANCE AND BRAD DOURIF HAVE KIDNAPPED JEFFREY BEAUMONT AND ARE MENACING HIM INSIDE THE CAR WHILE THEY’RE GOING WHAT LOOKS LIKE 100+ DOWN A DISMAL RURAL TWO-LANER: The reason it looks like the car’s going so fast is that lights outside the car are going by so fast. In fact the car wasn’t even moving. A burly grip was bouncing madly up and down on the back bumper to make the car jiggle and roll, and other crewpeople with hand-held lamps were sprinting back and forth outside the car to make it look like the car was whizzing past streetlights. The whole scene’s got a claustrophobia-in-motion feel that they never could have gotten if the car’d actually been moving (the production’s insurance wouldn’t have allowed that kind of speed in a real take), and the whole thing was done for about $8.95.
9 (sex scenes that are creepy in part because they’re exactly what the viewer himself imagines having sex with Patricia Arquette would be like)
10 (a stilted, tranced quality that renders the sex scenes both sexually “hot” and aesthetically “cold,” a sort of meta-erotic effect you could see Gus Van Sant trying to emulate when he had the sex scenes in My Own Private Idaho rendered as series of complexly postured stills, which instead of giving them Lynch’s creepy tranced quality made them look more like illustrations from the Kama-Sutra)
11 (And as an aside, but a true aside, I’ll add that I have had since 1986 a personal rule w/r/t dating, which is that any date where I go to a female’s residence to pick her up and have any kind of conversation with parents or roommates that’s an even remotely Lynchian conversation is automatically the only date I ever have with that female, regardless of her appeal in other areas. And that this rule, developed after seeing Blue Velvet, has served me remarkably well and kept me out of all kinds of hair-raising entanglements and jams, and that friends to whom Tve promulgated the rule but who have willfully ignored it and have continued dating females with clear elements of Lynchianism in their characters or associations have done so to their regret.)
12 Lynch’s influence extends into mainstream Hollywood movies, too, by the way. The surfeit of dark dense machinery, sudden gouts of vented steam, ambient industrial sounds, etc., in Lynch’s early stuff has clearly affected James Cameron and Terry Gilliam, and Gilliam has taken to the limit Lynch’s preoccupation with blatantly Freudian fantasies (Brazil) and interpenetrations of ancient myth and modern psychoses ( The Fisher King).
And across the spectrum, in the world of caviar-for-the-general art films, one has only to look at Atom Egoyan or Guy Maddin’s abstruse, mood-lit, slow-moving angst-fests, or at the Frenchman Arnaud DesPlechin’s 1992 La Sentinelle (which the director describes as “a brooding, intuitive study in split consciousness” and which is actually about a disassociated med-student’s relationship with a severed head), or actually at just about anything recent that’s directed by a French male under 35, to see Lynch’s sensibility stamped like an exergue on art cinema’s hot young Turks, too.
13 (This isn’t counting Dune, which was in the dreadful position of looking like it wanted to have one but not in fact having one.)
14 I know I’m not putting this well; it seems too complicated to be put well. It has something to do with the fact that some movies are too scary or intense for younger viewers: a little kid, whose psychic defenses aren’t yet developed, can be terribly frightened by a horror movie that you or I would regard as cheesy and dumb.
15 The way Lost Highway makes the idea of head-entry literal is not an accident.
16(Premiere magazine puts its writers in extremely snazzy hotels, by the way. I strongly doubt all hotels in LA are like this.)
17 I know things like this sound like a cheap gag, but I swear I’m serious. The incongruous realism of cheap gags is what made the whole thing Lynchian.
18 Mary Sweeney is one of Lost Highway’s three producers. Her main responsibilities seem to be the daily rushes and the rough cut and its storage and organization. She was Lynch’s editor on Fire Walk with Me.
19 (One Lost Highway crewperson described Scott Cameron as “the Mozart of stress,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.)
20 (not “Third Assistant,” for some firmly established reason)
21 ( = Robert Loggia)
22 ( = Balthazar Getty, about whom the less said the better, probably, except maybe to say that he looks sort of like Tom Hanks and John Cusack and Charlie Sheen all mashed together and then emptied of some vital essence. He’s not particularly tall, but he looks tall in Lost Highway’s footage
because he has extremely poor posture and David Lynch has for some reason instructed him to exaggerate the poor posture. As a Hot Young Male Actor, Balthazar Getty is to Leonardo DiCaprio roughly what a Ford Escort is to a Lexus. His breakthrough role was as Ralph in the latest Lord of the Flies, in which he was bland and essenceless but not terrible. He was miscast and misdirected as a homeless kid in Where the Day Takes You (like how does a homeless kid manage to have fresh mousse in his hair every day?) and really good in a surly bit part in Mr. Holland’s Opus.
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