David Foster Wallace was the last of American literary rock stars. Writers haven't really been glamorized this side of the Atlantic since the Jazz age, but dropping Wallace's name in a conversation is enough to make any English major smile and shoot their best melancholic gaze at you like you wouldn't understand. That said, I happen really like David Foster Wallace's books and have grown quite a disdain for the very much revisionist romantic cult of personality he's been the object of since his death in 2008.
There were two David Foster Wallace's. The one who existed and left an immense literary legacy for every people on Earth to enjoy and the one we've all made up in our respective minds. It's a dilemma that The End of the Tour understands quite well, perhaps even better than Although of course you end up becoming yourself, the book it's based on. It was perhaps Wallace's fate to always feel alone and miserable so we wouldn't have to, because he was better than us.
It's all very Christlike when I say it like that, but I doubt he willingly sacrificed his life for us strangers who enjoyed his art. No one was saved either. Seven years after his death, we're still struggling with the complex legacy he left behind.
The End of the Tour is based on a David Lipsky book that was published in 2010, following the suicide of David Foster Wallace. The book contains a series of interviews and conversations between Lipsky and Wallace, held during the last week of the Infinite Jest book tour, held in 1996. It was meant to be published as a portrait in Rolling Stone, but it was relinquished to David Lipsky's drawers for an obscure reason until 2008, when he heard the news of Wallace's passing. It became a best seller's book and a movie later because apparently the memory of Wallace as a person has become as marketable as his books.
The crux of The End of the Tour is very simple. It's Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg having a series of conversation with each other, mainly about pop culture and each other's lives. The film is marketed with the tagline "imagine the greatest conversation you've ever had" and I assure you it's not, but it doesn't make the film any less endearing. The End of the Tour is not about Wallace himself, but about the privilege of hanging out with one of the smartest, most charismatic man in America and trying to differentiate who he was from who we perceived him to be and it's not always easy. The End of the Tour subscribed to the romantic cult of David Foster Wallace's ghost, but aren't we all?
Jason Segel does a great job at not doing too much. He's a humble and passionate actor who understands his strengths and limitations.
The End of the Tour is very self-aware. It's a movie about an important moment in David Lipsky's life and it doesn't try to be anything else. Thing is, Lipsky lived what every David Foster Wallace reader would've ever wanted to live: spend some quality time with the man. This is what's so fascinating about David Foster Wallace: his very presence changed the way you acted and it's something he wasn't cool with. He was a man who loves writing before anything else and who was better at it than most human beings and the insane levels of admiration he received messed with his relationship to writing because he craved it so much, yet it made him feel even more lonely. People loved Wallace for bridging gaps in their own lives, yet they didn't fill any in his.
The movie illustrates this with clever symbolism here and there. For example, towards the end of the movie, after an intense discussion with Wallace where he truly defines himself instead of trying to please him, Lipsky walks to a window, pulls the blinders only to find a blinding light on the outside, symbolizing that he found enlightenment. This is the kind of stuff that usually pisses me off when dealing with David Foster Wallace's legacy, but just the very fact that I'm trying to position myself against this kind of fanboy behavior shows that I think I have a special relationship to David Foster Wallace's writing too. We're all trying to position ourselves in that immense and complex legacy he's left for us to figure out.
The End of the Tour is a flawed, but ultimately successful movie. I've enjoyed the humble and low key performances by Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg, who didn't try too hard to become their characters. They were still very much themselves, acknowledging the aura of the source material and preventing the movie from turning into a silly hommage. The End of the Tour is a very more reflexive film about an intellectual legacy we're still not comfortably at managing even today, seven years after David Foster Wallace left this world. Now that every post-mortem books of his have been released and that whatever movie that needed to be released has been (I don't think any of Wallace's novels ever will be adapted), maybe we're going to start dealing with the fact that he's not here anymore and choose how we're going to remember him.
The movie illustrates this with clever symbolism here and there. For example, towards the end of the movie, after an intense discussion with Wallace where he truly defines himself instead of trying to please him, Lipsky walks to a window, pulls the blinders only to find a blinding light on the outside, symbolizing that he found enlightenment. This is the kind of stuff that usually pisses me off when dealing with David Foster Wallace's legacy, but just the very fact that I'm trying to position myself against this kind of fanboy behavior shows that I think I have a special relationship to David Foster Wallace's writing too. We're all trying to position ourselves in that immense and complex legacy he's left for us to figure out.
The End of the Tour is a flawed, but ultimately successful movie. I've enjoyed the humble and low key performances by Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg, who didn't try too hard to become their characters. They were still very much themselves, acknowledging the aura of the source material and preventing the movie from turning into a silly hommage. The End of the Tour is a very more reflexive film about an intellectual legacy we're still not comfortably at managing even today, seven years after David Foster Wallace left this world. Now that every post-mortem books of his have been released and that whatever movie that needed to be released has been (I don't think any of Wallace's novels ever will be adapted), maybe we're going to start dealing with the fact that he's not here anymore and choose how we're going to remember him.
