“The End of the Tour” (2015), directed by James Ponsoldt and
based on the non-fiction book “Although of Course You Become Yourself: A Road
Trip with David Foster Wallace” by David Lipsky, screenplay adaptation by
Donald Marguiles, is very important to me personally in the top-down view it
gives of the world of journalists, writers and authors since I have become a
public “amateur” at that activity during the second half of my own life. The dialogue brings up many issues for that
world, and this film will surely be on the year-end Oscar and Golden Globes
lists. It’s kind of interesting for it
to come out in late summer; it’s more of a late autumn season film.
Jesse Eisenberg plays the 30-year-old Lipsky in the winter
1996 road trip, to Illinois and the Minneapolis. The downtown Minneapolis scenes reminded me
of my own six years there (Nicollet Mall showed, but not my own residence at
the nearby Churchill Apartments). Some
of the Illinois parts seemed to be filmed in Grand Rapids MI. The
film is framed by Lipsky’s writing about the experience in 2010, when he is
middle-aged. The transformation of
Eisenberg (now 31 and looking “younger” than that) into someone around 45 (for
a book-signing) is subtle. He plays the roles
as someone very aware of his own values and own course in life. He has a girl friend (I thought the film
implied he was married by 2010, but I’m not positive). There is a scene where he chides Wallace for
Wallace’s being too much into his own intellectual superiority over other “ordinary”
people and tending to like to associate with people who won’t challenge
him.
Wallace, who died in 2008 at 46 (according to Wikipedia, of
self-hanging), is played by Jason Segel, who, in the part, looks older than the
34 he is supposed to be. His Illinois
house is somewhat cluttered, and his manner is a bit unkempt, and he seems to
be a loner, sometimes waffling on Lipsky’s right to cover more personal aspects
of his life.
The “tour” is the promotion of his novel “Infinite Jest”,
over 1000 pages, which has been characterized as an “encyclopedic novel” I glanced at it on Amazon, and it seems that
the use of detail, the numerous footnotes, the complex sentence and paragraph structure
and broad development, resemble these items in my own books, especially the
first of my three “Do Ask, Do Tell” books, which is non-fiction but has a kind
of autobiographical “plot” that would happen in fiction. (At this point, I’m
not sure how many chapters it has, or whether it has a TOC or index, will have
to look later.) I’ll digress here and
say that in my third “Do Ask Do Tell” book, I present both non-fiction and
fiction sections, as if they were interchangeable, and I have a feeling Wallace
may have done something similar. Note
that the Wallace novel has a character (a U.S. president) named “Gentle”; is
that an intentional reference to Clive Barker’s hero in “Imajica”? The
plot, involving world political reorganization and specific entertainment censorship,
and “samizdat”, isn’t specifically covered in the move.
So, Wallace is a bit like me (in a heterosexual incarnation),
but in another sense, so is Lipsky. Eisenberg plays the young Lipsky in a manner
that makes me think he really could play a younger version of me if my DADT
stuff gets made. My goodness, he has
already played Mark Zuckerberg. That
would put me in good company.
Both men were a little bit eccentric, in different
ways. Both men showed some signs of
Asperger syndrome, but Wallace (with his awkward body language) a bit
more. But they’re almost like a tag team
for these five days, even though Wallace gets jealous at one point in Minneapolis
that Lipsky is paying too much attention to a potential girl friend.
One question is, what made a challenging, thick,
self-indulgent book like “Jest” a best seller? Wikipedia says it was heavily
marketed. I get calls from my “self-publisher”
pushing me to “market” mine as a commodity much more (even go on tours
now). I am beginning to see (from
watching this movie) why they think this way.
Now, Lipsky actually works for “Rolling Stone” (now in
trouble over the UVa lawsuits) and even has an office cubicle where he can
write. He is a professional, and “writes
what other people want”, not his own story (as does Wallace, in a sense). He has to convince his boss to send him on
the tour with an expense account. It’s Lipsky’s responsibility as a journalist
to get Wallace to cooperate well enough to give the RS readers a good
article. I didn’t realize magazines
would spend so much on a story like this. It’s part of the economy.
Lipsky fumbles around a little bit on the logistics of the
trip, not having yet gotten a hotel room, and Wallace offers to let him stay in
a guest room, which he does. Wallace’s
dogs come in and insist on keeping Lipsky company (dogs actually love to sense the
magnetic field of a sleeping man’s heart beat). The real-life Jesse Eisenberg
is reported as fond of cats (adopting them) and of vegan diets (in Wikipedia),
which seems to correspond to Reid Ewing and dogs. But in the movie, both Lipsky and Wallace
chain-smoke, even in restaurants, which was probably still permissible in 1996.
(That’s different from me; I don’t
smoke, although most of Ayn Rand’s characters do so! I have been “adopted” by a stray cat before,
however.)
The “guest room” idea reflects a similar episode in my own
life. On New Year’s Day, 2003, while
staying at mother’s home in Arlington VA for Christmas, I drove up to West
Warwick, RI to meet with the now late filmmaker Gode Davis about his work “American
Lynching”, which I have mentioned elsewhere in my blogs. I actually stayed in his guest room that
night, and drove back the next day. I
remember meeting up with Gode in a Friday’s restaurant when almost the first
thing he said was that my own body language showed him that I have Asperger’s,
which he said he has. All of this is
part of an evolving effort about which I think there will be more to report
soon.
There's another point of comonality. Lipsky challenges Wallace as to whether the considerable presentation of drug use in "Jest" could be viewed by readers as suggesting that Wallace has "drug problems". This parallels the situation with my own screenplay "The Sub" on sexual issues, which I explained on my main blog July 27, 2007. I've talked about this issue there as "implicit content".
There is an incidental scene where the "team" sees the film "Broken Arrow" (directed by John Woo), with John Travolta, supposedly in the Mall of America (which had General Cinema when I lived there -- now I think it's AMC). I saw that film in Virginia in 1996 about a year before my own move to Minneapolis. It deals with a lost nuclear weapon, a point not mentioned in the new movie.
The official site for the film (A24) is here. Production companies include Kilburn and
Anonymous Content.
I saw the film at the Angelika Mosaic in Merrifield VA,
before a small late weeknight audience.
Pictures: Newport, RI, last weekend's trip (mine), and downtown Minneapolis in early 2003 from my pad in the Churchill apartments, about a half mile from the Nicollet Mall.
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