In where I write about a much overlooked film, "The End of the Tour"
Jason Segel as author David Foster Wallace in the film
"The End of the Tour"
The movie "The End of the Tour", is about a week long conversation/interview between writers David Foster Wallace and David Lipsky, about Wallace's infamous novel, Infinite Jest. "The End of the Tour" gets to the heart of Wallace, but it does almost miss it in the beginning.
The reason for that is Jesse Eisenberg's Lipsky comes across as a little smarmy at the start, but it's only because Lipsky at the time was searching for himself. Eisenberg does an honest, somewhat halting performance of Lipsky: the writer desperately wanting to be successful.
As writers we all want that recognition and acceptance from other more successful writers, especially someone as brilliant as Wallace. I like the honesty of Eisenberg's performance, he's just a guy who is lucky enough to spend days getting to know one of his idols and he so badly wants his acceptance. I've been there, that feeling and awe, but wanting to treat them like they are just people so that they let their guard down to let you in, in a meaningful way, so that you can do your art, while they're doing theirs. It doesn't get more intimate than that.
David Lipsky got lucky not many writers, particularly writers of Wallace's stature, want to let another writer in. It's like being looked at by the world, the way that this person or writer views you and you don't want to be viewed as not able to get the work done, that you are a joke.
David Foster Wallace so wants to be approachable, just an average guy, but he knows that he is an incredible writer. Jason Segel's stripped down version of Wallace is Wallace. Segel is able to understand the crippling pain of understanding everything that Wallace had to him. It surprises me how open Wallace is, but really what did he have to lose by not opening up? I remember being 17 and reading Girl With Curious Hair, Wallace's short story collection, it was hidden in the back of my high school library along with copies of Sylvia Plath's Ariel and Hemingway's The Dangerous Summer that I had hidden there because I had hit my limit on books to check out, I was also doing research on Mozart, so I had depleted the library's biography section. The library was my favorite place, there were books there, that's besides the point, Wallace's short stories made me look beyond the "normal," to realize the absurdity of life and how full of excitement it could be.
My favorite parts of "The End of The Tour" is when Wallace is trying to get Lipsky to understand his depression and to put it behind himself. He wants in vain to leave it there, he's embarrassed by it, it's his Achilles heel. Depression is funny that way, some of us will be open about it, but most of us who have been through bouts of depression feel that we will be looked at as abnormal, that we don't fit in the world. I look at my depression as something to learn about myself, watching for triggers keeping myself off that line. I don't want to go back to having to take antidepressants, ever. That said, I believe that antidepressants can help people, for me, I felt lost and even lonelier on medication so I've figured out other ways to keep it at bay. I felt it coming on when I first left my day job a few months back, I went into survival mode, throwing myself into a daily routine of getting my kid up, ready for school, taking the dog for a daily walk and finding projects to keep myself busy. My depression began years ago after I lost my newborn son, Zachary, at birth. I got pregnant with my daughter not too long after that, which kind of kicked me out of it, but about a year and a half after her birth I was attending classes at Metro State here in Denver, I started having issues concentrating and getting into my academics. I was also having a hard time being a mom, I hadn't really dealt with losing my son and being a mother to another child so quickly. I got on antidepressants and they helped for about a fraction of what they were supposed to and I decided to just quit taking them. I didn't taper off of them, I just quit. Which, I know isn't the most responsible thing to do in the world, I just couldn't do it anymore. Yes, I am a Cannabis smoker and most would say that I am self medicating, but let me tell you, I can deal with and function on a much higher level then I ever could being on antidepressants, and trust me I tried quite a few of them to get me functioning.
Talking about writing, Wallace puts it all into perspective at the beginning of "The End of The Tour", "At the end of the day it's just a plain piece of paper and me." He gives a look into what it is like to be a writer, what can we turn that piece of paper into. If we're lucky it becomes something like Infinite Jest.
The best part of this movie, and about understanding Wallace, is at the end of the interview, David Lipsky is laying in Wallace's "guest bedroom" fuming about a discussion the two of them had earlier in the day about Wallace's fame, drug use and depression. Wallace sums himself up by saying, "It was much more that I had lived an incredibly American life, this idea that if I could just achieve x, and y, and z, that everything would be okay. There's a thing in the book how when somebody leaps from a burning skyscraper, it's not that they're not afraid of falling anymore, it's that the alternative is so awful, and so then you're invited to consider what could be so awful that leaping to your death would seem like an escape from it. And I don't know if you have any experience with this kind of thing but it's worse than any kind of physical injury. It maybe in the old days what is known as "Spiritual Crisis." Feeling as though every axiom of your life turned out to be false and there was actually nothing and that you were nothing. And it's all a delusion and you're so much better than everybody 'cause you can see how this is just a delusion, and you're so much worse because you can't fucking function. It's really horrible. I don't think that we ever change. I'm sure that I still have those same parts of me. Guess I'm trying really hard to find a way not to let them drive. You know?" and that's what depression is really, trying hard not to let it drive.
You can find "The End of the Tour" Available on Amazon Prime if you have an Amazon account and on Hulu. It's well worth the watch, especially if you enjoy reading David Foster Wallace, it's a small glimpse at a genius writer.
If you have an suggestions of other over looked movies etc please let me know in the comments or follow me on Twitter @ ChristineLarran or on Facebook Christine Larranaga or at my website https://christine-larranaga.squarespace.com/ and please feel free to check out some of my photography on Flickr @https://www.flickr.com/photos/missy2876/
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