The End of the Tour

In his gargantuan novel, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace distinguishes at length between different forms of sadness.  Crucial to the some aspects of his novel is the distinction between anhedonia, that is, an inability to feel pleasure, and psychotic depression, an immoveable, debilitating pain that seems to "scream from every cell" of the afflicted person's brain and body.  In an aside in the book, cited in James Ponsoldt's The End of the Tour (2013), Wallace says that a person who is moved to leap from a burning building has not overcome his or her fear of falling from a great height -- it's just that the terror of flame exceeds the terror of the heights; similarly, a person who kills himself out of psychotic depression has not overcome his fear of death -- the fear of death remains powerfully present; it's just that the pain of living has over-powered the fear of death.  A film about true psychotic depression would be unwatchable, too painful to witness.  The End of the Tour contains some theoretical discussion of depression but it's emphasis is on anhedonia.  (This is probably unfair to Wallace's protracted agony that resulted in his suicide in 2008).

The End of the Tour adapts a memoir by David Lipsky, a New York writer for Rolling Stone.  The film is by parts irritating, self-aggrandizing, and, ultimately, quite touching.  Lipsky, played by Jesse Eisenberg, persuades his boss at Rolling Stone to fly him to Bloomington, Illinois to interview David Foster Wallace (DFW), at that time living in isolation in a rented house on the outskirts of the small Midwestern city.  DFW is famous for Infinite Jest but the scope and extent of his fame has not yet registered with the shy young man -- he is about 34, I think, when the film takes place, apparently around the winter of 1996 and 1997.  Lipsky is a published novelist himself and, like most writers, is intensely competitive.  He acknowledges the force of DFW's novel only begrudgingly and is angry that his live-in girlfriend seems to like Wallace's vast book better than his slender, and no doubt well-wrought, book The Art Fair.  Lipsky is bemused by DFW (played by Jason Segal).  Wallace seems very lonely and remote -- he confesses only to have been addicted to TV.  (Lipsky's mandate is to find evidence that DFW is a heroin addict; the most he can wrest from the novelist is that there is a period in which he drank too much and that he was on suicide watch for 8 days when he was in graduate school in Harvard.  (DFW is similarly reticent in the acknowledgements in Infinite Jest -- he thanks members of various Boston AA clubs for the stories that he records his book, but doesn't admit that he was, apparently, a member of AA himself.)  Both DFW and Lipsky are extremely thin-skinned -- they get on one another's nerves and end up spending the last part of their time together in angry silence.  DFW and Lipsky fly to Minneapolis where Wallace reads at the old Hungry Mind bookstore on Grand Avenue, just a little to the West of Snelling -- this trip to Minneapolis is the titular end of his book tour.  The two men spend some time with a couple of women who live in St. Paul -- one of them attended graduate school with Wallace.  The girls are attractive and, probably, would be receptive to a relationship with Wallace, but he is scrupulously ethical and believes it would be a disservice to his book to use it as a way of meeting women.  The ice and cold in Minnesota, effectively shown in the film, seems to intrude in the relationship between Lipsky and Wallace which had earlier been very close -- Lipsky quarrels with his girlfriend, back in New York, about her preferring DFW's prose to his work.  Further, he is outraged when DFW accuses him of using his connection with the novelist to pick up girls, something that he thinks is unfair to Lipsky's girlfriend and a misuse of his art.  The men fly back to Bloomington where Lipsky has lost his rental car in the airport parking lot -- this leads to more bitter recriminations. They spend a last night together and, then, Lipsky returns to New York to write his article for Rolling Stone -- years later, after DFW has died, Lipsky writes a fulsome account of the encounter, pulling out of storage his old cassette tapes of his interview with the deceased author; he publishes  his recollections as a memoir and, in the final scene, we see him at what looks like The Hungry Mind reading from his essay about DFW.  Lipsky says that the several days he spent with DFW in Bloomington, Illinois and, then, Minneapolis (they go to the Mall of America and see John Woo's Broken Arrow there) were the most consequential in his life.   The film is little uneasy as to whether it is a study of Lipsky's arrogant East Coast pretentiousness -- he can't imagine why DFW is wasting his life in the snowy Midwest -- or, primarily, about DFW's anhedonia.  In the end, I think the film is probably primarily focused on DFW's anhedonia, his inability to really enjoy anything but old TV shows.  The film incorrectly, I think, implies that the novelist's suicide was caused by anhedonia -- in fact, as DFW's father has said, Wallace killed himself because none of his medications had been effective in treating the horrific depression from which he suffered.  The End of the Tour is spooky in some ways -- DFW lives in a little, somewhat squalid house with two dogs; the house is full of pop cans because he swills Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew at all times.  Lipsky sleeps in a room in the house stacked high with copies of Infinite Jest.  DFW is totally uncool and unhip -- he eats at McDonald's, goes to dances at a local Baptist Church, and, when we see him, is totally abstinent both regard to booze and drugs but also sexually.  He teaches in what seems to be Community College where the students apparently worship him but absolutely refuses to traffic in his fame -- at that time, he was the most famous writer in America.  DFW keeps prayers on his wall and a collage of pictures of his sister and parents and he genuinely loves his Labrador retrievers.  He feels that his life is meaningless and he is completely unable to enjoy his fame and fortune -- he insists upon driving a car that is very old and badly damaged (it has no shock absorbers, he announces somewhat hyperbolically).  The movie is very low-key, a bit like My Dinner with Andre in that the film is essentially a long dialogue between two interesting, irritating, and voluble men.  The dialogue is fascinating, witty, and informative and I thought the picture was reasonably entertaining.   But, then, I have just finished Infinite Jest, a novel that raises more questions than it answers, and, of course, have an interest in DFW's sad life.