The David Foster Wallace Industrial Complex that’s sprung up in the seven years since his suicide has birthed an unlikely new film out this month. Called The End of the Tour, it’s based on writer David Lipsky’s memoir Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. It stars Jason Segel as the late author and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky, who was sent by Rolling Stone to profile Wallace in 1996 as the late novelist promoted Infinite Jest. Part bromantic road movie and part heady Dinner With Andre-style talkathon, The End of the Tour has earned stellar reviews (including from our own J.R. Jones) and some hand-wringing because its subject had such a tortuous relationship with fame. Surely Wallace would have cringe at the idea of Wallace the movie character, right? “I don’t want to turn this into a romantic, lurid, tormented-artist thing,” he tells Lipsky at one point during their five-day trip.
In Max’s defense, however, there’s evidence that Wallace himself both sentimentalized and condescended to his home region. Fehrman relates an anecdote in which Wallace wrote an author in 1999 to say, “You’re special, but so’s the guy across the table who’s raising two kids sober and rebuilding a ’73 Mustang. It’s a magical thing with 4,000,000,000 forms. It kind of takes your breath away.”
Just ask Wallace’s long-time friend and fellow novelist Jonathan Franzen, whose off-putting but well-meaning remarks about adopting an orphan from Iraq in an interview last week prompted torch lighting and pitchfork raising from the eternally offended online mob. Wallace’s many eccentricities and problematic thoughts, untweeted and never Instagrammed, remain relatively tucked away, which is perhaps why he’s become an icon, a saint, a Magic Eye puzzle of a character since his death—a vessel that launched a thousand essays and more pages worth of think pieces than could be contained between the covers of Infinite Jest. Just like this one.
