The End of The Tour (2015)

I have a confession to make: I was yesterday years old when I discovered David Foster Wallace and his significance as a contemporary American writer. I'll turn 55 in a couple of weeks. I know, it's embarrassing. My only excuse is that I lived half of my life in the Soviet and post-Soviet cultures.

Still, I don't know how his work escaped me when I was in my doctoral program, especially because it is so pertinent for my area of specialization - mass communication, and specifically consumerism and media obsession. But I've never heard of David Foster Wallace (DFW) before. Which felt even more frustrating when I realized that he was a Gen-Xer as well, just 8 years my senior. Had he not died by suicide, he would have turned 63 this February. His father died in 2019; his mother is still alive. It pains me to think how hard it must have been for her to cope with her son's death.

I have discovered DFW accidentally. I'm teaching Presentational and Digital Literacy this semester and was looking for great examples of commencement speeches to use as an exercise for my students to reverse-engineer a speech by creating its outline while listening to it.

I had in mind Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement speech that I had analyzed in my persuasion class. While looking for its link online I came across the Time Magazine's ranking of top 10 best commencement speeches of all times. It had David Foster Wallace's 2005 speech at Kanyon ranked as #1, higher than Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill, and JFK. That peaked my interest and I listened to the speech. I was floored by both the ideas and delivery. What started out as a slightly condescending reflection on the ignorance of the young ended with the most compassionate and humbling message for the entire humanity and life. If you haven't yet, you can listen to it here and make your own conclusions about it (read the comments to the video too, they are precious):

After this, I was hooked. I listened to DFW reading his excellent essay "Consider the Lobster" on the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival where he discusses many issues relating to how humans treat animals and consume them for food (every vegan will love it) and much larger issues of humanity, restraint and indulgences.

I have also listened to snippets of his PBS interview with Charlie Rose where DFW described how he'd discovered his own avant-garde and postmodern philosophy and the importance of being an authentic self for a writer. The more I learned, the more I liked him. So I ordered his most influential book -- Infinite Jest -- and when my colleague saw me unpacking the 1,000-page brick today, he said excitedly, "Oh, David Foster Wallace! I've read this book in my grad program. Have you seen the movie about him, titled The End of The Tour?"

I haven't but now I had to. Immediately after I was done with teaching today, I went to Amazon Prime and bought the movie. I've just finished watching it. Since this preamble to the review is already too long, I will make the review using my usual formula succinct and brief.

1. Cognitive Dimension (What did I learn from the film?)

I've learned a lot about DFW as a person and a writer. The movie is based on the book by David Lipsky, played by Jesse Eisenberg, who had interviewed DFW (excellently played by Jason Segel) for the Rolling Stone magazine while on the last leg of the Infinite Jest book tour. The interaction between them was indeed one of the most interesting conversations about life, virtue, and human condition.

2. Emotional dimension (How did the movie make me feel?)

I went through a host of emotions, empathizing with both DFW as a rather reclusive deep thinker who doesn't know how the interview will turn out and has anxieties about how the people reading it will perceive him and with Lipsky, trying to find an angle to write a story about this enormous literary figure for a popular culture magazine. In retrospect, it also made me feel for creative people prone to depression and thoughts of suicide.

3. Aesthetic dimension (What did I appreciate in the movie about the way it was executed?)

The movie is incredibly intimate, closely showing how complete strangers can foster a deep human bond and develop trust within just three days of constant interaction and staying together. Eisenberg is a natural for this and Segel was a complete revelation in terms of how accurately he rendered DFW's speech and mannerisms. Must have been a big fan of his.

4. Moral dimension (What ethical and moral lessons does the movie teach us?)

The biggest and most important lesson of the movie for me was that even the most famed, influential and well-established writers are deeply insecure about their talent (DFW has a pretty good message there about the imposter syndrome) and vulnerable. To the point where they can end their own life at a high point of their career that they think is the low one.

Even though the suicide is not the main focus of the film, except for one point where Lipsky asked DFW about his prior suicide watch, I would not recommend this movie to those who might be prone to similar thoughts. But my highest recommendation if you want to see an excellent movie about the writer's existential angst.

I'm off to read Infinite Jest. Expect a book review from me in the future, but not too soon - I have picked up an overload assignment and will be teaching five classes this semester.