I think you have to be pretty arrogant to try to explain David Foster Wallace’s interior life to a wide audience. It’s probably a lot easier and more honest to stick to describing merely what it was like to be around him. To begin with, unless you’ve lived with crippling, suicidal, fatal depression, I don’t think you have the slightest idea what it’s like to go through life with the kind of massive insecurities that constantly plagued Wallace. Trying to get an audience to understand is next to impossible, and it really can only be depicted in somewhat mysterious terms.
For another thing, it is no simple thing for even an above-average intellect to understand what it’s like to be a genius. It’s just not an accessible thing. What is it like to think so quickly, to be able to store and access so much information, to be able to make calculations in your head without the assistance of a calculator or computer? Unless you’ve aged considerably or suffered some injury, you can never really imagine what it’s like to have a more powerful brain than they one you’re using right now.
Then, if you want to show an audience what it was like to be David Foster Wallace in movie form, you’re really hampered, because movies are about action, not the thoughts that swirl in people’s heads.
Finally, the less you know about Wallace’s real life the better. He wasn’t really a good person or someone you’d want to emulate. His life was tragic, really, which is why it’s possible to forgive him despite his superior attitude. But he should not be turned into a hero.
So, on the whole, a road trip bromance movie about Wallace was bound to be disappointing. It shouldn’t even have been attempted.
I haven’t seen it and probably won’t, but the idea that we cannot know anyone else’s thoughts or try to explore the mind of a genius is not true. Lots of movies have done that, from films about Van Gogh to Sybil to A Beautiful Mind…and those are just a few right off the top of my head.
I think there will be people who are bored by it, or don’t understand it or simply don’t like it, but it’s not that unusual a plan to make a movie about someone’s state of mind and how they relate to the rest of the world, or don’t. And showing his life doesn’t necessarily make him a hero.
So if the movie sucks, meh. I think people will take from it what they want to.
It’s one thing if you can show how that internal life manifests itself, like through being able to solve huge formulas on a blackboard or paint a masterpiece.
But when the product is the written word, it’s pretty difficult.
And the point with Wallace is that he ultimately killed himself, you’re trying to somehow explain that. But you can’t really get the viewer to understand what it was like to be inside his tormented mind, especially in a road trip bromance format.
Never say “can’t” to an artist! Exploring David Foster Wallace’s tormented mind in a road trip bromance format holds no appeal for me, personally, and you could say that it’s an artistic feat with a very high difficulty rating, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Another recent example would be Love and Mercy, which I thought gave a pretty good impression of what it must be like to be Brian Wilson, torment and all. Of course, again, that’s music, not the written word, so it’s easier to depict on film. On the other hand, I’ve never been a Beach Boys fan, and I’m still unfamiliar with Pet Sounds, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the movie. So the music was sort of opaque to me, in somewhat the same way that the written word would be in a film about a writer.
A movie that should have been impossible is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Quite riveting for some and possibly very boring for others.
The movie apparently isn’t a biopic. It’s five days that he spent with David Lipsky. A brief encounter retold through the eyes of only one of the participants. Whether or not that makes for good cinema, in any way illuminates the life of Wallace for his fans, or the fact that he committed suicide a dozen years later, doesn’t figure in to Lipsky’s right to tell the story in print or screen.
Wallace would likely have hated it. OTOH, he didn’t shy away from scrutinizing others in his writing. Thus, holding up Wallace as too precious to be depicted, fairly or unfairly, on the big screen has never been an artistic standard. IOW, Emily Dickinson is fair game.
Recall some similar outrage over Hilary and Jackie. For some, Jacqueline DuPre was too special and tragically died young for such honesty.
interesting puzzle; seems to me an excellent biopic could be made of the life of James Baldwin and I don’t know of any, yet. Robert Bresson’s approach to interiority and the written word in Diary of a Country Priest is brilliant but it’s something few today will try.
agree about bromance and road trip approach, but also it’s the nature of WFD’s writing which I’m not sure is on the level of van Gogh or Baldwin.
Those movies were, by and large, generally bad.
A decade after it was first published, this is worth revisiting:
Host – Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio. Long on the path to the 2016 GOP-POTUS-Palooza.
An observation — that didn’t escape some of us in real time and knew it spelled trouble up ahead:
Soon enough we discovered where they came from and what they were up to — fleecing the naive and when those pockets were emptied, fleecing the Federal Treasury.
John Ziegler, the primary focus of the article, has had a few more lives since them — all similarly offensive to those with a sense of decency.