The End of the Tour

I went to see the David Foster Wallace movie last night, The End of the Tour [trailer]---partly because it's set in my city (also Michael at OCA recommended it).

I was disappointed, however: there were only a few shots of the city, DFW not being one for sightseeing, the movie suggests, preferring to watch TV at a friend's house, or to go to the Mall of America. 
(I guess going to the MOA is sightseeing... but he didn't stand on the Hennepin Bridge over the Mississippi River and exclaim "Huck Finn!" like I'd hoped.)

There was only one other person in the theater, so when the characters drive from the airport past the Mary Tyler Moore statue on the mall, I felt free to mutter out loud, "You can't drive down the mall!"     Buses and pedestrians only.

And when they go to the Mall of America, I squeaked: 
I was just passing through there two days ago, on my way with Marz to IKEA, across the street from the MOA, to get new stuff for her new apartment. (I felt such a mom...)

May I say, the area is not designed for pedestrians at all. There's no way to cross the highway from the Mall to IKEA, except to jaywalk. Luckily there's not much traffic... because it's all turned into the Mall's parking lots.

But DFW didn't have to worry about pedestrian crossings because he got a ride from my favorite person in the movie:
the publicists' driver, played by Joan Cusak, an actress who always, always delights me.

Better than any sight, she captured the local culture, with her [adorable? annoying? both?] Minnesota brand of perkiness. (I cringed: I'm like her sometimes.)

Enthusing over DFW's radio interview, which she'd listened to live on the car radio, waiting outside the public-radio building for him, she says to him as he gets in the car,
"Now I'm going to have to buy your book!"

"I'm sorry," he mumbles.

I think this is the only time I laughed out loud at the movie.

[Was it just a touch too reverential, too precious? I think so.
And the music? Would he have liked that? Couldn't he have been dancing to the Bee Gees, since he'd mentioned 70s dancing?]

Darning sampler from the Fries museum, from tomofholland.com/tag/darning

I'm not actually a huge fan of DFW's writing.
I do love and admire the way he weaves mind-threads together, with footnotes and whatnot--like elaborate darning--but his content doesn't usually catch me much.
He even says in the movie that most of his readers seem to be young men, and that makes sense to me.

Both the "men" and the "young".
 
I'd have enjoyed this movie more (and DFW too) if I'd seen it at the same age (twenty) I saw and enjoyed My Dinner with Andre, which now doesn't interest me. 
.

DFW mentions the loneliness of people under forty-five; 

I wish he'd lived long enough to write about the loneliness of people over forty-five.

Loneliness does feel different to me at midlife; less desperate, for one thing, accompanied with the relief of dropping some of the illusions of youth:
"Oh, thankgod, I don't have to burn the candle at both ends! I could never get that other end to light anyway, and the wax seems to be dwindling all too fast as it is."

But in old age, loneliness seems likelier to return to the killing strength it has in youth.

Anyway, I always point people of any age or gender to DFW's fantastic article on eating lobsters in Maine –– "Consider the Lobster" –– which veers off from considering the lobster and becomes pretty damn terrific on the problem of pleasure and pain, going from talking about how lobsters taste good with butter, and how they're giant sea insects, to asking,
" Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?"

And I do feel that I like DFW, the person, though I have no trouble at all believing him when he answers the question of why he's not married at thirty-four by saying it's because he's hard to be around.
No trouble at all. 

But watching him (or rather, Jason Segel, speaking his words), I remember that I'd always thought of him as one of us, one of mine; 
not in a shared level of intensity, or an ability to to work hard or to keep one's thread from tangling impossibly, but in what he cares about: 
THINKING ABOUT STUFF.
   And he asks questions! I liked how he kept trying to turn the interview with the Rolling Stone reporter into a conversation. 
And he answers them, of course, in depth. 

I laughed a little again, come to think of it, or exhaled a huff of pleasure, the pleasure of recognition, when he goes back to the interviewer's room on the last night to clarify a point he'd made--an important point about depression--obviously he'd been thinking on it and couldn't stand to let his incomplete, inaccurate answer stand.

So, the End of the Tour cheered me up, the way seeing an old friend does, even if after three days you remember why you don't want to see that friend more often. 

But, of course, at the same time the movie made me so, so sad, I cried, because you know DFW doesn't make it... that sparky mind got rubbed out... 

And that left me lonely.

I also left with a craving for Hostess cupcakes. DFW eats junk food throughout the movie (though not those, my craving was brought on through the process of association). 

Pleasure and pain, all twisted up, like a nest of sewing thread.

_____________________

Note to Jesse Eisenberg: Learn to smoke, man! Watching you do it wrong was distracting. 
_________________

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