On film

When interviewer becomes the story

Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) confronts writer David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) as he stands on the precipice of monstrous fame in The End of the Tour.
Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) confronts writer David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) as he stands on the precipice of monstrous fame in The End of the Tour.

The End of the Tour, James Ponsoldt's film about an interview conducted with novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky over five days in 1996, has just hit the theaters. A talky, largely two-man show that makes for curious counter-programming to the exploding inevitable seasonal blockbusters, The End of the Tour is being hailed by critics, with Jason Segel earning near unanimous praise for his portrayal of Wallace, who hanged himself in 2008.

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David Lipsky

Doing an interview about a movie about an interview he conducted nearly 20 years ago must strike Lipsky (who's played by Jesse Eisenberg in the film) as a terribly postmodern moment. He acknowledges as much. He now finds himself in a position similar to the one Wallace was in 1996, when he was charged with promoting his 1,079-page second novel Infinite Jest.

It's funny that the five days Lipsky spent with Wallace -- he never saw or spoke to him again -- should loom so large. Wallace warned him that he mightn't really want the celebrity that comes with literary achievement. Lipsky got a taste of it when his 2003 book Absolutely American, a four-year study of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, was a critical and commercial success. (The film and television rights have been bought by Disney. Stay tuned.)

The film is faithful to the facts of the story -- Lipsky was working for Rolling Stone when Infinite Jest came out, and after he read it (at the urging of his girlfriend) he prevailed upon his editors to send him to rural Illinois to write a profile of Wallace. But the piece never saw print until after Wallace's death.

"A couple of days after I got home I was sent to Seattle by [Rolling Stone editor] Jann Wenner to do a piece on heroin addiction," Lipsky says. "So I lived with heroin addicts for about a month, and then took about three weeks to write and edit and close the piece. ... By the time that story ran it was May, and Jann brought me to his office and said, 'I know you loved that time and I know that you have things you want to write about David, I know you love his work, but his novel came out in January. ... It's like writing about the Jurassic era. We're not going to do it."

It wasn't until after Wallace's death in 2008 that Lipsky turned his notes and tapes into an elegiac piece that won a National Magazine Award in 2009 and a year later into the remarkable book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, which consisted of a foreword, an afterword and transcripts of the taped conversations that have the feel of a Samuel Beckett play for voices.

Lipsky believes his book and the movie demonstrate the power of journalism to answer questions about the nature of living.

"Sometimes people say bad things about journalists, or they're unhappy when a journalist shows up," he says. "This shows why we have journalism and what journalism can be."

He says he was talked into doing a piece on Wallace for National Public Radio by producer Ellen Silva, who reminded him "that when someone dies in the manner that David had died ... there's always a chance that people will go back and read their work not for the incredible pleasure it gives or ... the way that it makes you see things more clearly. ... They'll begin only looking at it for clues."

"She told me you have this chance here to say he's not just this person who killed himself," he says but also "this incredibly alive person. And don't take the last year of his life as being all the years of his life. ... That's why I wrote about him in Rolling Stone and why I wrote the book. ... So you don't have to wonder."

...

In Alex Ross Perry's 2014 film Listen Up, Philip, the title character, a blocked young novelist played by Jason Schwartzman, passes on an opportunity to interview one of his contemporaries, an irritating poseur named Josh Fawn, who has recently won the National Book Award for his novel The Exploding Head Trick.

A lot of people, myself included, saw the posturing Josh Fawn as kind of a gloss on Wallace. Perry has said in interviews that is not the case, that he admires Wallace's work and that Fawn was "an homage to Wallace's somewhat well-documented polite tolerance of Mark Leyner, a writer with whom he was sometimes circumstantially grouped but whose titles are infuriating and absurd to the point of being illogical." (The real reference to Wallace in the movie came when Philip has his breakthrough near the end of the movie -- his novel Obidant sports a cover that's an obvious reference to Infinite Jest.)

When Fawn later commits suicide, Philip muses: "I'm glad he's dead and all, but doing that interview would have been a great opportunity for me. Last interviews are hard to get."

This pretty much sums up the dynamic of an interview conducted by someone with a literary ego. One of the difficult things about trying to be a writer is the weird combination of admiration and jealousy that comes with reading something beautiful you wish you'd written yourself. (In the film there's a freighted moment when Wallace introduces Lipsky as his "Boswell," which suggests something less than his peer.) But Lipsky doesn't qualify his praise; to him, Wallace was the "best writer, the best journalist."

"There's a thing that David said to me when we were traveling around," Lipsky says. "He said, 'Writers aren't smarter than other people, they just may be more compelling in their confusion. ... The writer isn't smarter than the reader at all, but if they do their job right they wake the reader up to stuff that they've already been aware of, stuff that they've known all the time.' And it makes them alive to that. 'It speaks to their nerve endings' is the way that he put it.

"There was no one better at talking about what it feels like to be alive now than David. That was why I wanted the assignment to go spend time with him. That was why I wanted to do the book. And that's what the movie is -- the movie says, 'Here's what it's like to be alive now, and here's what it's like to travel with someone who is experiencing all the things that we all feel as we're going through a day, as we're getting into a car, as we're having a Pop-Tart, as we're going to McDonald's.' Here it is in a way that wakes you up to stuff."

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MovieStyle on 08/21/2015

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