"I'm not a film scholar," he tells Rose at one point. Man, neither am I and about 98% of film watchers. I used to stress at school about becoming some degree-having authority, but obviously, with this guy as an example, it's much cooler to be a pretty smart guy who's pretty thoughtful and discerning about the movies you watch. So the best thing about the new book “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself” is that lots of it is just Wallace talking film with author David Lipsky. For context, the book is simply an extended transcription of Lipsky's taped interviews with Wallace that took place over 3 days at the end of the book tour for Infinite Jest. Lipsky was assigned by Rolling Stone, but the piece got nixed. You know how some writers give music playlists to accompany a work? This book is like that, except movies instead of music. And instead of adding to mood, Wallace gives us a film Coles notes on his oeuvre’s themes. Watch Blue Velvet, he'll say, to see how intimate avant garde art can be, how it can aim to do what Carver and Munro do, but do it better. The all-engrossing film in Infinite Jest that kills viewers will and renders them zombies? You might want to look at the actioners that are Wallace's chief pleasures. "(Die Hard) is a great film." There's even a great moment where Lipsky and Wallace take a break to check out Broken Arrow in theatres and how Wallace loves the moment where Travolta gets the nuke right to the chest. (The moment from that movie that sticks with me is when Travolta kills that dude by smashing his windpipe; in my memory it's with a rolled up magazine, but Chris tells me it was with one of those big flashlights). But my favorite are his opposing examples on how to depict character, artfully and unartfully. The latter he uses Schindler's List as his example, how fake and lightspeed Schindler flip-flops from cunning businessman to crying martyr. "There's no coherent story of how that change took place... that movie had the heart of a whore and it was a cheat."
Look, you can like David Foster Wallace because he's really talented or because he's really authentic in trying to make moral art (and I mean that in the least suspicious way). People are figuring him out only now (like me) partly because of the Kurt Cobain factor, for better or for worse. But one of the more underrated reasons to like him is his taste and passion for film. Lots of readers got their first sense of this while reading Infinite Jest, movie entertainment one of the central motifs. Others through his David Lynch essay "David Lynch Keeps His Head" where Wallace credits Blue Velvet as the most influential piece of art on his own sensibility. I got my first peek when I youtube'd a Charlie Rose interview with DFW. He talks Lynch, too, but Rose throws him some titles and Wallace just riffs. Oh, and how he was all intimidated by the director of Shine as they waited in the green room together.
Wallace doesn't overtly state this, but the counter to Schindler: True Romance. Him and Lipsky, earlier in the book, discuss the scene where Walken, a mafioso, tries to break down Dennis Hopper for info on his son. Hopper goes from zero (he's a security guard who lives in a trailer alone) to true hero in ten minutes of screen time. The authors talk about how Hopper takes that drag on the cigarette and how he takes it in knowing how it's going to be his last. How he not only doesn't try to avoid dying, he spurs Walken on: "Your great, great, great grandmother was fucked by a n*gger." And how he does all this regardless of the fact that his son's address is stuck to the fridge just a few feet away. Guy reminds me of Gately, the manager of the addict group home in Infinite Jest. He's lowly and he cleans up guys' shit, but there's little details, little brushstrokes that when he eventually has to stare down a group of French-Canadian black ops guys, it makes total sense.
When Lipsky parts ways with Wallace, there's a sense that he doesn't want to leave, that the thing he took away most from the 3 days was a sense that he and some cool dude were just cold-chilling together. That's impossible if the guy you're chilling with likes bad movies. Sure there's the antinomy of taste, to me though, if you like shit, that's a deal-breaker, in friendship and in any romance. For me, I'd stop reading an author too. Cool to see that this dude I like likes exactly the same movies I do. Except he doesn't like Scrooged, for the same reason he hated Schindler.
