Perfect, R-Rated Movie About The Man Who Tried To Warn Us

By Robert Scucci
| Published 2 seconds ago

I hate to admit that I rarely talk publicly about my appreciation of David Foster Wallace’s fiction and essays because, for reasons I’ll never fully understand, his name is associated with pretentiousness. On one hand, I get it. Infinite Jest is not only an intimidating read, but you could also throw it in your backpack before a hike if you want to maximize your workouts because it’s such a heavy piece of work, literally and figuratively.

The End of the Tour, a movie about David Foster Wallace based on the 2010 memoir Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky, unpacks whatever preconceived notions of pretension you may have about Wallace, his work, his anxieties, and his battle with depression that eventually claimed his life in 2008.

Based on Lipsky’s (portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg) multiple-day interview with Wallace (portrayed by Jason Segel) as the author made his final press rounds to promote Infinite Jest in 1996, The End of the Tour humanizes the author in a way that could make anybody who thinks he’s just a holier-than-thou blowhard reconsider their stance. Through Eisenberg and Segel’s powerhouse performances, we catch a fleeting glimpse at what happens when an intimidating amount of intellect intersects with the kind of personality that feels so trapped inside his own mind that he simply doesn’t know how to operate like a regular person.

Wallace’s work is startlingly verbose, and through that verbosity, he doesn’t mince words about his fears of living in a post-modern, post-ironic world. His essays “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All,” and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” illustrate how much thought went into every single interaction he had and how those thoughts paralyzed him.

You don’t need to read Infinite Jest to appreciate Wallace’s insights on modern and post-modern American life. Look up any interview, and it’s written all over his face. Jason Segel, in what I consider to be the best role of his career, captures that energy flawlessly in The End of the Tour. So much so that even if you never crack open a Wallace tome, you’ll still come to appreciate him as a human being who felt so lost in this world that he decided to leave it on his own terms.

The End Of The Tour

The premise for The End of the Tour is simple. Struggling author and Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky doesn’t believe a literary work like Infinite Jest, a 1,079-page novel about post-modern American life, could become such a massive success. At his girlfriend Sarah’s (Anna Chlumsky) urging, he reads the book and becomes obsessed with David Foster Wallace, asking his editor to give him a chance to interview him as he wraps up his book tour. Once he gets the green light, he travels to Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, where Wallace lives and teaches.

Their relationship is adversarial at first. Wallace is guarded in how he answers questions while Lipsky’s tape recorder is running, and he requests that anything he wants struck from the record can’t go into the final published interview. Lipsky honors that request, and a more trusting rapport eventually forms as they buy copious amounts of junk food from the convenience store, where Wallace loads up his arms with treats the second he learns about his interviewer’s expense account.

These interactions are the bread and butter of The End of the Tour. As Wallace lets his guard down, he tells Lipsky how he thinks, and what’s most astonishing about these conversations is how much Wallace wants to be a regular guy with a private life, despite the fact that it’s clear he’s also the kind of guy who writes books like Infinite Jest. You can tell he wanted the notoriety as a literary force to be reckoned with, then realized he didn’t want the celebrity that comes with it.

Wallace admits that out of all the celebrities out there, he’d probably want to meet Alanis Morissette because she seems like the only person who would occasionally enjoy a bologna sandwich. When they take a final stop on his book tour in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Wallace refuses to stop at the statue depicting Mary Tyler Moore tossing her tam in the air, something he talks about at length in “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” while unpacking how network syndication added horrifying layers of irony to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which is way too dense to unpack here.

The Fight Against Post-Modern Loneliness

The End of the Tour illuminates how guarded Wallace is when answering questions, always assuming that a journalist like Lipsky will spin the narrative however he wants. But when asked why he doesn’t have a TV, the floodgates open.

While you can find several interviews with the real David Foster Wallace where he talks about the remote control changing the way we consume entertainment, Segel delivers what I believe is the warning Wallace was trying to leave us with, in the author’s words: “And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.” He goes on to say that when it gets to that point, he’ll want to leave the planet. 

As somebody who writes movie reviews for an entertainment news site, I’m fully aware of the irony here, as I’m telling you all to go watch a movie. One of the reasons I don’t hang out on social media is that what Wallace is describing, even though he didn’t live long enough to see it, is basically the current state of the internet. He didn’t have a TV in his house because he knew it would be his undoing. His restraint didn’t come from a holier-than-thou stance, but from being self-aware enough to recognize his own addictive behavior and how easily he’d become a slave to his devices instead of being productive.

Listen, I’m not telling anybody to go pick up a copy of Infinite Jest. Watching The End of the Tour, on the other hand, is a great idea because the dialogue is pulled from recorded conversations between Lipsky and Wallace. While their talking points are still deep and cerebral, they also function as a conversational counterpart to his more verbose writing, all of which carries the same underlying message.

As of this writing, The End of the Tour is available for rental or purchase through Fandango at Home, YouTube, Apple TV+, and Amazon Prime Video.

Rest in peace, David Foster Wallace. You would have absolutely hated Instagram Reels.