Art, Wallace told Lipsky, is a sort of superfood that “requires you to work.” (Italics his.) Entertainment is candy whose “chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise.”īy the time many of us got around to reading Wallace’s early critical essays, they were already period pieces-artifacts of the anti-corporate 90s, when it would’ve seemed necessary to decry the negative effects of television or bring down Brett Easton Ellis’s cohort. For most of his career, Wallace suggested that art ought to be difficult, that pleasure is suspect, and that entertainment is compromised. “I think that if there is a sort of sadness for people under 45, it has something to do with pleasure, and achievement, and entertainment-like a sort of emptiness at the heart of what they thought was going on,” says Segel as Wallace, in the trailer. But what emerges from those interviews and Wallace’s critical essays is his deep aversion to entertainment. For the completist, there are also his interviews with Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky from the Infinite Jest book tour of 1996-which have now been adapted as The End of the Tour, with Jason Segel playing DFW. DFW’s fans have already consumed every available DFW product-not just his terrific short stories, or his 900-plus page dystopian novel on TV, tennis, and addiction, Infinite Jest but also his critical essays, his Kenyon College commencement address, and his gonzo forays into reporting and travel writing. The market, of course, is primed for a multiplex-filling movie. There’s a certain irony in making a feature film about David Foster Wallace: funneling the most voluminous of writers, he of the endnotes with their own gravitational pull, into a work of entertainment.
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