The competition between these two isnt as black and white as the wardrobe suggests.
The difference between these two isn't as black and white as the wardrobe suggests.

There were lots of ways that The End of the Tour could have sucked. Fans of David Foster Wallace (and I’m raising my hand as high as it can go—I’m no Howling Fantod, but I read everything he ever published) know that his whole thing, his ever-present concern, was the soul-corrupting potential of image-obsessed culture. In broad strokes, his worry was that soon, Entertainment Technology would create a giant holographic fuckmachine that we could plug into, and, once that happened, all that was great and redeemable about humanity—art, conversation, coffee, science—would come to an end. Unless we could somehow develop the appropriate defenses to this inevitable fusion of tech and easy pleasure, humans wouldn't have the moral fortitude to unplug themselves from it.

Producing a film, then, wherein doofus Hollywood actor/comedian Jason Segel dons DFW’s trademark bandana and his warm, nervous speaking voice seems like a dismissal of the author’s most closely held worldview. DFW fought so hard in life not to be an image: Thanks to this movie, he’s an image of someone who doesn’t want to be an image. On top of that, there’s the gross, creepy, profiteering aspect of a soulless system trying to cash in on a writer’s life and death. (DFW committed suicide in 2008.)

And! For those who aren’t fans of DFW: who gives a fuck about two, highly educated, upper-middle class white dudes talking about how they’d like to be perceived for their literary accomplishments?

But The End of the Tour doesn’t suck. In little ways, the first 10 minutes of the movie allays some of those fears. It turns out Jason Segel can do totally serviceable DFW impression, a slightly paunchy former jock who loves Hollywood movies and happens to be one of the brightest minds to have ever considered lobsters, state fairs, and luxury cruises. The substance of the conversation between DFW and David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), a novelist and reporter who convinced Rolling Stone to let him interview DFW at the end of the book tour for his instantly canonized novel Infinite Jest, is about, among other things, DFW’s anxiety about his own perception, so it’s not as if the movie is silencing his true feelings about that subject.

The movie works because, as observed in this week's paper by my esteemed colleague Alison Hallett, it's not about DFW. It’s about genius, jealousy, and good ol’ fashioned American ambition. Watching the likenesses of genius author DFW and non-genius author David Lipsky discuss their anxieties, pettinesses, and personal lives offers a fresh and, for writers, a particularly harrowing example of the Genius Biopic.

One of the million paradoxes of being an American is that we’re as obsessed with genius as we are with the Puritan work ethic. The genius’s gift is meant to be God-given, effortless, but the toiler works every day of their life hoping—at least once, all it takes its once—to produce a work that will earn God’s nod. Films about geniuses often dramatize this paradox by pairing a genius artist with a workaday artist, highlighting the pain of the workaday artist (often a double for the viewer) who can see, touch, taste, and drink coffee with genius, but never achieve it for themselves.

Writers and artists feel this pain so harrrrrrrd. Sure, scientists want to be Einstein and economists want to be Adam Smith. But you can make some real livable wages in hard science and business. Writers and artists—wisely or unwisely, whether they’ll admit it or not—often forego the financial comforts of this mortal coil in the hopes that they’ll paint or write something that outlasts them. (If you don’t know why someone would dedicate their lives to producing works that might not be appreciated in their lifetime, if ever, then good for you. Congratulations on being so well-adjusted.) Living geniuses inspire fury within toilers because it’s just so absolutely clear that they’ve got it, that thing, that touch, and what's worse: they already know they’re going to live forever. The fact that they often can't get it together to tie their own shoelaces only makes it all the more infuriating.

Typically, movies about these types strike many of the same notes. Miloš Forman’s Amadeus is my favorite example. Mozart (Tom Hulce) is the genius and Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) is the murderously jealous mediocrity, famous in his time, but agonizingly aware that he’s nowhere near Mozart's league. Everything in Mozart’s life is crumbling—his finances, his romantic life, his mental state—but none of that matters because guess what: He’s a genius. Salieri enjoys financial success and a relatively stable mental state (though his murderous jealousy might indicate a minor imbalance) but none of that matters, because guess what: he’s NOT a genius. There’s always a moment in such films where the genius shows up the plebe, as when Mozart takes a composition written by Salieri and riffs on it at a level Salieri can’t even fathom. Shortly thereafter the hero dies, crushed under the weight of his own greatness.

The weird thing about Wallace is that being a genius was antithetical to his goal of being a good person (which might have been what economists like to call an hysterical overcorrection by his psyche). Wallace is hyper-aware of the genius delusion. He knows that indulging it, like indulging the pleasure of the giant holographic fuckmachine, will lead to spiritual and physical death. Plus, the art will start sucking. For Lipsky's sake, DFW seems to treasure his everydayness, his jock upbringing, as a kind of bulwark against the charge that he thinks of himself as a genius. He wants to prize the everyday effort of being a good person over the effort of writing the Great American Novel.

The problem is that DFW was actually a Mozart-level genius who did write the last Great American Novel, despite what the author of American Psycho says. Wallace took the intellectual and moral struggles of the great Russian novelists (Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenev) and ran them through the sieve of dark, sarcastic, American Postmodern novelists (Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo), and what emerged was Infinite Jest, which is considered in the movie and in the real-world literary establishment as a work of genius. And his non-fiction work, the essays he wrote for magazines just to make a bit of money on the side, are some of the most well-observed, thoughtful, morally and intellectually complex writing ever written. Many serious writers try, and sometimes succeed, to reproduce his particular style of heavily-footnoted, formally experimental investigative journalism (hello, John Jeremiah Sullivan), but taken as a whole, it’s just very hard to fuck with DFW’s mind.

Like Salieri, the inferior writer, David Lipsky (and by extension any other writer who is watching the movie), can barely contain his jealousy for DFW, but ends up becoming his friend anyway. The jealousy is heightened by the fact that Wallace wants to be a good, normal person while also, you know, happening to be a genius or whatever. He’s supposed to be a tortured art freak spiraling down the drain! He’s depressive! He’s maybe a secret heroin addict! He’s not supposed to only want to be a normie! If he doesn't treasure his genius, then why do I treasure the idea of being a genius! Etc.

The competition between the two writers is hot but becomes hilariously subtle once Lipsky realizes he might be able to beat DFW in life, if not on the page. DFW offers coffee, for instance, but Lipsky says he doesn’t need it to wake up in the morning. Take that, genius! Instead of Mozart and Salieri arguing over "too many notes," we get Lipsky and DFW arguing over whether it’s poor form to make a pass at an ex-girlfriend. And, just like in many films about geniuses, we do get a scene of the master showing up the plebe, but, blessedly, it doesn’t come in the form of some weird writing competition. Lipsky confesses that he’s worried his girlfriend might like DFW more than him. In response, DFW makes Lipsky put his girlfriend on the phone, and they talk for 25 minutes while Lipsky seethes.

The pedestrian nature of these dick moves is exactly what makes the movie so compelling. Lipsky is trying his hardest to prove that DFW can’t have it both ways: You don't get to be a good, regular person and a genius. That’s not how it works. Geniuses are heady assholes who live in worlds of their own and die young because of course they do. Regular people work every day, and live small lives. Wallace insisted that you could be both, and died trying to prove it. He seemed to believe that being a good, ordinary person was both harder and more important than being the greatest, smartest, writer of his time, or cutting a suitably cool image as Rolling Stone's Hot Writer of the moment. The DFW that emerges in The End of the Tour, frozen in time and unaware of his eventual fate, gets to have it both ways, which is, of course, fitting, because guess what: It's a movie. This is the kind of irony that Wallace himself could have spun into brilliant prose—from his famous David Lynch profile: "...we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this 'both' shit." But let's not pretend he would have appreciated that irony.

It would have destroyed him.