I have watched "The End of the Tour" six times in a theater. I am almost certain that "The Departed" is the last film that I watched six times in various theaters in Seattle in 2006. It just fascinates the hell out of me. I was unaware of David Foster Wallace until someone on an NPR station that I was listening to in 2008 reported that he had killed himself. I bought one of his books a few days later ("The Lobster") read its first two chapters, recognized that it was great writing then put it away because life was interfering with reading.
Before I attended even one screening of The End of the Tour I read that it's based on a memoir about a famous set of interviews with David Foster Wallace that is titled "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself." I thought that the title made complete sense because it's a phrase that embodies everything that almost all artists set out to do: to represent himself or herself unflinchingly. In stand up comedy there are two sets of performers: a real/raw guy and a character (Marc Maron calls them "clowns"). Generally the worst stand ups are the performers who get caught somewhere in the middle of being a clown and being themselves OR act as if they're real yet lace their acts with blatant lies.
When I watch the clown/character onstage I recognize that he/she is terrified of the audience-- and I've heard many amateur and pro character comics actually admit that they are in fact terrified of the audience. A comic named Kevin Christy recounted the case of a close friend who was doing well in comedy then reverted to a horrible character then quit comedy altogether. When Kevin asked him why he switched from being himself to being the character he replied, "it hurts so much less when I bomb." So they hide behind personae.
As I watched "The End of the Tour" then researched David Foster Wallace's life it became clear to me that my initial assumption that he had in fact "become himself" (an overt and genuine person) through his art wasn't entirely correct. Foster's "fiction" was his real life act and the interviews-- the persona that he presented to the public and himself-- was the clown show. Many of the emphatic denials that he made in the interviews-- most of them about his use of drugs in the past, but also many other things-- were in fact almost certainly lies. This realization was a bit jarring to me, but it's not to say that his art isn't brilliant. I don't feel as if he was playing both sides in his books, but if I saw a comic who was completely genuine onstage and misleading offstage I would question from what or whom he was running.
Wallace was clearly running from himself. As the intro to "Although Of Course..." states, he was on antidepressant drugs since the late '80s, then when he felt confident enough to ween himself off of them he promptly killed himself. As one of his family members put it flatly, "the drugs were keeping him alive." In this sense, Wallace's life is the story of a man who struggled to know exactly what was real.
In Wallace's interviewer David Lipsky's case, "becoming himself" meant that he realized that Wallace was a mess and he needed to stop emulating him. At the end of the film Wallace says to him, "I'm not so sure you want to be me," to which Lipsky responds without pausing or his characteristic nervous titter, "I don't."
In Wallace's case, "becoming himself" meant that he found his reality in a non-antidepressant existence.... and it was unbearable.
5/5 Stars.
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