Production started this year on The End of the Tour, a film based on the interviews Lipsky conducted with David Foster Wallace. Like many Wallace fans, I was deeply upset when I heard about this movie. First, there is the inexplicable decision to cast Jason Segel as the late author. Segel’s portrayal of Wallace comes right off the heels of Sex Tape, a comedic film in which he and Cameron Diaz star as a couple trying to recoup its lost pornographic film. Second, there is the fact that Wallace’s estate has publicly disavowed the film. But most importantly, it should be clear to anyone familiar with Wallace’s life and work that this film is exactly the thing that would have made the late author shudder. Rather than substantiate this last point myself, I have instead compiled the following collage of Wallace’s own words from his novels, stories, essays, and public appearances.

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To the Creators of The End of the Tour,

I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams' form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it’s just been ... overlooked; and then that horrific interval between realizing what you’ve overlooked and turning your head to look back at what’s been right there all along. The dream is that you awaken from a deep sleep, wake up suddenly damp and panicked and are overwhelmed with the sudden feeling that evil’s essence and center is right here, in this room, right now. And is for you alone. [1]

A commercial movie doesn’t try to wake people up but rather to make their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it. [2,3]

Movies are an authoritarian medium. They vulnerabalize you and then dominate you. [4] It is a frightening industry, though not for any of the simple reasons most critics give. [5] Unless you’re one of those rare mutant virtuosos, coming on screen stimulates your "What am I going to look like?" gland like no other experience. [6,7,8] At age sixteen and a half, I started to have attacks of shattering public sweats. [9] I mean, this stuff is real bad for me. I said “yes” to the Lipsky interviews so that I could in good conscience say no to a couple of things that are just way more toxic. [10]

Commercial film allows the moviegoer to pretend he’s somebody else, at ease in the world, unhaunted by voices telling him that there is something deeply wrong with him that isn’t wrong with anybody else and that he had to spend all of his time and energy trying to figure out what to do and say in order to impersonate an even marginally normal or acceptable human being. [11,12] This seduction, a fantasy-for-money transaction, is a commercial movie’s basic point. [13] Saying it this way, it sounds to me very crude and very simple. [14]

I am in here. [15]

Like an actual living person instead of the dithering, pathetically self-conscious outline or ghost of a person you see. [16] And what goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. [17] I’m complex. [18]

You will say: everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. [19,20] But I am not just a fraud or a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.” I can create sympathy, repulsion, break your heart inside. [21,22,23,24]

I’m exerting control to control my anger. [25] There’s a part of me that doesn’t get this. [26] It puzzles me that people seem so keen on asking fiction writers straightforward interview-type questions, since if the fiction writers really thought interesting stuff could be talked about straightforwardly they probably wouldn’t have become fiction writers. [27] I have friends that would not cross the street to hear me converse [28]: