The End of the Tour

Original theatrical release poster

I watched The End of the Tour few days ago.

I loved the movie and it also left me quite pensive. Turmoil’d.

Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg are both great, with Segel being absolutely, hauntingly awesome.

Hauntingly.

I have this trouble with knurd, can’t seem to suspend it for the duration of some things. I do not dislike that, in fact I usually revel it, but I acknowledge it is sometimes impractical. Like while trying to believe an actor is a character. In this case Segel was so perfect and so persuasive it was extremely hard for me to believe he’s not just reciting somebody else’s words - but THAT would be just the point of him doing an awesome job of being an actor transformed to a character. But the character in this case is a biographical sketch, likeness, a ghost of the person once existing and now deceased. Crazy. And beautiful. And crazy. Convoluted stuff.*

Segel’s Wallace is haunting.

I am not much of an expert on David Foster Wallace. Most of the things I know about him come from This Is Water, from opinions, reviews and obituaries. That really is not much, and yet … yet I acknowledge we share a few characteristics and many of them were the axis of this movie.

I used to be somewhat of a prodigy. I used to write a lot and to stir things up with my writing. I drank an awful lot and medicated myself to assert control over my life. I committed suicide.

That was 20 years ago and I was 18 at the time. In a month I will be 38 and later still, somewhen beginning autumn, there will be 20^th anniversary of my second life; life of practicality, moderation and adamant exclusion of television entertainment.

I loved the movie. I loved how we are only jumping on that train just for one final station. I loved how we are making the jump with bundle of conventional-ness and insecurity (Lipsky). It is well-paced movie and also a movie with definite feel of prose; few interactions brought to the top of the stream of life, to be noted and to be representative of writer’s impression of things. I loved the natural feel of happenings; the hanging out, the smoking, the stuffing of bellies with treats facilitated with being in company - to comfort and ease social awkwardness - sacred ouroboros of misfits everywhere.

In many a scene I could not help taking it personal and being moved, borderline insulted, with… how things are. It poked me right into my sense of appropriateness, that notion of people taking for granted that author is known through his work, implying we only write the things we are. We do not. Sometimes we write the things we most definitely aren’t, sometimes we write things we wished we could be, sometimes we write the people we loathe. That is the magic of creation. This need to attain security through elimination of ambiguity I find...

tiresome.

* Opposite, yet also knurd-unsuspensing thing happens when people are presenting themselves in movies, never really being persuasive enough to fill in the expectations.