Jar Jar Binks, Todd Hanson, David Foster Wallace, and me

Remember this guy?

In the early spring of 2001 I got a call from Tom Bissell, who was then an edit­or at Henry Holt. I had been referred to Tom by David Foster Wallace. Tom had this great idea for an essay col­lec­tion, and Henry Holt had agreed to pub­lish the col­lec­tion, but there was a hitch: he couldn’t be the edit­or of record on the book because he worked full time, more or less, at Holt. Yeah, I didn’t quite get it either. The oth­er thing was that because of the book’s sub­ject, he, and his super­i­ors at Holt, thought it would be a good idea to get A Known Film Critic to be the edit­or. Tom asked some writer friends for recom­mend­a­tions and Dave Wallace was kind enough to recom­mend me. This in spite of the fact that the last piece we’d worked togeth­er on at Première, in 1998, had left Dave so infuri­ated with Première and Hachette and magazines and everything (and to my mind this infuri­ation was jus­ti­fied on his part) that he’d made it clear he’d nev­er do any­thing for Première again. If I ever went to anoth­er magazine, at anoth­er com­pany, he’d be happy to work with me again—our per­son­al rela­tions had, grate­fully, sur­vived the débâcle—but not Première, not Hachette. (Readers aware of the cur­rent dis­pos­i­tion of Little, Brown may detect some small pos­sible present irony here.)

Tom’s book was, or was to be, an essay col­lec­tion about the last­ing cul­tur­al impact of the Star Wars movies. Our first meet­ing, at this Mexican place that had been Sullivan’s in the Ed Sullivan Theater build­ing, saw us get­ting in synch almost imme­di­ately. He had a pretty good list of lit­er­ary folk he thought would be game, I was in charge of pur­su­ing film crit­ic and film­maker types, and we banged our heads togeth­er won­der­ing who or what we were miss­ing. I wondered wheth­er the book could accom­mod­ate graph­ic treat­ments; wouldn’t it be great, I said, to have a Tom Tomorrow strip, or bet­ter still, some­thing by The Boondocks cre­at­or Aaron McGruder, in the book. Etc. And we both said at the same time, “We should get someone from The Onion to do something.”

The Onion had just moved its headquar­ters to New York. Tom and I were both in awe of the pub­lic­a­tion, not just because it was awe­some but pre­cisely because it had come out of what many met­ro­pol­it­an types refer to as “nowhere” and it as a res­ult also seemed extremely mys­ter­i­ous to us. Was the pub­lic­a­tion, we wondered, so con­temp­tu­ous of the main­stream of pub­lish­ing that any approach from rep­res­ent­at­ives of Henry Holt would be laughed out of their office.

Well, no. “Their head writer is an insane Star Wars guy, it turns out,” Bissell repor­ted to me soon after. “Went to open­ing night of The Phantom Menace in an Obi-Wan Kenobi costume.”

“Holy shit,” I said. So this head writer, Todd Hanson, wanted to write an essay about the crush­ing, over­whelm­ing dis­ap­point­ment he felt upon actu­ally see­ing The Phantom Menace. Well, yes. This was a good idea. 

The book began to come togeth­er over the sum­mer. The first com­mis­sioned piece we actu­ally received was from Jonathan Lethem. Titled “13, 1977, 21,” it was the account of how he saw Star Wars: A New Hope, as it is now called, 21 times in the sum­mer of 1977, the sum­mer it opened, which was also the sum­mer his mom died of brain can­cer. It was a tender, gently dev­ast­at­ing, typ­ic­ally Lethem-sharp piece. Bissell and I knew it was going to be the open­ing essay of the book. Very serendip­it­ous, we thought.

9/11 caused us—me, Tom, Henry Holt—to rethink wheth­er we were gonna go on with the book at all. We were, but a hand­ful of com­mis­sioned writers who hadn’t turned in pieces yet dropped out. This was unfor­tu­nate but under­stand­able. By early 2002 we had much  of the book in place. The edit­or was reserving a page’s worth of space in the intro­duc­tion into which I’d cram some thoughts about Attack of the Clones once I saw it in May. All was well. Except I didn’t have the essay from The Onion guy yet. 

I had only spoken to Todd once or twice since we first made the agree­ment but now I had to get after him a little harder. Over a couple of weeks we seemed to make good pro­gress with respect to how he was feel­ing about the writ­ing, and then we hit a bit of a wall. He finally fessed up. “The thing is, it’s really long right now. It’s like, ridicu­lously long.”

 “Well why don’t you let me see it and I’ll be the judge of that.” It didn’t go quite that easy, but he did send it, and I did read it.

He was right: it was long. It was also won­der­ful. It was fuck­ing won­der­ful. It was laugh-out-loud funny—of course it was—it was genu­inely lit­er­ary, it was filled with thor­oughly trenchant insights on pop cul­ture and American cul­ture and American life, and it was poignant, and, oh, it was laugh-out-loud funny. I loved it and I told him so.

“I don’t know, man, I don’t know,” was some­thing like his reply. And now I didn’t know how to make Todd feel my sin­cer­ity. One way, it occurred to me, was by social­iz­ing. We began to hang out a bit; one of Todd’s best friends lived in my Carroll Gardens neigh­bor­hood, so we’d meet for a bit of a smoke-up at his pal’s, and then go over to Finn, this bar nearby, and get com­pletely shit-faced. A couple of young­er reg­u­lars there who were friends of mine were blown away that I was bring­ing the head writer for The Onion to our loc­al, and they got shit-faced with us in an eager-apostle-type style. It was fun. Todd even­tu­ally opened up to me about his doubts: writ­ing some­thing for a book, he thought, was a really big deal, and his friends agreed with this notion, and some of them advised him that sub­mit­ting a 20,000 word essay when you’d been asked to sub­mit some­thing between 2,000 and 5,000 words was bad form—it looked greedy and undis­cip­lined and unpro­fes­sion­al, and it would screw up his chances to do essay writ­ing else­where, and so on.

“Your friends are idi­ots,” I said to Todd, as I would. “And also: You know who always went WILDLY over the fuck­ing word count whenev­er I worked with him? David Foster Wallace.” Todd knew that Bissell and I knew Wallace and looked at him as a kind of guard­i­an angel of the pro­ject and were hop­ing to get a blurb from him when the book was in gal­leys. (As to why Wallace didn’t do a piece—of course we asked—he, like the Tom Tomorrow guy,  just wasn’t that into Star Wars. He’d seen the first one  just once. Dubbed into French. Because he was in France at the time, whenev­er it was. Didn’t make an impres­sion. “Definitely count on me if you do a book on the Lord of the Rings movies, though,” he said. )

Now might be a good time to admit that there was a cer­tain way in which I was act­ing in enlightened or unen­lightened self-interest, depend­ing on how you want to read it.  I have to admit here to what some might see as not 100 per­cent enlightened self interest. Until I got Todd’s piece, the book was a little more than a bit under the 60,000 word MS total that was spe­cified in my con­tract. Todd’s essay, at its sub­mis­sion length, put it slightly over 60,000, so a big weight was off my mind. BUT. I reit­er­ate: Todd’s piece was bril­liant, I didn’t want to cut a word of it.

It still holds up. Because it is, I think, one of the best expres­sions of indig­na­tion at American Pop Culture that also cri­tiques indig­na­tion at American Pop Culture and cel­eb­rates a spe­cif­ic aspect of American Pop Culture: the essay’s title, after all, is “A Big Dumb Movie About Space Wizards.” One of its anim­at­ing themes is an Ahab-like anger at the very notion of the char­ac­ter Jar-Jar Binks, who, at around the mid­point of the essay, is redubbed He Who Shall Not Be Named/HWSNBN. (“An UberBarney with the Voice from Beyond Elmo” is one of my favor­ite descrip­tions of the mis­be­got­ten char­ac­ter.) One of its most wel­come fea­tures is a lightly-worn and entirely non-academic/unpretentious eru­di­tion that has noth­ing to do with the defens­ive crouch that’s become too com­mon in crit­ic­al writ­ing about pop cul­ture in today’s Internet this-is-water.

My enthu­si­asm pos­sibly failed to really con­vince Todd, but he was even­tu­ally mol­li­fied. It would have been very poet­ic had the essay, which ended up being the last I signed off on, ended up being the lat piece in the book, but it was more like whatever you call the ante-penultimate (if you don’t count the acknow­ledge­ments). In early June of 2002 the book was in gal­leys and I sent a copy to Wallace in the hope of get­ting a blurb. Also of course because I figured he’d be curi­ous about what Bissell and I had come up with. Dave read it pretty much right away and called to tell me, yes, he liked it, but alas, no, he wasn’t gonna blurb it. I ima­gined that he put him­self through his cus­tom­ary eth­ic­al tor­ture before mak­ing the decision—he soun­ded genu­inely regretful—but the com­bin­a­tion of his rel­at­ive ali­en­a­tion from the book’s sub­ject mat­ter com­bined with the Professional Complications Inherent In Bestowing A Blurb If You Are David Foster Wallace made a polite demur­ral his only option. I wasn’t going to argue or beg. After we got over that hump, he said, “The nearly-last piece, the one by the Onion guy, Hanson? That was fant­ast­ic. Best thing in the book.”

“I’ll make sure to tell him that,” I said. And I did, and that very nearly made Todd pos­it­ively happy about hav­ing done the piece as he had done it. Todd nev­er got to meet up with Dave, which is a shame, and he, like a lot of people, took it pretty hard when Dave took his own life in September of 2008. Todd told me, one night when we hung out and got soused near the end of that year, that Wallace and Thomas Disch had been his two favor­ite liv­ing authors—Disch had killed him­self on the Fourth of July of that same year. Great writers killing them­selves becom­ing a Thing—we didn’t see much hope in that, at the time.

Why am I writ­ing this and sub­sequently post­ing it? Good ques­tion. Possible answers: 

1) To prove, Ana Marie Cox and Andrew Sullivan not­with­stand­ing, that blogging’s not dead. Whoo-fucking-hoo. 

2) There was that whole thing on social media recently, when the all-female Ghostbusters was announced with dis­mal sex­ist dudes com­plain­ing in all earn­est that an all-female Ghostbusters is just wrong, and treat­ing Ghostbusters as a sac­red text, and of course the whole push­back on this from Responsible Professionals deplor­ing the social media sex­ism. But it occurred to me that these ostens­ibly deplor­able expres­sions of opin­ion are an entirely organ­ic fea­ture of the “everyone’s a crit­ic cul­ture” that Jeff Jarvis once found so entirely salut­ary. And that the per­cep­tion of some­thing like Ghostbusters as some­thing sac­rosanct is not entirely unre­lated to a cer­tain tend­ency in pop cul­ture writ­ing, an anti-intellectualism that insists on aggress­ively express­ing a dis­taste for “dif­fi­cult” art and demand­ing to be taken ser­i­ously for its myri­ad of per­cep­tions con­cern­ing every single tele­vi­sion show, etc., etc. These obser­va­tions were lead­ing me, thought-wise, down a path I had trod before (“gen­er­a­tions have trod, have trod, have trod”) and I was largely set to pen­ning Yet Another Ineffectual Indictment Of The Usual Fucking Subjects. And I thought, why not, as an altern­at­ive to the same old thing, think about a piece of writ­ing about pop cul­ture that I actu­ally admire? (One that, among many its oth­er advant­ages, say, doesn’t use rape as a meta­phor, as in “George Lucas raped my childhood.”)

3) This impulse dis­solved, cine­mat­ic­ally even, into memor­ies of David Foster Wallace, on account of the movie The End Of The Tour, which premiered at Sundance and garnered very favor­able reviews, many of them wax­ing enthu­si­ast­ic on the theme “Who Would Have Thought That Jason Segel Could Bring David Foster Wallace To Life Like That?” And already you see some resent­ment on my part, no? Yes. I sup­pose on some level I ought to feel grat­i­fied that the movie is, appar­ently, a sens­it­ive and well-made one. I know James Ponsoldt is a good film­maker. We have more than a few mutu­al friends. I’m also friendly with a lot of people at the com­pany that pro­duced the movie (although the pro­du­cers them­selves are not known to me). On the oth­er hand I’m also friendly with at least one per­son who’s part of Wallace’s estate. Various reports about End of the Tour have stated that Wallace’s estate tried to block the movie from being made. As far as I know that’s untrue. What the estate did do, and is entirely with­in its rights and even oblig­a­tions in so doing, is state that it did not author­ize the movie, which is based on a book by David Lipsky. The people who were closest to Dave—and those are, as it hap­pen, the people who make up the entity that is called his “estate”—are acutely aware that had Dave not killed him­self in 2008, Lipsky’s book would not have come into being; had Lipsky’s book not come into being, it would not have had motion pic­ture rights to be sold; had motion pic­ture rights not been sold, David Margulies could not have writ­ten a screen­play based on the book; etcet­era, etcet­era. All lead­ing up to the logic­al con­clu­sion that had David Foster Wallace not killed him­self, Jason Segel would not have been able to sit down at a video shoot at “Variety Studio” (“presen­ted by Dockers”) and say things like “I was really lucky to have three really good friends who had read Infinite Jest read it again with me.” I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that if you con­sider your­self a David Foster Wallace “fan” and you can’t under­stand why for some people this par­tic­u­lar course of events might really hurt some people, then maybe you might want to read some more of Wallace’s work, and a little more care­fully. Even allow­ing the idea that The End of the Tour might indeed be an object­ively con­scien­tious and sens­it­ive work, I can’t even look at Jason Segel for more than ten seconds at a time right now. (And I wasn’t even THAT CLOSE to Wallace, I know.) And I can’t think about The End of the Tour without hav­ing the Captain Beefheart lyr­ic come into my head. You know the one, from “Sue Egypt” on Doc At The Radar Station: “I think of all those people that ride on my bones.”

4) So I thought rather than go nuts about all that, I’d write some­thing, you  know, fond.