This is Water. This is Oil.
Firstly, Mr. Ellis, I want to say that I respect what you have done in your creative career. As far as I can surmise, you approach your writing and other artistic endeavors (like trying to create a DIY film on a shoe string budget in 20 days) as the crafts they deserve to be. You have creative intent.
To me, this is the most crucial measure of a person’s life and their work.
By the same measure then, I am also hugely respectful of the late Mr. Wallace and what he was able to create while he was with us. While I, too, have not completed IJ, I have watched DFW’s recorded interviews, The End of the Tour, read his editorials and yes, listened to his commencement speech. Again, as far as I can surmise, he, too, approached his work as the craft it deserves to be.
So, to me, it’s a shame that, while DFW was alive and now in his passing, both you and he never seemed to see eye to eye.
Please don’t mistake that as an expectation that you would necessarily like each other’s work because that should never ever be an expectation of you or of anyone, frankly.
Moreso, to me, it is a shame that both of you, in my opinion, may have misunderstood each other’s work, thus fueling a mild feud amongst otherwise unrivaled peers.
In your piece, you present what I understand to be two specific commentaries. First, you present a commentary on the hypocritical nature of The End of the Tour. In summary, by portraying DFW as a somewhat conflicted but otherwise saintly character, a “Fake DFW” as it were, while at the same time trying to attest to its own authenticity, this film was making an artistically futile attempt to lift itself up off the ground by its own shoelaces.
I have no argument against this other than to say you can probably appreciate the immensely difficult nature of striking the desired tone in a film that was inevitably going to be examined with such scrutiny (as it has been here).
What I am more curious to explore is the second commentary specifically on DFW himself as an author and as a person.
Again, I did not know DFW so he very well could have been all the things you say he was in terms of being pretentious, disingenuous, narcissistic, etc.
But what strikes me is that this isn’t so much a commentary about DFW. As you say, you liked DFW as the man of contradictions. To me, it is more clearly a commentary on the public narrative around DFW and the implications around that.
I find that it is no coincidence that the criticisms you heaped on “Generation Wuss” have a strikingly similar tone to the criticisms you now heap on DFW’s legacy.
If I could postulate, this is because you see both as symptoms of a larger underlying trauma. The need to have DFW’s life and his suicide be held up as a model of living is symptomatic of a weak-kneed outlook where simple criticisms are viewed as existential affronts.
The propagation of this narrative seems to strike you as its own existential affront. And I would share that view to an extent. “Where has the backbone of our society gone? Why must everyone get four stars and a medal? Because sure as hell not everyone deserves them.”
It is this unrealistically positive attitude which I infer you found most distasteful about “This is Water.” How can it be, that the solution to our world’s problems is to “decide to think about them in a nice way?” Patently absurd. More absurd than even some of the intentionally absurdist satire you have written.
The fact that this has been taken up as a sort of swan song for a generation must be exponentially maddening from that perspective. And again I agree that if DFW actually intended “thinking positive” to be a realistic solution this would be as absurd as you probably think it is.
But I am not sure this was DFW’s intended message at all.
If I were to draw one message from This is Water it would instead be this: the most important thing to learn in life is mindfulness.
It’s still an earnest message but hopefully not as saccharine a motto as “think nicely.”
Within this message of mindfulness, I believe DFW was not necessarily saying “think nicely” but moreso “think intently.”
It is with this message that DFW drew one of his deeper insights but in the same breath also created his own worst nightmare.
I think, as much as he feared the idea, over time, DFW’s own self-perception increasingly conflated the idea of DFW the “patron saint of positivity” with DFW the man of contradictions. As a result, he began to slowly confuse his own philosophy of “think intently” with “think nicely.”
So when the inevitable hummer of life did in fact cut him off on the turnpike, he probably felt that natural instinct within all of us to lash out in a fury of expletives. Whereas many of us would have been relieved to let those expletives out in a cathartic release, he instead may have suddenly felt a crushing wave of guilt and self-conflict in having lost control of his own thought process despite what he personally espoused.
Likewise, when a certain Rolling Stone journalist knocked on his door he probably felt the same degree of self-conflict. The source of his tortured psyche was partially an internal conflict of persona, but at its root, I believe it was moreso the result of an internal conflict of philosophy.
He wanted to live by the words he espoused. He wanted the fame and recognition (thus the perceived narcissism) but he didn’t want to succumb to them. My guess is he couldn’t help but lose that struggle from time to time because it is only natural for us to have selfish, angry, vicious thoughts pop into our heads on occasion.
Thus, I can only imagine the mental anguish he experienced when a generation looked to him as a soothsayer of positivity. The mounting anxiety and pressure he must have voluntarily hoisted upon his own shoulders. How could he let them all down?
In the end, when he finally completed his unfortunate transformation and fully conflated “think nicely” with “think intently” and vice versa, I believe that is ultimately what proved fatal because, indeed, who can maintain a “nice” persona and remain authentic 100% of the time?
No one can live up to that expectation. It is decidedly inhuman. It is certifiably unnatural. Ironically, in a way, this tragically unnatural state is also what I imagine you found so disappointing about The End of the Tour. So, in a weird meta way, the film actually did reflect the real DFW’s struggles more than it probably intended to.
Within your criticisms, I think you sensed a lot these contradictions. In fact, my sense is that in brutalizing the movement to hold DFW up as a patron saint of positivity, you are, in a way, trying to preserve what was truly best and human about him.
In lambasting him as disingenuous, pretentious and narcissistic you were heralding what was true about him as an actual human being with flaws and contradictions. As an occasional asshole with a streak of cruelty.
That some of DFW’s casually cruel criticism was directed towards your work I’m sure is not lost on you.
Here is where I, as a complete bystander, choose to create my own narrative. One apart from DFW’s saccharine fable as depicted by the End of the Tour and likewise one apart from the story of you as the cynical Trickster, ever ready to unload your “volcanic pique” on any unsuspecting victim.
In my own personal narrative, I prefer to see two immensely talented writers with diametrically different styles, personalities and perspectives. I see one writer whose aw shucks aspirational tone struck a nerve with a generation looking for answers. I see another whose brutally graphic satire and unnerving wit also connected deeply with an increasingly cynical world. These two writers detested each other for what they understood the other’s work to be.
The prevailing experts would have us believe the narrative began and ended here.
But in an attempt to exercise my own ability to “think intently,” I’d like to take the narrative a little deeper to explore the inherent contradictions that made the works of each so resonant.
The first writer is more publicly known for his aphorisms and acuity. Both blessed and cursed with a frightening power of observation, he could dissect events and behavior with prodigious speed and surgical precision. Like suddenly turning a stargazing beam inwards, this deep introspection revealed a swirling vortex of conflicting inner dialogues. Espousing positivity but seeing ugliness. Promoting mindfulness but succumbing to impulse. Removing his tv but inviting Rolling Stone. It was in his attempts to overlay positivity over these self-contradictions through sheer acts of will that he ultimately drove himself mad.
The second writer is more publicly known for the visual extremes that he paints. For those that make the understandable but terminal error of taking these vivid depictions literally, they unsurprisingly view his works as being excessive to a point of sadistic caricature. However, for those who appreciate his work with a less than literal lens, there is a dark and satisfying humor. Moreso than humor, there is a perverse optimism at play. In much the same way he scolds Generation Wuss because he wishes that they could openly confront their flaws for their own good, this author uses the sadistic excesses of his characters as a warning to all as to what is possible but what doesn’t have to be.
Despite their antithetical means, both were masters of their crafts. Both were intensely committed to their own unique voices. And both have used these voices with the best of artistic intents, to open the eyes of those they reach as to what is possible.
However dichotomous their exploration of these possibilities, they revealed them with vitality and truth.
It is here that I choose to draw the most crucial connective thread between the two. In a way, both shared the most critical of philosophies; to know the impulses we face for what they are, to not paint our failures with rose-colored acrylic. In a way, both urged us to think with intent, they sought to snap us out of our waking slumbers.
And that is why I respect you both despite any narrative i hear.
If this is water and that is oil, I know never the twain shall meet. But, then again, that doesn’t mean that, together, they still can’t be beautiful.
