A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (36 page)
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Authors: David Foster Wallace
I know this all looks kind of abstract and general. Consider the specific example of
Twin Peaks
’s career. Its basic structure was the good old murder-whose-investigation-opens-a-can-of-worms formula that’s right out of
Noir
101—the search for Laura Palmer’s killer yields postmortem revelations of a double life (Laura Palmer = Homecoming Queen by Day & Laura Palmer = Tormented Coke-Whore by Night) that mirrored a whole town’s moral schizophrenia. The show’s first season, in which the plot movement consisted mostly of more and more subsurface hideousnesses being uncovered and exposed, was a huge smash. By the second season, though, the mystery-and-investigation structure’s own logic began to compel the show to start getting more focused and explicit about who or what was actually responsible for Laura’s murder. And the more explicit
Twin Peaks
tried to get, the less popular the series became. The mystery’s final “resolution,” in particular, was felt by critics and audiences alike to be deeply unsatisfying. And it was. The “Bob”/Leland/Evil Owl stuff was fuzzy and not very well rendered,
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but the really deep dissatisfaction—the one that made audiences feel screwed and betrayed and fueled the critical backlash against the idea of Lynch as Genius Auteur—was, I submit, a moral one. I submit that Laura Palmer’s exhaustively revealed “sins” required, by the moral logic of American mass entertainment, that the circumstances of her death turn out to be causally related to those sins. We as an audience have certain core certainties about sowing and reaping, and these certainties need to be affirmed and massaged.
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When they were not, and as it became increasingly clear that they were not going to be,
Twin Peaks
’s ratings fell off the shelf, and critics began to bemoan this once “daring” and “imaginative” series’ decline into “self-reference” and “mannered incoherence.”
And then
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
, Lynch’s theatrical “prequel” to the TV series, and his biggest box-office bomb since
Dune
, committed a much worse offense. It sought to transform Laura Palmer from dramatic object to dramatic subject. As a dead person, Laura’s existence on the television show had been entirely verbal, and it was fairly easy to conceive her as a schizoid black/white construct—Good by Day, Naughty by Night, etc. But the movie, in which Ms. Sheryl Lee as Laura is on-screen more or less constantly, attempts to present this multivalent system of objectified personas—plaid-skirted coed/bare-breasted roadhouse slut/tormented exorcism-candidate/molested daughter—as an integrated and living whole: these different identities were all, the movie tried to claim, the same person. In
Fire Walk with Me
, Laura was no longer “an enigma” or “the password to an inner sanctum of horror.” She now embodied, in full view, all the Dark Secrets that on the series had been the stuff of significant glances and delicious whispers.
This transformation of Laura from object/occasion to subject/person was actually the most morally ambitious thing a Lynch movie has ever tried to do—maybe an impossible thing, given the psychological context of the series and the fact that you had to be familiar with the series to make even marginal sense of the movie—and it required complex and contradictory and probably impossible things from Ms. Lee, who in my opinion deserved an Oscar nomination just for showing up and trying.
The novelist Steve Erickson, in a 1992 review of
Fire Walk with Me
, is one of the few critics who gave any indication of even trying to understand what the movie was trying to do: “We always knew Laura was a wild girl, the homecoming femme fatale who was crazy for cocaine and fucked roadhouse drunks less for the money than the sheer depravity of it, but the movie is finally not so much interested in the titillation of that depravity as [in] her torment, depicted in a performance by Sheryl Lee so vixenish and demonic it’s hard to know whether it’s terrible or a tour de force. [But not trying too terribly hard, because now watch:] Her fit of the giggles over the body of a man whose head has just been blown off might be an act of innocence or damnation [get ready:] or both.”
Or
both? Of
course
both. This is what Lynch is
about
in this movie:
both
innocence and damnation;
both
sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in
Fire Walk with Me
is
both
“good” and “bad,” and yet also neither: she’s complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this “
both
” shit. “
Both
” comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. At any rate that’s what we criticized
Fire Walk with Me
’s Laura for.
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But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch’s Laura’s muddy
bothness
is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy
bothness
in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a
bothness
we go to the movies to get a couple hours’ fucking relief from. A movie that requires that these features of ourselves and the world not be dreamed away or judged away or massaged away but
acknowledged
, and not just acknowledged but
drawn upon
in our emotional relationship to the heroine herself—this movie is going to make us feel uncomfortable, pissed off; we’re going to feel, in
Premiere
magazine’s own head editor’s word, “Betrayed.”
I am not suggesting that Lynch entirely succeeded at the project he set for himself in
Fire Walk with Me
. (He didn’t.) What I am suggesting is that the withering critical reception the movie received (this movie, whose director’s previous film had won the Palme d’Or, was
booed
at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival) had less to do with its failing in the project than with its attempting it at all. And I am suggesting that if
Lost Highway
gets similarly savaged—or, worse, ignored—by the American art-assessment machine of which
Premiere
magazine is a wonderful working part, you might want to keep all this in mind.
1995
When Michael Joyce of Los Angeles serves, when he tosses the ball and his face rises to track it, it looks like he’s smiling, but he’s not really smiling—his face’s circumoral muscles are straining with the rest of his body to reach the ball at the top of the toss’s rise. He wants to hit it fully extended and slightly out in front of him; he wants to be able to hit emphatically down on the ball, to generate enough pace to avoid an ambitious return from his opponent. Right now it’s 1:00 Saturday, 22 July 1995, on the Stadium Court of the Stade Jarry tennis complex in Montreal. It’s the first of the qualifying rounds for the Canadian Open, one of the major stops on the ATP’s “hard-court circuit,”
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which starts right after Wimbledon and climaxes at NYC’s U.S. Open. The tossed ball rises and seems for a second to hang, waiting, cooperating, as balls always seem to do for great players. The opponent, a Canadian college star named Dan Brakus, is a very good tennis player. Michael Joyce, on the other hand, is a world-class tennis player. In 1991 he was the top-ranked junior in the United States and a finalist at Junior Wimbledon,
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is now in his fourth year on the ATP tour, and is as of this day the 79th best tennis player on planet earth.
A tacit rhetorical assumption here is that you have very probably never heard of Michael Joyce of Brentwood/LA. Nor of Florida’s Tommy Ho. Nor of Vince Spadea, nor of Jonathan Stark or Robbie Weiss or Steve Bryan—all American men in their twenties, all ranked in the world’s top 100 at one point in 1995. Nor of Jeff Tarango, 68th in the world, unless you remember his unfortunate psychotic break in full public view during last year’s Wimbledon.
3
You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it’s hard.
Stade Jarry’s Stadium Court facility can hold slightly over 10,000 souls. Right now, for Michael Joyce’s qualifying match, there are 93 people in the crowd, 91 of whom appear to be friends and relatives of Dan Brakus. Michael Joyce doesn’t seem to notice whether there’s a crowd or not. He has a way of staring intently at the air in front of his face between points. During points he looks only at the ball.
The acoustics in the near-empty Stadium are amazing—you can hear every breath, every sneaker’s squeak, the authoritative
pang
of the ball against very tight strings.
Professional tennis tournaments, like professional sports teams, have distinctive traditional colors. Wimbledon’s is green; the Volvo International’s is light blue. The Canadian Open’s is—emphatically—red. The tournament’s “title sponsor,” du Maurier cigarettes,
4
has ads and logos all over the place in red and black. The Stadium Court is surrounded by a red tarp festooned with corporate names in black capitals, and the tarp composes the base of a grandstand that is itself decked out in red-and-black bunting, so that from any kind of distance the place looks like either a Kremlin funeral or a really elaborate brothel. The match’s umpire and linesmen and ballboys all wear black shorts and red shirts emblazoned with the name of a Quebec clothing company.
5
The big beach umbrella that’s spread and held over each seated player at end-change breaks has a lush red head and a black stem that looks hot to hold.
Stade Jarry’s Stadium Court is adjoined on the north by the Grandstand Court, a slightly smaller venue with seats on only one side and a capacity of 4800. A five-story scoreboard lies just west of the Grandstand, and by late afternoon both courts are rectangularly shadowed. There are also eight nonstadium courts in canvas-fenced enclosures scattered across the grounds. Professional matches are under way on all ten Stade Jarry courts today, but they are not exactly Canadian Open matches, and for the most part they are unwatched.
The Stade Jarry grounds are all spruced up, and vendors’ tents are up, and Security is in place at all designated points. Big TV trailers line the walkway outside the stadium, and burly men keep pulling complicated nests of cable out of ports in the trailers’ sides.
There are very few paying customers on the grounds on Saturday, but there are close to a hundred world-class players: big spidery French guys with gelled hair, American kids with peeling noses and Pac-10 sweats, lugubrious Germans, bored-looking Italians. There are blank-eyed Swedes and pockmarked Colombians and cyberpunkish Brits. There are malevolent Slavs with scary haircuts. There are Mexican players who spend their spare time playing two-on-two soccer in the gravel outside the Players’ Tent. With few exceptions, all the players have similar builds: big muscular legs, shallow chests, skinny necks, and one normal-sized arm and one monstrously huge and hypertrophie arm. They tend to congregate in the Players’ Tent or outside the Transportation Trailer awaiting rides in promotional BMWs back to the Radisson des Gouverneurs, the tournament’s designated hotel. Many of these players in the “Qualies,” or qualifying rounds, have girlfriends in tow, sloppily beautiful European girls with sandals and patched jeans and leather backpacks, girlfriends who set up cloth lawnchairs and sun themselves next to their players’ practice courts.
6
At the Radisson des Gouverneurs the players tend to congregate in the lobby, where there’s a drawsheet for the Qualies up on a cork bulletin board and a multilingual tournament official behind a long desk, and the players stand around in the air-conditioning in wet hair and sandals and employ about 40 languages and wait for results of matches to go up on the board and for their own next matches’ schedules to get posted. Some of the players listen to personal stereos; none seem to read. They all have the unhappy self-enclosed look of people who spend huge amounts of time on planes and waiting around in hotel lobbies, the look of people who have to create an envelope of privacy around them with just their expressions. Most of these players seem either extremely young—new guys trying to break onto the Tour—or conspicuously older, like over 30, with tans that look permanent and faces lined from years in the trenches of tennis’s minor leagues.
The Canadian Open, one of the ATP Tour’s “Super 9” tournaments that weigh most heavily in the calculation of world ranking, officially starts on Monday, 24 July. What’s going on for the two days right before it is the Qualies. This is essentially a competition to determine who will occupy the eight slots in the Canadian Open’s main draw designated for “qualifiers.” It is a pre-tournament tournament. A qualifying tourney precedes just about every big-money ATP event, and money and prestige and lucrative careers are often at stake in Qualie rounds, and often they feature the best matches of the whole tournament, and it’s a good bet you haven’t heard of Qualies.
The realities of the men’s professional tennis tour bear about as much resemblance to the lush finals you see on TV as a slaughterhouse does to a well-presented cut of restaurant sirloin. For every Sampras-Agassi final we watch, there’s been a week-long tournament, a pyramidical single-elimination battle among 32, 64, or 128 players, of whom the finalists are the last men standing. You probably know that already. But a player has to be eligible to enter that tournament in the first place. Eligibility is determined by ATP computer ranking. Each tournament has a cutoff, a minimum ranking required to get entered in the main draw. Players below that ranking who want to get in have to compete in a kind of pre-tournament. That’s the easiest way to explain what Qualies are. In actual practice the whole thing’s quite a bit messier, and I’ll try to describe the logistics of the Canadian Open’s Qualies in just enough detail to suggest their complexity without boring you mindless.
