A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

“So different were our appearances and approaches and general gestalts that we had something of an epic rivalry from ‘74 through ‘77.”

Wallace’s narrative tendencies are evident from an early age. As he reflects on his childhood, he turns a lopsided rivalry against a more talented tennis opponent into a multiyear narrative in which he is the protagonist. Wallace’s rival continued to improve after this point, while Wallace lost interest. Nonetheless, he casts himself as the protagonist in a tennis rivalry that denotes the Midwestern mindset, making the innocuous vital, just as the significance of his seemingly failing tennis game increases because of its context.

“They made no sense. Houses blew not out but in.”

Tornadoes, to Wallace’s young mind, symbolized the incomprehensible. In a very real sense, they were a powerful force of nature outside the boundaries of his comprehension. The tornadoes were a backdrop to the more comprehensible world of tennis, a symbol of the world beyond Wallace’s understanding that instilled fear in his young mind. He chose to focus on tennis, something he could compute and comprehend, rather than the destructive, incomprehensible terror of tornadoes.

“I could not tell you why we kept hitting.”

As a tornado threatened the small town, Wallace and his rival continued their rally. They kept playing not through ignorance but through an unspoken acknowledgment of their own insignificance. Powerless to stop the tornado or even find shelter, they play on, exercising control over the game of tennis. The game is a system of rules and regulations that they learned to manipulate through talent and intellect. The tornado is an incomprehensible contrast to this; their rally is a defiant acceptance of their limitations, in which they continue to focus on what they understand and control rather than bow to the pressure of what they cannot comprehend and cannot control.

“Actually I have never seen an average American household.”

Wallace’s assertion is a tacit acknowledgement of how the television defines the core concept of an “average American household” (22). The television creates and perpetrates this idea, contrasting with citizens’ actual experience and understanding of the households around them. The televisual conception of the American family feels more real (even to Wallace) than the real examples, which are rife with idiosyncrasies.

“This is another reason why most TV criticism seems so empty. Television’s managed to become its own most profitable analyst.”

Television is a powerful force in American culture because it provides the capacity to deflect criticism in a new way. Each criticism is preempted and turned into yet more television, ensuring that the broadcast is always a step ahead of critics. Television does this, Wallace suggests, in pursuit of pure profit, illustrating how the capitalist forces of American society create cultural behemoths which cannot be shifted.

“A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.”

Wallace’s analogy illustrates the difficulty of criticizing television. An audience primed to consume television is an audience primed to look at the end of the finger rather than in the direction the finger is pointing. Wallace suggests that a particular ability to repurpose criticism and irony allows television to train vast audiences to ignore the valid criticisms of the medium by looking at the television itself. Television becomes a self-criticizing, self-contained mega-medium that dominates the cultural landscape by refusing to relinquish the audience’s attention.

“If even the president lies to you, whom are you supposed to trust to deliver the real?”

Two historical incidents inform Wallace’s suggestion about presidential lies. The Watergate scandal involving Richard Nixon is the most relevant to Wallace’s discussion about American paranoia in the 1970s, but the later Iran-Contra scandal involving Ronald Reagan in the 1980s is a more direct example of a president lying to the population. Reagan, a product of American culture, lied on television but (unlike Nixon) was not forced to resign. Similarly, Bill Clinton’s statements during the Monica Lewinsky scandal of the 1990s had little effect in terms of prompting resignation. These two instances suggest that after Nixon’s lies, the television-consuming American public became alienated from consequence, turning politics into little more than another television show.

“It congratulates Joe Briefcase, in other words, on transcending the very crowd that defines him.”

Wallace describes television as an abstract, patronizing entity. By packaging commercials to look like programs, television executives seek to seize viewers’ attention even during commercial breaks. Ironic, self-aware commercials dole out meager praise, congratulating viewers on their awareness of the medium and granting them a brief moment of smug satisfaction at having discerned the trick. The lasting effect remains, however: Their attention stays fixed on the commercial. Joe Briefcase feels smug while, in truth, he is being patronizingly manipulated so that he will keep watching.

“I suspect that every so often editors at these magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90% of the United States lies between the Coasts and figure they’ll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heartlandish.”

Wallace equates his visit to the Midwest with a colonial expedition into unknown lands. The image of the pith helmet has direct colonialist implications, as does the suggestion that East Coast elites know nothing about most of the continent they inhabit. Ironically, Wallace himself was from these unknown lands. He hailed from the Midwest, though he admits to feeling estranged from his native lands. Wallace was not so much an explorer of an unknown region as someone launching an expedition into an unrecognizable past.

“This is a whole different kind of alienation.”

Many of the essays in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again concern the alienation that affected American society in the 1990s. Over the course of these essays, however, Wallace accepts that more than one kind of alienation exists. The wealthy landowners of the Midwest are alienated from American society in a very different way than a white-collar office worker in Los Angeles or a factory worker in Philadelphia. Ironically, these various strands of alienation converge to create a broad monoculture defined by alienation. In effect, the alienation that estranges people from one another unites them.

“This may be just the sort of regional politico-sexual contrast the swanky East-Coast magazine is keen for.”

Wallace quizzes his companion about the sexual harassment she endured from two ride operators at the fair. While he is outraged on her behalf, she is dismissive. Wallace does not relinquish the idea, turning her hesitation into an essay idea in its own right. Rather than genuine concern for her well-being, however, he is thinking of using her experience as fodder for his own essay. Just like the fair workers, he is taking advantage of her.

“The lines are the longest for the really serious Near-Death Experiences.”

At the end of the fair, Wallace studies the crowds queuing up to engage in “Near-Death Experiences.” Throughout this essay (and the others in the collection), he explores the nature of American alienation and people’s search for meaning. The desire to take part in dangerous ride experiences exemplifies the desperate desire to feel something, even if that something is terror. The adrenaline rush of the rollercoaster and similar rides provides artificial social sustenance for an alienated society.

“You at least have to credit them with this fertile miscegenation of criticism and philosophy.”

Miscegenation means the relationship between people from two ethnic groups, particularly in the context of pejorative (racist) condemnation of such relationships. Wallace asserts the fraught nature of the Post-structuralist argument by using the word to refer to the two schools of philosophy with regard to the Death of the Author. This deliberately provocative language illustrates the stakes at play for an academic like Wallace amid what is, in essence, a largely abstract discussion. For the literary critics he is describing, the discussion surrounding the Death of the Author has the implied importance of race relationships.

“Hix destroys the author in order to save him.”

Wallace spends time in each of the essays describing the ways that irony has imprisoned US culture. Hix is no exception, and the argument that his book presented is as beholden to irony as the culture itself. Hix tries so hard to broaden the meaning of author (and thereby make the author’s role amenable to Traditionalists and Post-structuralists alike) that he obliterates any meaningful definition of author. By trying to keep the author alive in literary theory, Hix ironically writes the author out of existence.

“I learned I would rather not make a film than make one where I don’t have final cut.”

Wallace maintains a deliberately physical and social distance from David Lynch, a person whose work he admires but whose personality leave him cold. Since the essay is a profile of Lynch, however, it naturally includes his words and voice. In a formal sense, Wallace maintains his distance by only repeating Lynch’s words from another journalist’s story. The key elements of Lynch’s character that Wallace wishes to foreground through these quotes are secondhand, relayed through previous reporting rather than uncovered by Wallace himself. The effect is to create distance between the author and the subject, reflecting their distance in reality.

“This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: you don’t feel like you’re entering into any of the standard unspoken/unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies.”

Wallace admires how Lynch’s movies defy expectations. They achieve this, he explains, not just by depicting strange or creepy images. The portrayals serve a purpose: to challenge the social contracts that exist between the director and the audience. In a Lynch movie, violence is not limited to the villain, and the audience cannot expect the villain to be taken down in a traditional sense. Audiences do not expect the typical narrative arc or moral framework that forms the foundation of most movies. Lynch’s movies are uncomfortable because they challenge these long-held agreements, rather than just because of the images they contain.

“From the distance of the roadside cliff their conversation looks like its own surreal metacommentary on parallel identity crises.”

The film Lost Highway concerns dissolving identities, in which characters and actors often overlap and interchange as a way to interrogate the nature of identity itself. In his essay, Wallace mirrors this theme. On several occasions, he mentions actors standing beside their doubles. The effect is to extend the Lynchian dissolution of identity beyond the confines of the movie into the set and into the rest of the world. Lynchian themes spread through the set and throughout the essay, metastasizing in a creepy, surreal manner as the subject of the essay (Lynch and his ideas) begins to color the essay itself.

“Big muscular legs, shallow chests, skinny necks, and one normal-sized arm and one monstrously huge and hypertrophic arm.”

To reach a tournament like the Canadian Open (even the qualifying rounds), players must make great sacrifices. They dedicate their lives to the pursuit of the sport, meaning that many share the same tragic sense of childhoods lost in vicarious pursuit of a parent’s ambition. The physical appearance of the players symbolizes those experiences and sacrifices. They all have the same build, just as they all have the same emotional scars. For every one arm that appears normal is a hypertrophic arm that denotes their shared experience of sacrifice.

“The applause of the tiny crowd is so small and sad and shabby-sounding that it’d almost be better if people didn’t clap at all.”

Players like Michael Joyce dedicated their lives to tennis. While millions of viewers at home and thousands in the stadiums watch the most elite players like Andre Agassi perform, players like Joyce are relegated to the fringes of society’s attention. These players may have sacrificed just as much as Agassi and may have dedicated themselves equally to the sport, but (through quirks of fate such as genetics and timing) they are doomed to play in front of tragically small crowds. The scant attention afforded to the players, despite their immense sacrifice, invite consideration of whether the sacrifices to even have a chance of becoming a tennis great could ever be worthwhile.

“Already, for Joyce, at 22, it’s too late for anything else.”

The story of Michael Joyce’s life was set in motion at a young age. He may be only 22, an age when most young people are beginning to figure out what they want to do with their lives, but the cost of his years of practice is that his life must be dedicated to tennis to justify everything he has done. The tragedy of this fate is that the decision was made when Joyce was young; As a child, he could not even have imagined what he was giving up to pursue his father’s ambition. Now, on the fringes of the professional tennis scene, he cannot do anything else.

“My companions at supper’s Table 64 finally had to tell me, with all possible tact, to shut up about the fin already.”

Wallace has little experience with the ocean beyond a sense of immense dread at what it could contain. When he boards the cruise ship, his hyper-focus on searching for sharks is a manifestation of his struggle to define what fills him with despair aboard the ship. Sharks are legitimately scary creatures, capable of easily inflicting pain and death. However, they are completely absent from the waters in which the ship sails. When Wallace is searching for shark fins (or discussing sharks), he is trying to vocalize his deep psychological discomfort through the image of the absent sharks.

“YOU ARE HERE.”

Throughout the ship, maps assure the passengers that they are in a certain location. Wallace’s essay observes that, out at sea, disconnected from society’s structures and institutions, and pampered by overzealous workers, the passengers crave such assurance of their presence aboard the ship, their location in the here and now, as a rebuke to the discomfiting effects of manufactured fun and relentless luxury.

“I prostituted myself.”

Frank Conroy is a writer whom Wallace admires. His article in the cruise brochure, however, deeply troubles Wallace. When he speaks to Conroy, the writer confesses that he was paid well to write a positive piece of advertising that would masquerade as his own work. He suggests that this paid work was professionally degrading and, in doing so, gives Wallace an ideological focal point around which to orient his essay. While Conroy’s work is advertising in disguise, Wallace’s piece becomes increasingly absurd as the effects of manufactured fun take a psychological toll on him. For long stretches of the essay, Wallace’s writing is effusive in a way similar to Conroy’s article, but as he spends more time on the cruise, as he thinks about Conroy’s work as a cautionary tale, he begins to describe the splintering of the visage of luxury and happiness that the cruise promised. Conroy’s confession provides leverage for Wallace to work against.