A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

In 1995, at the time that Wallace wrote the relevant essay, Michael Joyce was the “79th best tennis player on planet earth” (214). In A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, tennis and David Foster Wallace’s love of it is the only subject matter to which the author devoted two separate essays. Although Wallace played tennis as a junior to a reasonable standard, watching Joyce play drives him to the conclusion that he “could not meaningfully exist on the same court” (244) with the young players he watches at the tournament. The mixture of Wallace’s love of the sport, his own ambitions connected to it, and the self-reflective revelation that the firsthand experience of watching professional tennis elicits from Wallace illustrate its importance in Wallace’s life, both as an early passion and as a later marker of his abandoned hopes and dreams. Specifically, Wallace admires Joyce and uses him as a vector to explore his own relationship to tennis, describing Joyce’s practice sessions and qualifying games in meticulous detail to convey the sport’s immense physical, technical, and mathematical complexities. Despite Joyce’s far greater skill and commitment to the sport compared to Wallace’s, the author chooses to celebrate Joyce as an exemplar of everything he loves about tennis rather than seethe with jealousy in light of the extent of his own limitations.

Nevertheless, Wallace cannot help but examine the tragic element at the core of Joyce’s life. Joyce described the daily routine of his childhood, a rigorous, relentless cycle of practice and recovery, driven by his demanding father. Joyce did not want to play tennis some days, he suggests, but it provided him with an escape from the very thing from which he needed to escape: tennis itself. He dedicated his life to the sport of tennis, forgoing any college experience or the typical social interactions of a teen. From a very young age, he devoted his life to the sport in a way that Wallace struggles to even comprehend. Despite his sacrifice and immense talent, however, Joyce was not one of the top elite players. He sacrificed his childhood (or, as Wallace suggests, Joyce’s father sacrificed his son’s childhood in vicarious pursuit of his own ambitions) to be among the world’s top 100 players. This is still a remarkable achievement, but despite knowing that he’ll easily be beaten by the top players, Joyce must still compete in the qualifying rounds of the Canadian Open. Joyce, Wallace posits, could not begin to imagine any other sort of life. He could not comprehend the life that he potentially lost or that (through the lottery of genetics and circumstance) he could never hope to match the true greats of the game.

Though not among the most famous players at the tournament, Joyce’s relative talent provides an important example to Wallace. Joyce has a similar position relative to the top elite players (such as his mentor, Andre Agassi) as Wallace has to the lowest players at the tournament. In Wallace’s view, this is the prison in which Joyce existed. His childhood of relentless practice equipped him with only one means of expressing himself: the sport of tennis. He found peace only when playing it, yet it (and particularly the acknowledgement that he must dwell among the mid-ranks of the tour for the rest of his short career) imprisoned him. This irony is important to Wallace’s observation, but the determination to uncover this irony also speaks to how Wallace has become imprisoned by his own literary tendencies.

American film director David Lynch has often been the subject of critical controversy. Although Wallace profiles numerous people throughout the essay collection, Lynch is notable for his status as an artist. He is not only internationally renowned but shares many of Wallace’s own artistic preoccupations. Their shared fascination with US culture and irony makes Lynch a compelling subject for Wallace’s profile because Wallace admires Lynch’s work (though, as he explains, he does not like all of Lynch’s output or his personality). Wallace is invited to the set of Lynch’s Lost Highway and observes Lynch’s creative process firsthand, profiling him for a film-centric magazine (rather than the more culturally oriented magazines in which the book’s other essays were first published). Wallace’s admiration for Lynch’s films, coupled with his excitement at being on a movie set, sets the scene for an informed profile of one artist by another.

The artistic sympathies between the works of Wallace and Lynch may help explain Wallace’s repeatedly defending the misreading of Lynch’s work by critics and the cinema-going public. Throughout the essay, Wallace points out the ways that critics misread Lynch’s oeuvre, noting that audiences are unwilling to be truthful about Lynch’s depiction of US society because his films refuse to bow to the desire that the narrative should punish the “secret and scandalous immoralities” (208) of American life. This misunderstanding may speak to the author Wallace in particular because the essay was published in 1995, a year before the publication of his sprawling novel Infinite Jest. Wallace’s desire for audiences to understand Lynch is the desire of an artist who sympathizes with a peer and who, in turn, fears that his own work may not be properly understood. The irony of this desire is especially pronounced given the discussion of the Death of the Author in another essay.

While Wallace stridently defends Lynch the artist, he is not so strident in his defense of Lynch the person. Wallace draws a clear distinction between the art and the artist; he is a fan of the majority of Lynch’s films but is indifferent (and, at times, quite critical) toward Lynch the man. The coldness is apparent in the early descriptions of Lynch. On set, Wallace is unwilling to approach Lynch. The director stands apart from others, including the writer. Even though Lynch is the subject of the essay, Wallace notably does not have the opportunity or inclination to interview or even converse with the director in anything other than short, sharp pleasantries. Wallace is likewise critical of artistic choices in the movie Lost Highway, particularly of Lynch’s decision to cast comedian Richard Pryor, whose medical struggles were quite evident at the time of casting. Wallace admits, however, that the casting choice, which highlights the contrast between Pryor’s debilitated state and his previous on-stage energy as “thematically intriguing, then, but coldly, meanly so” (189), suits the film’s goals. In addition, Wallace alludes to a critical view of Lynch’s depiction of race in US society as idiosyncratic and unrepresentative. Throughout these criticisms, however, Wallace reiterates the effectiveness of these choices; Wallace’s distinction between art and artist, between admiration and affinity, provides insight into the mechanics of his empathetic tendencies and the way that he wishes others to treat his art (and himself). Wallace’s profile of Lynch may represent the profile he hopes to one day receive.