>>7300369if you're a plebe watching this, or if you just aren't really paying attention, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking the film portrays him as a kind of misunderstood genius who only wanted to fit in but couldn't because of his inexorable and intolerable smarts. i'll admit i fell under segal's spell the first time i watched it, and really came around to like wallace and even thought about picking up infinite jest again (i called it quits after 300 pages). however, you watch it a second time and you come to see that the moments the movie makes the most of are those in which he's being a real prick. take the scene in the girl's apartment, where wallace tells lipsky to 'be a good guy.' this is wallace at his most petty, most childish.
those two negative traits are most thoroughly played on in the two 'reconciliatory' moments, where you're supposed to come around and like him again: we first have the scene where he barges into lipsky's room at night to more thoroughly explain his heroin problem, and then the dancing scene, which really baits plebeian misreadings. in the first case, we see a child coming to apologize for his rude behavior, but of course, being a child, he can't actually own up to his own childishness, so instead of an apology proper we get a long winded, probably, knowing wallace, prepared speech about what rehab can 'do to a person' or whatever the rhetoric is. at first it might strike us as a really emotional moment, especially considering lipsky's teary eyes—we're meant to experience wallace through lipsky's eyes, and so we fall under the same spell he does: 'our' reading of the moment, namely, the conglomerate reading of us-as-audience and lipsky-as-unsuccessful-writer, completely surrenders to wallace's powers of rhetoric, overlooking the manipulative pouting the scene entails; what on the surface appears to be a heartfelt bearing of the soul conceals what amounts to so many literary puppy-dog eyes, engineered precisely for the lipsky-audience the film spent the previous 90 or so minutes cultivating.
this makes the scene at the end, with wallace dancing at the church, the film's riskiest gambit: it is this moment precisely where the iron shackles binding together the twin readerships comprising the lipsky-audience are allowed to flex, and lipsky is put out the scene—it's the only moment where we see wallace through the neutral gaze of the camera, rather than the adulating eyes of lipsky. of course, the film can't take this gambit too far: lipsky is still spiritually present, delivering his eulogy in voiceover. the uncritical watcher is thus invited to bridge the gap to lipsky himself, by projecting lipsky's own reading of wallace as captured in the eulogy onto the childish image we see. note, however, that wallace dances alone, a molecule among a christian molarity: as he makes perfectly clear when telling lipsky about the dance, wallace goes for himself, to let off his own steam
