Slackers! (not the Jason Biggs movie)

The utter nonchalance of Congress, especially with regard to dismembering Joe Lieberman (who I've never been able to stomach, and who now makes me unremittingly nauseated--which I don't need because MS and chemo aftershocks have taken care of that), is enough to disgust me wholly. It has help, though, in the form of this year's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and its inescapable forebear, 1991's Slacker.

Richard Linklater wrote and directed Slacker. Then, of course, he went on to such cinematic classics as Before Sunrise (& Before Sunset, which came out nearly ten years later). In case you can't tell, I'll say that, yes, I'm being sarcastic. I can't watch those movies, and bridle whenever I try because of the obscenely pretentious dialogue. Only Waking Life is tolerable, and mostly this can be attributed to interesting animation, which superimposes images onto footage of actors, you know, acting. Nevertheless, I cringe at the mental image I have of Ethan Hawke talking about his dreams to some truly unfortunate woman.

I've said it many times, but nobody--nobody--gives a shit about your dreams. George Carlin, in his last HBO special, It's Bad For Ya, talked about he could not care less when someone talks about his/her kids. Luckily, I've been able to dodge such conversational skids, for the most part, but I have had, mentally, to remind my eyes to water themselves on more than a few occasions when someone has launched into a needlessly long description of a dream. "A gigantic Reese's Peanut Butter Cup?" "Four forks? The hell you say." I've endured my fair share of inane banter--and even produced a ton of it--and not once has a dream been interesting unless A) it involves me or B) there's a ton of blood involved. Those two cross paths more often than I'd care to admit or know, I'm sure.

However, in the hands of Linklater, an interesting exposition ends up mired in pretentious language that is unbelievable. (That is, it is not to be believed.) Nobody talks like one of his characters. Even if someone did, I'd inevitably walk away and refuse to listen to any of the pompous dissertation that always accompanies such bombastic and boring digressions.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a movie directed by John Krasinski (Jim on the US version of The Office, on NBC), based on David Foster Wallace's book of the same name. It's a thoroughly forgettable movie, due in no small part to the turgid dialogue taken from Wallace's stories.

A few years ago, I tried to read Infinite Jest, Wallace's magnum opus and the flagship of his literary output. Of course, I failed. I got a few pages in before I could no longer tolerate his writing. Thankfully, I stopped early because the book is looooong. Writing complicatedly is fine, but there's no excuse for it in dialogue. No one talks like he writes. I've read apologists for the movie explain that Wallace's words were meant for the page and not the screen. This is bullshit, because I've perused his books and I can say, unequivocally, that his words do not become more believable in type. They say never to speak ill of the dead, but I refuse to give Wallace a pass just because he hung himself.

As I watched Krasinski's movie, I kept guffawing to no one in particular. It was a familiar sensation that I last experienced when I tried to watch Linklater's 2006 movie, A Scanner Darkly. It stars, strangely, Keanu Reeves, who I'm sure understood less than half of his lines.

I am not a film scholar, but at least with regard to literature, I can authoritatively say that it's the periphery that counts. Nothing interesting happens on the fringes of the screen of the movie, however. I've seen enough of Wallace's writing to know that the cloying bombast of the movie was the result of a faithful adaptation.

If only Linklater and Wallace spared us their words by being silent, unlike the former's loquacious, effusive, annoying slackers.

R