A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

by David Foster Wallace

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to.

There’s a compelling frictionlessness about the local TV reporters, all of whom have short blond hair and vaguely orange makeup. A vividness. I keep feeling a queer urge to vote for them for something.

It occurs to me that if I allow the Harper’s-Bazaar-food-scout misunderstanding to persist and circulate I can eventually show up at the Dessert Competition tents with my Press Credentials and they’ll feed me free prize-winning desserts until I have to be carried off on a gurney. Older ladies in the Midwest can bake.

It’s well up in the 90s and the sky is the color of old jeans.

The likely answer involves the fact that Lynch’s movies are essentially apolitical. Let’s face it: get white people and black people together on the screen and there’s going to be an automatic political voltage.

Methinks DFW is not the one to tackle the topic of race in Lynch’s films!

they’ll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation. The ads promise that you will be able—finally, for once—truly to relax and have a good time, because you will have no choice but to have a good time.