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

by David Foster Wallace

Deleuze and Guittarri’s Anti-Oedipus

“terminal idiosyncrasy”

the artist’s own perceptions and moods and impressions and obsessions come off as just too particular to him alone. Art, after all, is supposed to be a kind of communication, and “personal expression” is cinematically interesting only to the extent that what’s expressed finds and strikes chords within the viewer.

this is bullshit of the rankest vintage,

not just because it’s sloppy logic but because it’s symptomatic of the impoverished moral assumptions we seem now to bring to the movies we watch.

Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies—evil wears them.

Lynch’s idea that evil is a force has unsettling implications. People can be good or bad, but forces simply are.

I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the skeetshooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the Midnight Buffet is.

flatulence-of-the-gods sound of a cruise ship’s horn.

Temperatures were uterine.

your average sleepy midsize airport six days a week and then every Saturday resembles the fall of Saigon.

A second Celebrity crowd-control lady has a megaphone and repeats over and over not to worry about our luggage, that it will follow us later, which I am apparently alone in finding chilling in its unwitting echo of the Auschwitz-embarkation scene in Schindler’s List.

those hammer-shaped automatic oil derricks all bobbing fellatially,

And but so

The very best way to describe Scott Peterson’s demeanor is that it looks like

he’s constantly posing for a photograph nobody is taking.

but so

and but so

perpetrating absolute skeetocide

described Scott Cameron as “the Mozart of stress,”

(solipsism being not exactly the cheery crackling hearth of psychophilosophical orientations)

salt the compliment

The camera’s ogling is designed to implicate Frank and Jeffrey and the director and the audience all at the same time.

a major component of the felt suspense in contemporary U.S. suspense movies concerns how the filmmaker is going to manipulate various plot and character elements in order to engineer the required massage of our moral certainties. This is why the discomfort we feel at “suspense” movies is perceived as a pleasant discomfort.

The Nadir’s got literally hundreds of cross-sectional maps of the ship on every deck, at every elevator and junction, each with a red dot and a YOU ARE HERE—and it doesn’t take long to figure out that these are less for orientation than for some weird kind of reassurance.

A further self-esteem-lowerer is how bored all the locals look when they’re dealing with U.S. tourists. We bore them. Boring somebody seems way worse than offending or disgusting him.

these expressions are the facial equivalent of going “Aaaahhhhh,” and the sound is not just that of somebody’s Infantile part exulting in finally getting the total pampering it’s always wanted but also that of the relief all the other parts of that person feel when the Infantile part finally shuts up.

Women of all ages and estrogen-levels swooned, sighed, wobbled, lash-batted, growled, and hubba’d