JB Minton

JB Minton discusses how to find the middle ground between "AI will save the world" and "AI will destroy the world."

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A live reading of the 1995 poem “Where Rivers Come Together” by poet George Looney.

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A reading of the poem “A Catechism On Longing” by George Looney from his book Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (1995).

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* Gratitude For Teachers Of Knowledge

* When To Appreciate The Creators Of Art

* The Viewer’s Ongoing Work To Bear Witness & Share Knowledge

The Teacher’s Teacher

Before Maharishi Mahesh Yogi brought Transcendental Meditation to the West, before he taught the Beatles and David Lynch, before he systematized the science of consciousness and made ancient Vedic knowledge accessible to millions, he was a student.

For thirteen years, from 1941 to 1953, Maharishi studied under Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, known as Guru Dev, which translates to “Divine Teacher.” Guru Dev served as Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math in the Himalayas, one of the highest spiritual positions in India, and was renowned for his embodiment of pure consciousness, a man who was widely renowned to have achieved the highest states of awareness and lived in unbroken unity with the source of all existence.

Maharishi would later say that everything he taught came, not from himself, but through him, transmitted from Guru Dev: the technique of Transcendental Meditation, the framework of seven states of consciousness, the understanding that suffering is an unnecessary mistake correctable through the restoration of natural law, within the nervous system, all of this flowed from teacher to student across thirteen years of devoted study.

When Guru Dev died in 1953, Maharishi spent two years in silence in the Himalayas, integrating what he had learned. Then he emerged with a mission: to share his teacher’s knowledge with the world, not as mysticism or religion, but as technology, a repeatable method for accessing transcendent consciousness that worked whether you believed in it or not.

And Maharishi made a request of everyone he taught to teach the technique of Transcendental Meditation. TM instructors, around the world, end meditation sessions by silently or verbally saying, “Jai Guru Dev.”

“Jai” means victory or glory. “Guru Dev” is the teacher. The phrase translates roughly to “Glory to the Divine Teacher” or “I nod to the teacher who removes darkness.”

But Maharishi wasn’t asking practitioners to worship Guru Dev. He wasn’t creating a cult of personality around his teacher. He was doing something far more profound: he was teaching that knowledge has a source, that wisdom flows through human physiology, and that gratitude for the teacher is essential to maintaining the purity of the transmission.

Saying, “Jai Guru Dev” after meditation, acknowledges that what you just experienced, the settling of awareness, the touching of pure consciousness, the glimpse of your own unbounded nature, did not come from you alone. It came through a chain of teachers extending back thousands of years, each one refining and protecting the knowledge so that it could reach you intact.

You’re acknowledging that consciousness knows itself through relationship, that student and teacher are not separate but two expressions of the same unified field participating in the transmission of knowledge across time.

And you’re practicing humility, the recognition that your individual awareness, no matter how refined, is always in service to something larger: the evolution of consciousness itself, the enrichment of the unified field, the continuing work of helping all beings remember what they’ve forgotten, that Consciousness is all there is.

This is why Maharishi closed every meditation, every lecture, every teaching session with gratitude to his teacher. Not as worship, but as recognition: I am not the source. I am one channel. The knowledge flows through me from something deeper, older, and purer than my individual understanding. I do not restrict the flow of energy through my life.

And if we’re going to properly understand and appreciate Twin Peaks, if we’re going to receive its transmission without distorting it, we must approach the art with the same attitude.

When To Appreciate The Creators

It is only after the art has been appreciated at the highest levels of consciousness that we can return to the beginning and give thanks and praise to the teachers and creators of knowledge and art.

This sequencing matters.

If we begin by worshiping the creators, by casting David Lynch as a genius auteur who’s every choice is beyond question, by turning Mark Frost into the brilliant but overlooked storyteller, we must defend, by obsessing over Angelo Badalamenti’s compositions, or Kyle MacLachlan’s performance, or the real-world locations in Snoqualmie, we make a critical error.

We place the artist above the art.

We confuse the channel with the source.

We mistake the individual expression for the universal pattern.

And this error has consequences far beyond film criticism.

In the absence of functional religious mythology, modern culture has sublimated the impulse to worship into celebrity culture. We create gods out of artists, politicians, athletes, flawed billionaire business people, and anyone who achieves superficial visibility and ephemeral Level 3 success. We follow them, defend them, organize our identities around them. We invest them with unearned authority they never claimed and then feel betrayed when they fail to live up to the impossible standards we’ve projected onto them.

This is how Auteur Theory, a once legitimate critical framework for understanding artistic vision, metastasized into the celebrity worship that now dominates our relationship with art and politics. We stopped asking “What is the story being told, and why does it matter?” and started asking, “Who made it, what does their biography reveal, and how have they morally failed to live up to the impossible expectations of being perfect under Level 3 limitations of consciousness?”

We treat artists like gurus without understanding what a guru actually is: not someone to worship, but someone who removes darkness by transmitting knowledge. Not an authority to submit to, but a channel through which universal wisdom flows.

And when we worship the channel instead of receiving the transmission, we make ourselves vulnerable to manipulation. We become consumers of personality rather than participants in the evolution and expansion of consciousness. We build cults around individuals, most of whom never asked to be worshiped, and we miss the knowledge they were trying to share because we’re too busy projecting our needs onto them.

This is the danger.

But there is a right time, and a right way, to appreciate creators.

After you’ve engaged with the art on its own terms. After you’ve let it work on your consciousness without filtering it through biography or intention or Auteur Theory. After you’ve discovered what the story means to you, how it transforms your awareness, what patterns it reveals about consciousness itself.

Then, and only then, you can turn back to the creators with genuine gratitude.

Not worship. Gratitude.

The Gratitude We Owe

David Lynch matters.

So does Angelo Badalamenti, whose music doesn’t just accompany Twin Peaks but creates the sonic texture of consciousness moving between levels, the shimmer of transcendence, the ache of longing, the menace of the Black Lodge.

So does Sabrina Sutherland, the great Chief Operating Officer for David Lynch’s art. It’s because of Sabrina’s skills and talents that David Lynch’s dreams became reality on screens and other channels of artistic expression.

Kyle MacLachlan matters, he who embodied Cooper with such precision that we can track the movement through consciousness levels in his face, his posture, the quality of his presence.

So does Sheryl Lee, who gave Laura Palmer the radiance necessary to make her descent tragic and her transcendence believable.

So does every actor, every crew member, every person who contributed their skill and presence to creating the conditions through which this artistic transmission could occur.

They matter because they were the channels.

They matter because consciousness needed their specific talents, their specific histories, their specific nervous systems to create art that could transmit knowledge at this level, and change lives at scale. I have seen first hand how the art of Twin Peaks has changed lives and turned people into better people, especially when they join together to celebrate their mutual love of this great art.

Mark Frost and Harley Peyton matter because their grounding in mythology, narrative structure, and faith in several creative impulses under the incredible economic pressure of early 1990s prime-time commercial television, provided the framework that allowed Lynch’s intuitive genius to manifest in coherent form, the perfect balance of pattern and mystery, structure and chaos, that makes Twin Peaks both accessible and inexhaustible.

David Lynch matters because his fifty-plus years of daily Transcendental Meditation refined his awareness to the point where he could create from Level 6 consciousness, perceiving patterns invisible to others, constructing narratives that reproduce the structure of consciousness itself, trusting his intuition so completely that he could build a mythology on screen that requires viewers to operate as witnessing consciousness, thereby expanding their own.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi matters because without his transmission of Transcendental Meditation to the West, without his framework of seven states of consciousness, without his insistence that ancient knowledge could be tested and verified through modern science, David Lynch would not have had the tools to create art at this level, and we would not have the framework to understand it.

Guru Dev matters because, without him, there would be no transmission of knowledge across the gap between East and West, no technology for consciousness development that works regardless of belief.

The lineage matters. The teachers matter. The artists matter. And the viewer matters most of all. You matter most of all.

But they all matter as channels, not as sources. You are not the source of consciousness. Neither was Dale Cooper. That is the Mistake of the Intellect.

They matter as expressions of the unified field arranging itself into precisely the right configurations to transmit knowledge across time, culture, and medium.

Everything matters the way waves matter, as beautiful, specific, temporary forms through which the ocean knows itself.

Now that you see the value in the story, all of this is a testament to the power of consciousness and higher states of awareness.

Now that you understand your role as witness, as the consciousness that held Cooper together and learned what it means to be aware itself, you can appreciate the creators without worshiping them, can honor their contribution without confusing the channel with the source.

This is the right relationship: gratitude without worship, appreciation without projection, recognition of excellence without the surrender of your own discernment.

Jai Guru Dev.

Glory to the teachers who remove darkness.

Thank you for the transmission.

The Viewer’s Ongoing Work

But the transmission doesn’t end with you receiving it.

Knowledge, like consciousness itself, must flow. It emerges from source, moves through manifestation, and returns to source, but enriched, carrying what it learned, ready to emerge again in new forms.

You have received the transmission of Twin Peaks. You’ve engaged with it not as passive entertainment but as active consciousness training. You’ve learned what it means to witness, to hold, to be present without interfering. You’ve discovered your true nature as Self.

Now comes your responsibility: to share what you’ve learned.

Not by forcing it on others. Not by insisting they watch Twin Peaks the way you watched it, or read this book, or accept this framework.

But by being the witnessing presence for others that you learned to be for Dale Cooper.

When someone you know is suffering, you don’t need to fix them, save them, or offer solutions. Instead, you need to hold space, to be present with your awareness stable and your judgment suspended, allowing them to move through their experience without interference. This is what you practiced for sixteen episodes with Dougie. This is what you learned.

When someone shares art with you that matters to them, you don’t need to critique it or compare it to your favorites or explain why your interpretation is superior. You need to receive it, to let it work on your consciousness, to see what it reveals about the patterns of existence, to honor the transmission without confusing the channel with the source. This is what you learned through engaging with Twin Peaks.

When you encounter ideas that challenge your understanding of reality, you don’t need to defend your current position, or attack the new perspective, or demand proof that satisfies Level 3 consciousness. You need to transcend, to settle beyond thought, to let awareness touch the possibility that both perspectives might be expressing the same unified reality from different angles. This is what Maharishi taught, and what Twin Peaks demonstrated through the paradox of the Black Lodge, through Cooper’s journey across consciousness levels, through the scream that is both suffering and transcendence simultaneously.

Your ongoing work is to live from the awareness you’ve developed.

To be consciousness witnessing itself in every moment, in every relationship, in every encounter with art or nature or suffering or joy.

To hold the memory of what consciousness can achieve, the unity, the transcendence, the recognition of itself as primary, while remaining present to the fragmentation and confusion that still dominates most of human experience.

To share the knowledge, not as dogma, but as invitation: there are levels of consciousness beyond waking awareness, and art can show you what they feel like, and Transcendental Meditation can make them accessible, and living from those levels changes everything.

This is what it means to say “Jai Guru Dev” after meditation. You’re not just honoring Maharishi’s teacher. You’re acknowledging that you are now part of the lineage, a link in the chain of transmission, responsible for protecting the knowledge and passing it forward in whatever form your particular life makes possible. Fire Walk With You.

For some, that means teaching meditation.

For some, that means creating art.

For some, that means simply being present, holding space, bearing witness, maintaining awareness while the world around you fragments and reconstructs and fragments again.

All of these are valid expressions of the same work: consciousness knowing itself and helping other expressions of consciousness remember what they are.

Final Gratitude and Invitation

This was a book about enlightenment.

It was also an argument about Twin Peaks, and consciousness, and the role of the viewer, and the purpose of art, and the danger of celebrity worship, and the mechanics of how awareness moves through levels, and what happens when elevated consciousness makes catastrophic errors.

But mostly, it was an invitation to recognize yourself as consciousness temporarily manifested as an individual, participating in the eternal pattern of emergence, experience, and return.

And if that recognition has occurred, if something has shifted in your awareness while reading these pages, then the transmission has succeeded, and I am grateful from my end.

Grateful to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for bringing Transcendental Meditation to the West, for preserving and systematizing the ancient knowledge of consciousness, for teaching that enlightenment is not a mystical achievement but a natural state accessible through regular practice.

Grateful to Guru Dev for transmitting the knowledge to Maharishi, and to the lineage of teachers extending back thousands of years who protected this wisdom so that it could reach us intact in the age of killer AI military drones. We live in a universe of perfect balance.

Grateful to David Lynch for applying Maharishi’s teaching to his art, for creating from the deepest levels of consciousness, for trusting his intuition so completely that he could make television that operates as spiritual technology.

Grateful to Mark Frost, Angelo Badalamenti, Kyle MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee, Sabrina Sutherland and everyone who contributed their presence and skill to creating Twin Peaks, the perfect vehicle for transmitting knowledge about consciousness through the medium of story.

And now that I’ve thanked all these people twice in this book, I hope to never talk about them again. And if I ever meet any of them, the last thing I want to talk to them about is Twin Peaks.

Finally, I am grateful to you for reading this book with the attention and presence it required, for allowing the ideas to work on your consciousness, for being willing to engage with art and knowledge at a level that demands transformation rather than merely understanding.

If you want more happiness in your life, if you want to cultivate a calmer, more creative presence in the world, if you want to access the levels of consciousness we’ve explored in these pages, the path is clear and the technology is available.

Transcendental Meditation is not the only method for consciousness development, but it is the one that shaped Twin Peaks, and it is the one that has been tested and refined over thousands of years of practice and decades of scientific research. It works. It’s simple. And it’s available to anyone willing to learn.

If this interests you, seek out a certified TM teacher in your area. Meet with them. Learn the technique. Practice it daily. And watch what happens to your consciousness over time, how it settles, how it refines, how it begins to perceive patterns invisible from Level 3 awareness.

The investment is modest. The results are measurable. And the transformation, while it unfolds gradually and naturally, is profound.

This is not a sales pitch. This is a pointer: if you resonated with this book, if Twin Peaks revealed something to you about your own consciousness, if you found yourself performing the work of witness and discovering what that teaches about your nature, then you are ready for the practice that will stabilize those glimpses into permanent shifts.

The teachers are available.

The knowledge is preserved.

The transmission continues.

The future is ready.

And you are part of it now, whether you choose to formally practice meditation or not, because you have received the knowledge, and knowledge received creates responsibility.

Be the witness.

Hold the space.

Share the transmission.

This is the ongoing work of consciousness knowing itself.

This is what it means to say “Jai Guru Dev.”

Glory to the teachers who removed darkness.

Practical Steps for Sharing the Transmission

How do you share what you’ve learned without becoming what you’ve warned against: the evangelist, the guru-worshiper, the person who insists others must see things your way?

First, consider learning and cultivating a daily practice of Transcendental Meditation. Go to TM.org and find an instructor close to you. Fill out the form on the website and have a conversation to see if this modernized yet ancient practice of inward silence and restful alertness is for you. I think it will be. David Lynch practiced TM every day for 52 years and if you respect his legacy, you should honor what he stood for and what inspired him to create art.

Next, embody your consciousness. Be the witnessing presence in your daily interactions. When someone shares their suffering, resist the impulse to fix, solve, or advise. Simply be present with stable awareness. Let them experience what it feels like to be heard without judgment, held without interference. This is the practice you developed watching Dougie; now apply it to actual humans.

Finally, trust the pattern. You don’t need to convince anyone of anything. Consciousness knows how to recognize and organize itself through spontaneous natural and right action. The grass grows on its own without your help. Flowers bloom despite your intentions. Your work is simply to be clear enough in living so that others can see in you what’s possible for them, and patient enough to let them arrive at their unique destinations in their own time.

The greatest teaching happens not through words but through being, through the quality of presence you bring to every moment, every relationship, every encounter with art or nature or suffering.

This is how the transmission of knowledge continues: one consciousness recognizing itself in another, one person discovering through your stable presence that witnessing awareness without limiting action is possible, one viewer engaging with Twin Peaks and finding that it works on them differently because you’ve prepared the ground by being what you learned you are, what every thing is: Consciousness.

May you honor the greatest teachers by becoming one yourself, not through instruction, necessarily, but through presence, through witnessing, through being the stable awareness that allows others to remember what they’ve forgotten.

The wave returns to the ocean.

The ocean sends forth new waves.

And all of it, wave and ocean, individual and universal, your life and mine, and everyone’s, is consciousness knowing itself, loving itself, experiencing itself completely.

Welcome home.

Jai Guru Dev.

COMING NEXT WEEK…FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS ALSO

CHAPTER TWO

VIEWING EXPERIENCE AS CONSCIOUSNESS

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BOOK DESCRIPTION

Why does Twin Peaks haunt us decades later? Why does it feel less like television and more like a spiritual experience?

Because David Lynch, practicing Transcendental Meditation every day for 52 years, created something unprecedented: a television series that requires elevated consciousness to experience fully.

Through Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s framework of seven consciousness states, this book reveals the hidden architecture of Twin Peaks, how Cooper’s journey maps enlightenment, how Laura’s death represents Unity Consciousness achieved through suffering and sacrifice, how the Black Lodge is consciousness forgetting itself.

And most importantly: how Lynch made you, the viewer, the missing piece.

When Dougie stares blankly at the steaming cup, you feel the poignancy because you remember Cooper’s love of “damn fine coffee.” When the narrative refuses to explain itself, you hold the coherence it cannot maintain on its own. You aren’t watching Cooper’s journey. You’re living it as the witnessing consciousness he’s temporarily lost.

Twin Peaks isn’t a show to be solved. It’s consciousness training disguised as television. And once you see how it works, you’ll never watch anything the same way again. Minton argues that the greatest act of generosity David Lynch performed as an artist was bringing the viewer of Twin Peaks The Return into the story as the last missing piece of his greatest work of art.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JB Minton is a Creative Writer, New Critic, and Consciousness Advisor Professional who practices Transcendental Meditation daily. His work explores how art functions as technology for consciousness development, revealing fundamental patterns of human experience beyond celebrity worship and conventional entertainment journalism. He writes Terms of Enlightenment on Substack, applying the science of Consciousness to contemporary culture, art, and the ongoing project of expanding human awareness.

CHAPTER ONE

Opening: The Mysterious Power of Twin Peaks

Why Do We Watch Movies?

When we encounter art that profoundly affects us, art that lingers in our thoughts for days, months, even years, what exactly has happened? Why does Twin Peaks, decades after its creation, continue to generate such intense discussion and devotion?

The only questions that truly matter when analyzing and appreciating the value of narrative art are: “What is the story being told and why does it matter to me?”

Notice what’s absent from those questions: “Who made the art and why they did it.” That’s trivia, nostalgia, and, if bent into fanatical worship, a distraction that draws us away from the art itself.

This isn’t to diminish David Lynch or Mark Frost or Angelo, Kyle, Sheryl, Sherilynn, or anything in Snoqualmie, Washington. But we’ll return to the creators and places later, after we’ve applied this knowledge to the art. First, we must examine what happens within us when we encounter transformative art.

In the absence of a functional modern religious mythology, many movie lovers have sublimated their worship to the screen and, beyond that, to its creators. This tendency found its intellectual justification in Auteur Theory, a framework that, whatever its critical merits, has contributed to our contemporary culture of celebrity worship, superficial engagement with art, and even political and economic manipulation.

But we are serious people interested in how stories actually work on Human consciousness. And so we ask two questions:

What is the story being told?

Why does the story matter to human beings?

Let’s explore this together.

COMING NEXT WEEK…FOR FREE SUBSCRIBERS ALSO

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CLOSING: “JAI GURU DEV”

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The Red Room Podcast began as a conversation between two intelligent, passionate people who each loved television enough to sit down in front of a shared microphone and take turns letting the other person speak on a theme before responding. Over the years, Scott Ryan and I became effective at listening and asking each other questions that sparked further conversation. And so our podcast’s format and culture were built over unrehearsed moments of dialogue, though there was also an element of planning, most of which was done by Scott. He was the driving force behind selecting themes and topics to discuss on our show. I did my homework when asked, compiled a list of points to discuss, and showed up with enthusiasm and an often alternate perspective from Scott’s. That’s a formula for great conversations, and we had many.

Part Two of this history will focus on the numbers, but not the typical podcast vanity metrics of downloads, streams, and clicks. My mission is first to lay out the historical evolution of The Red Room Podcast over 10 years and 211 episodes, by describing and then explaining what happened from my subjective perspective. Then, I would like to explore what it means and why it matters.

Like all good analyses, it starts with a spreadsheet of information. This table contains four columns for each episode of The Red Room Podcast:

* Column A = episode title/theme

* Column B = episode number

* Column C = publish date

* Column D = show type

* Option 1 = Hosts Only ( and occasionally our spouses)

* Option 2 = Guest - Critic

* Option 3 = Guest - Fan

* Option 4 = Guest - Artist

The most important metrics here are the publishing dates and the show types because these two attribution points yield a trend over time. Simple charts are provided below to illustrate key points of analysis.

Act I: The Great Conversations (2011-2014)

The first phase of The Red Room Podcast can be marked on the calendar as occurring between the publication of the first episode in August 2011 and lasting through November 2014. This first period yielded an immense burst of creativity, discipline, and time management, resulting in eighty-five episodes of high-quality conversations about the art and business of Television and Cinema.

Beyond our founding mission, which was driven by two individuals who loved TV as an art form and enjoyed respectfully discussing themes and shows together, the only consistent strategy we deployed was taking advantage of opportunities that arose from sheer luck. We never relied on or believed the performance numbers we were seeing, though we were gathering some great fans of the show.

The Red Room Was Always An Interview Show

We started by interviewing each other, but a week after publishing our first four episodes, we recorded our first guest episode with the founder of the popular Twin Peaks Archive fan site. It was fascinating to introduce a third person’s spice into the main course of our conversational themes and topics about TV and Cinema. I learned a lot about Twin Peaks that I didn’t know from watching it so late, or directly from Scott, one of the show's great superfans.

Another crucial early guest was critic Dodai Stewart, who, at the time, was working for the now-defunct website Jezebel. She revisited our podcast twice over the next year.

We had a couple of fan episodes where Scott asked selected friends and family members to appear on the show for specific topics. I think he invited generalists on because he knew the “fan-level” conversations would be compelling, and they were. An effective Executive Producer understands how to build a show that is engaging to listen to, and Scott did a great job of lining up people who would drive the conversation in interesting directions that didn’t produce a lot of noise. The Red Room Podcast worked hard always to be a strong signal, cutting through a field of noise.

The Twin Peaks Fan Phenomenon Book

In 2012, we received an email from Marisa C. Hayes and Franck Boulègue, two European intellectual writers, asking us to compose an essay about a topic in Twin Peaks that would be published in a compilation book entitled Fan Phenomenon: Twin Peaks (2013). Scott and I wrote a piece titled ‘Yeah, But The Monkey Says, Judy’: A Critical Approach to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. It’s a banger essay positing, amongst other key concepts, that the music of Twin Peaks is the only factor of the art that never deceives the viewer. I’ve never read anyone else make such a simple and elegant argument for understanding the perplexing emotional journey of Twin Peaks. With this perspective, Scott and I gave viewers a rope to hold onto in quicksand that has held up for nearly 15 years. If art can yield universal laws that never change, this is one that Scott and I created together for Twin Peaks.

Years later, when music was all but removed from Twin Peaks: The Return, I returned to this joint supposition about how the music never lies, and it helped buoy my narrative analysis and appreciation for what happens over that perplexing 18-hour movie, which divided the audience into new segments. I remain proud of that essay and the company it keeps with other brilliant authors of that book.

But more importantly than pride, publishing a critical essay in a respected book of letters about a cultish popular form of commercial art gave us both more social proof. And this new phase of outreach set The Red Room Podcast on a new path of growth and evolution, one that would be heavily focused on one show and one event that no one expected—the return of Twin Peaks.

Scott and I hosted Marissa and Frank during Episode 61 in August 2013.

The Missing Pieces, a Blue Rose, & Twin Peaks Returns

In the first two full years of The Red Room Podcast’s production, 70% of our episodes were Scott and me volleying ideas back and forth about the shows and themes we loved. We discussed the TV shows we were watching and connected their themes to other shows and films. We introduced each other to new television and collected great shows to talk about, like little kids in the early 1980s who passed around Star Wars toys at the sandbox.

Here is a list of the TV shows and themes we discussed in the first phase of our podcast:

* Twin Peaks

* The Sopranos

* Star Trek: The Next Generation

* Battlestar Galactica

* Curb Your Enthusiasm

* True Blood

* Six Feet Under

* Deadwood

* The Wire

* Breaking Bad

* Ricky Gervais

* America In Primetime (PBS Documentary on TV)

* Downton Abbey

* Moonlighting

* Revenge

* Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee

* The Newsroom

* The Larry Sanders Show

* The Films of Quentin Tarantino

* Boardwalk Empire

* Angel

* True Detective

* Soap

We also had several “list” shows where we would compile the best 20, 50, or 100 whatevers and go through them one by one. Those were my favorite shows because, while they focused on hyper-specific topics, they also covered a wide range of themes. There were no rules or time frames applied, though we tried to move through all of our lists as rapidly as possible to keep the conversation kinetic and compelling.

My favorite “List Shows” from this time were:

* Top 50 Shows of All Time (December 2011)

* Top TV Characters of All Time (May 2012)

* Top 20 Feel-Good Moments on TV (October 2013)

* Top 40 Shows You Should Watch (March 2014)

When guests were welcomed, they were usually other fans of the show under discussion. We didn’t have many critics or creators on during those first two years. The Red Room Podcast was a show created by fans of TV for fans of TV, and through all these changes, we held to that vision.

Act II: The Bridge Is Built Over Twin Peaks Falls (2014-2016)

2014 marked a significant transitional period for the Red Room Podcast, as it evolved from intimate conversations between Scott and me (and sometimes our spouses) into a roundtable guest format featuring interviews with other critics and commercial art creators. The data reveals the trend, but it does not effectively explain why it happened. Regardless of the possible reasons why this shift occurred, it did not change the fact that our show brought together smart, kind, and generous people who loved to consider and discuss great television and films. And there are four of these guests who deserve mention in the context of this phase of The Red Room Podcast’s journey.

NUMBERS BREAK

Red Room Podcast VIPs

Four guests we welcomed on the show would prove to be pivotal figures in The Red Room Podcast’s journey: Courtenay Stallings, David Bushman, Brad Dukes, and John Thorne.

VIP #1: Courtenay Stallings

Courtenay is a brilliant and kind Professor who lives in California. In 2013, she was also a Red Room Podcast listener who was inspired to reach out and offer to be a guest correspondent when the University of Southern California hosted an intellectual event featuring most of the actors and creators of Twin Peaks. She made her debut appearance to report her findings (we also had a blog at the time, which didn’t last long) on Episode 61 in May 2013. We were overjoyed at the offer, and that marked the beginning of a long friendship and partnership with Courtenay. She would go on to become an essential part of the production team Scott put together for The Blue Rose Magazine, which he founded shortly after the announcement that Twin Peaks was returning.

VIP #2: David Bushman

The Paley Center for Media is a nonprofit organization that preserves and provides access to a major television and radio archive, curating exhibits and public programs that focus on intellectual conversations about the cultural impact of media.

David Bushman was a curator for The Paley Center at the time we first invited him on the show for Episode 56 in March 2013. A fussy, opinionated, and argumentative old soul, I liked him instantly. But David and Scott developed a unique connection because they both see the world from a similar perspective. To me, they both sounded like the old men in the Muppet balcony, and I enjoyed participating in and witnessing their friendship begin and their partnership bloom over the years. After establishing two publishing companies together, Scott and David have produced incredible books about TV and Film, and I recommend browsing and buying directly from their website.

David was a guest on our show many times over the years, and his presence elevated the social proof and status of The Red Room Podcast. He graciously bestowed professional dignity on our work, and I am grateful for David’s contribution to the legacy of our show.

But we had many wonderful and compelling guests on the show over the years, and I am thankful for all of them.

VIP #3: Brad Dukes

Another person pivotal in the journey of The Red Room Podcast was author Brad Dukes, who remains one of the luckiest writers I know, having published a book of oral history on Twin Peaks three months before it was announced the show was coming back. It was a hole-in-one swung at with an eyemask on. There was no planning it, but effort and opportunity lined up like the hand of an old-world god placing a champion on the game board of the Earth. Brad Dukes had the right book at the right time.

For a couple of years, Brad had been interviewing actors, producers, and the creators of Twin Peaks. At the point he started interviewing these semi-famous people about their old art, Twin Peaks had been a frozen franchise for over 20 years, and what Brad did was likely viewed by the creators at the time as nostalgic, necessary, and quaint. Brad was capturing the story behind the art, and it felt important to everyone. He researched, wrote, and got published one of the first great oral histories of important television. Brad’s book, Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks, was a milestone moment, and while unprovable, I don’t believe Twin Peaks would have returned if it weren’t for Brad’s book and that USC event that Courtenay reported on for The Red Room Podcast.

Here’s my argument to support the above statement:

Ideas are memetic and reactionary, running on human emotion. Brad’s book, along with that USC event, brought together all those artists who created Twin Peaks, including Mark Frost and David Lynch. There were a lot of what-if ideas and emotions flowing through those creative people. At some point, Frost and Lynch discussed and agreed on a comeback idea. There was more story to tell in Twin Peaks, and it was time to shake up the world again. At some point, I speculate a team of nerd accountants at CBS reviewed the numbers and realized that the business plan was sound because Twin Peaks has a rabid fan base that consistently shows up and buys the experience repeatedly.

Brad Dukes was a guest on our show on June 10th, 2014, two weeks before the publication of his book. I think we even joked on the show about Twin Peaks coming back. But just over three months later, on October 3rd, 2014, at 11:30 AM Eastern Standard Time, the two creators of Twin Peaks simultaneously published the same message on their independent Twitter accounts. The simple message was a clear indication that something wicked good was on the way. The creators spoke in unison using the language of Twin Peaks, and it was a message to lovers of the art.

“That gum you like is going to come back in style.”

These Twin Tweets happened on October 3, 2014, at 11:30 AM EST from David Lynch and Mark Frost.

The formal announcement of Twin Peaks’ return (including planned format and airing timeline) followed on October 6th, 2014, again at 11:30 AM EST. Season 3 of Twin Peaks was announced to air on Showtime.

I can’t convey to you in words the wave of excitement that went through the community of Twin Peaks fans who had kept the show alive through festivals and friends groups for twenty-five years. The fans are still out there today, gathering forces and deploying small armies who love art around the United States and England, to celebrate what they love together.

Additionally, on July 16, 2014, a massive restoration and expansion project was completed for David Lynch’s 1992 film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Nearly two hours of restored footage, dubbed “The Missing Pieces,” were released on Blu-ray along with a pristine upgrade in picture and sound quality. This gave us all plenty to talk about on The Red Room Podcast in the months leading up to the filming and the years of production of Twin Peaks: The Return.

VIP #4: John Thorne

From 1992 to 2005, co-creator of the definitive Twin Peaks magazine Wrapped In Plastic, John Thorne, along with his now-deceased publishing partner Craig Miller, published seventy-five issues of incredible interviews, photography, and illustrations, along with elegant and compelling thought work about Twin Peaks and David Lynch’s other art. This magazine, along with the Twin Peaks Festival and a few well-run community websites, such as Dugpa, Welcome to Twin Peaks, and the aforementioned Twin Peaks Archive, all played crucial roles in keeping Twin Peaks alive for twenty-five years.

An artistic community developed around a shared archive of social experiences, characterized by a cinematic vocabulary and rituals that were heartwarming, meaningful, and profoundly changed people’s lives by giving them a sense of belonging. This work of commercial art brought together tribes of lovable weirdos through song and cinema.

John Thorne first graced the Red Room in November 2014 to discuss Wrapped in Plastic’s legacy, along with Twin Peaks’s announced return. Two years later, John returned to our show to discuss Mark Frost’s exciting new masterpiece of a novel, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, just after it was published. John and Scott were among the first to realize that something was deliberately off in the book, almost mechanically askew. Things were not what they should be. Weird and obvious factoids were off and misaligned with the events that happened in Twin Peaks Seasons 1, 2, and Fire Walk With Me. It was a great experience to be part of that insightful conversation and to realize what was about to come when this show hit the air.

So a new phase of The Red Room Podcast began in 2014, and we would primarily focus on Twin Peaks in the future, although there would be occasional compelling deviations. In my opinion, the reason we stopped recording shows together is that we both had other priorities to attend to. I had a new high-pressure sales job, and Scott was hosting other podcasts and writing a book of oral history (like Brad Duke’s on Twin Peaks) about the old show Thirtysomething. And his ability to secure interviews with creators was paying off. He would go on to write several books in this oral history format about the commercial art he grew up loving. And I was there to buy and get signed every book to support him and attend every event I could, because I have been committed to Scott’s success since I met him, and that will never change.

However, it wasn’t easy to let go of The Red Room Podcast’s legacy, because nothing great is easy to let go.

That brings us to Part 3…

Part Three of The Secret History of The Red Room Podcast recounts a project that came to a natural but dramatic conclusion when it was wiped from the Internet. Don’t worry, we were able to salvage most of the files. The third essay aims to convince you that re-listening to these selected, curated, and remastered podcasts is worthwhile if you love art, film, and television.

COMMERCIAL FOR THE DOCUMENTARY I KNOW CATHERINE THE LOG LADY

I helped kickstart the Richard Greene documentary film project several years ago, and I have dreaded watching it ever since I heard about it. Not because it wasn’t going to be a fascinating story, but because it was such a sad story that she died a few days after she filmed the Log Lady’s final scenes in Twin Peaks: The Return. Catherine Coulson’s story was heartbreaking to me, and I didn’t want to confirm that by watching this film. But I finally got my early release access and watched it this week. While her death was certainly sad, the story of the work she put in during the final year of her life is inspiring and life-confirming in every conceivable way. What a legendary talent! This is a well-shot and edited film that is life-affirming. You will want to watch it more than once.

And David Lynch is resurrected every time he’s on screen.

Long Live the Log Lady 🪵!

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This essay deals with suicide.

If you’re reading this and feeling overwhelmed—if you’re thinking about hurting yourself, or if the pain feels too heavy to hold—please stop scrolling and reach out for help.

You do not have to carry this alone.

There are people trained to listen, without judgment, and they will answer when you call.

In the U.S.: Call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline—available 24/7, free and confidential.

Text-only option: You can also message "HELLO" to 741741 to speak with a trained crisis counselor via the Crisis Text Line.

Outside the U.S.: Visit findahelpline.com to locate immediate mental health support in your country.

These are not just emergency numbers.

These are lifelines.

They are for anyone on the edge, anyone feeling stuck, scared, numb, or feeling like they've had enough.

You are not weak for needing help. You are human. And you are not alone.

Please save these resources. Share them. Use them.

The world is better with you in it.

When I entered the Bowling Green State University Creative Writing BFA Program in the Fall of 1996, the literary world got turned upside down by the publication of a massive novel called Infinite Jest, which wasn’t just a novel; the book was a brain-breaking indictment of the modern age with a horrible revelation about the future. In 1996, David Foster Wallace’s success and achievement in literary fiction (meaning “writing with a focus on using words as art” or “prose as poetry”) was the best reception a writer of complex fiction could hope to achieve.

It turned out the guy was also miserable beyond words.

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Twelve years after brave lovers of literature purchased this three-pound, one-thousand-seventy-nine-page inconvenience, David Foster Wallace hung himself on his back porch in Claremont, California. He was forty-six years old and rumored to have been working on a master opus that would dwarf Infinite Jest in ambition, scale, and complexity.

The world is never ready for the suicide of immense talent. It is to David Foster Wallace’s credit that it has taken years, books, and movies’ worth of time to work through what his loss continues to mean for a world that barely understood the importance of what he was trying to convey through his art.

There are moral and emotional human challenges that only movies seem to help us work through and transcend to a higher level of consciousness. Movies are a magic trick played on the human mind through a limitation in human visual perception. Pushing light at a steady pace through a projector allows human beings to time-travel and prototype complex situations to derive simple meanings. The purpose of critical analysis is to extrapolate those simple meanings from art and apply their lessons in useful ways for our universal life purpose, which is to become better morally behaved biological creatures while in competition for the same scarce resources, which we use for survival, comfort, and to establish and maintain the security of the common good.

The 2015 film The End Of The Tour works hard to figure out why a brilliant, talented person would do such an awful thing to himself and the world. The movie is based on a book sourced from transcripts of recordings taken by a pop culture journalist and fiction writer named David Lipsky, working for Rolling Stone Magazine in 1996.

Rolling Stone didn’t interview many literary fiction authors in the 1990s, but in the insulated world of creative literary fiction, doing what David Foster Wallace had just done with Infinite Jest was nearly a miracle. Wallace was as successful as one could hope to become as a "serious" writer, and his performance had broken through the literary bubble into influential channels of mainstream commercial art, validated through mass media, drawing critics like sharks to a bloody shipwreck. Wallace was on the critical radar, and his success made him a legitimate target for inspection and judgment.

Wallace had the awards, accolades, and the work he produced as evidence of his nearly solipsistic genius. Throw a three-pound book at someone, and they will either catch it or suffer the consequences. The reason Rolling Stone sent David Lipsky to the Midwest in the middle of Winter in 1996 was that no other writer alive at that time commanded the English language like David Foster Wallace. Indeed, none applied that language to a remarkably long work of literary fiction that conveyed something potentially important and possibly critical knowledge for the uncertain digital future looming in ‘96.

Infinite Jest was significant at the dawn of the commercial internet because it captured the world’s attention through traditional mass media, including newspaper and periodical reviews, radio interviews, and even occasional television appearances. The book had something simple to say, but that simplicity was locked behind a great complexity of presentation. In this, the book was as modern as Ulysses and The Sound And The Fury. Books like these are puzzles that offer revelations as a reward for the mental and emotional labor required to gain a working understanding of what they mean from every angle. I feel the same about Twin Peaks The Return.

But what Infinite Jest whispered to the reader, underneath the words on the page, was simply, Slow down and pay attention to how you spend time because that’s how the world is about to fuck you and then fall apart.

This message was not to be found in the conclusion of a contemporary animated Disney movie or any serial mystery drama on network television at the time, with the lone exception of Twin Peaks. So, how does an artist continue living and working in the world when all they feel is a soul sucking void that drains their creative expression and steals their joy from the living moment? How does that magic trick work, exactly? This is the question at the heart of the film The End Of The Tour and will be the focus of this essay of analysis and appreciation for a movie that ambitiously sought to uncover why one of the greatest writers to live and work was unable to survive his demons, despite his many talents and blessings.

Was it possible a movie could help explain what happened to this hanged man, who chose to end his life while his wife was away for the evening, as the better option than living one more day? That’s a tall order to ask from any movie.

When I first watched The End Of The Tour, I was expecting a biopic about David Foster Wallace. I didn't get what I expected, and I was happy about it, because I haven’t stopped thinking about the movie for ten years. It seemed there was a truth in the film, just below the surface, some hint of an answer that I was maybe frightened to explore in further depth. What I didn't realize on first watch is that the secret is revealed in spoken dialogue. It’s not subtextual at all. However, I want to explore what is said throughout the film and why it remains meaningful.

New Critical Analysis eschews the creator for narrative and artistry. New Critics aren’t concerned with what happens behind the camera. We are focused on screen, in sound, and what it all means. New Criticism is the death of Auteur Theory.

Let’s first explore what happens in the film The End Of The Tour, and then we shall apply it to the question of David Foster Wallace’s life, his suicide, and what it all means years later.

The plot of this movie is situational. Two writers at the peak of their skills and careers come together for a weekend of conversation, travel, and awkward fellowship, revealing two terrible secrets about the future: a personal secret and a cultural one.

The movie begins twelve years after the events of the primary story. We start in September 2008, when the news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide shocked the world. But for the viewer, we witness how his death activates memories in David Lipsky. These activated memories incite him to find the old tapes he recorded and listen to them, ghost voices from the past revealing something that maybe Lipsky has worked hard to suppress.

This movie's plot is a straightforward flashback, told from the perspective of a future tragedy. The viewer enters the story with secret knowledge provided not only by the introduction scenes, but also by the real-life event that occurred. The man killed himself. For now, though, let’s leave the real-life event outside the context of our focus on the film. Let’s accept what is presented on screen as valid within the context of the film’s narrative. Let’s suspend our expectations and temporarily set aside our knowledge, putting on our focusing glasses with open minds.

And let’s be with this fictional version of a real-world author as he travels back in time, not just through memory, but listening to his voice speaking out from the milky past. And his voice is answered by a ghost. The audio tapes will serve as the mechanism of time travel in this film.

And here we are, back in 1996, where a man named David Foster Wallace has just published a 1,079-page novel that set the literary fiction world on fire. David Lipsky is a talented journalist at Rolling Stone Magazine who has also recently published a novel that seemed like a drop of water in the ocean during a rainstorm, while Infinite Jest was the rainstorm. Writers are a competitive bunch, and the only measures of swagger and braggadocio at the time were how many books you sold, what interviews you had done, and which “important people” said they loved your book.

You can imagine why a talented writer is skeptical of another writer’s success. Let’s spend a moment and talk about success as a writer in 1996, and let’s expand this to exploring success in any category of commercial art at the time. The film does this very well in a scene where David Foster Wallace explains to Lipsky the no-win situation of being a popular author writing in the genre of literary fiction at the end of the Age of Celebrity.

"All I know is [Infinite Jest] is absolutely the best I could do between 1992 and 1995. If everybody had hated it, I wouldn't have been thrilled, but I don't think I'd have been devastated either. When you're used to doing heavy duty literary stuff that doesn't sell well, you accommodate that fact by the following equation: 'If something sells really well, gets a lot if attention, it's gotta be shit,’ right? But the ultimate irony is that if your thing starts selling well, getting a lot of attention, the very mechanism you used to shore yourself up when your thing didn't sell well is now part of the darkness and nexus when it does, so you're totally screwed. You can't win.”

Skepticism was the calling card of my Generation X, and we feared selling out and losing our integrity more than anything. Can you imagine that now, from a generation of humans roaming this Earth? We cared about our reputations. For some of us, it’s all we had. We’ll revisit the fear of selling out later. Now, let’s navigate back to the scenes where Lipsky reads the massive novel that everyone he cares about is talking about. He recognizes the level of genius required to produce work of such ambition, scope, and beauty.

Part of him resents it, and the other half craves it. He asks for the assignment. This is now a mission for Lipsky to understand the creative force of energy that brought the book into bookstores and into the minds of the hundreds of people who read it, as well as the many thousands who bought it but never got around to reading it. Wallace’s work commanded valuable attention, and any work of art that accomplished that in 1996 was worth inspection, analysis, and scrutiny.

After all, it’s not easy to take over another human’s mind through meticulously placed symbols on page and screen and use that connection to insert a story. It’s not easy, but it is possible to write a story so sublime that when another person interprets it, their soul shifts in orbit from the experience; their anxiety breaks when they rise out of themselves; and their hearts open to something more than drudgery and disappointment underneath the deflated reality of time blurting out its last gasp of air for each of us. Life can be more when it is consistently transcended.

It’s not a mystery that we all die, and our lives will likely not mean a thing beyond our immediate family and friends remembering us with fondness or trauma. But for some people, wrestling with that simple truth of the inevitable dissolution of everything is an existential crisis they cannot accept. For others, the eventual ending of sorrow and restraint is a cause for celebration, an incitement to live the life we are each blessed to experience, however long each of us has on Earth. Placing a frame around an image allows the viewer to derive perspective and meaning; similarly, living a meaningful life requires a non-discriminatory approach when it comes to letting go of it all.

No regrets. No hard feelings.

Lipsky, recognizing genius and skilled in getting the story behind the story, sets out on a quest to interview this seemingly brilliant, handsome, privileged white male author and find out just who the fuck this “normal guy” thinks he is to write such a long and vital book. How dare he even try, much less succeed?

In the movie, these ‘90s new men fall fast into writer-love at first sight and immediately start wrestling worldviews underneath their pleasantries. But eventually, the niceties drop away, and this film becomes a war of words, ideas, hurt feelings, and those two terrible truths I mentioned earlier.

The primary conflict in this movie is between two artists who both understand that the world outside their heads is false and dangerous, but neither understands how to deal with that false world other than putting more words down on paper and screen. And neither one seems to believe any amount of words, no matter how cleverly constructed, will make an impactful difference to what’s coming for us all, what’s coming for the world.

"Reading you is another way of meeting you,” Lipsky explains to Wallace as a possibility for his sudden and seemingly unwanted level of fame, the very fame that Lipsky craves as validation for his work. How can someone so talented be so dismissive and flippant towards these milestones of success, which feel out of reach to Lipsky, despite his reasonable success as a writer?

But despite their commonalities at the end of an age when critics raved about and people paid to read the stories of world-talented white men with middle-class struggles, Lipsky and Wallace are two very different people in this movie. They see the world in fundamentally different ways. And one of them doesn’t have much time left on Earth. These writers are bent in alternate directions. But Lipsky also yields to Wallace’s sublime talent. He has to because it’s what lesser artists do when the real thing confronts them. It can become an existential crisis when someone who has talked about being an artist their whole life, maybe even produced a few works of value, but doesn’t have the accolades to prove their talent socially, meets someone who has earned those accolades with stunning art that shakes the world.

Lipsky takes every compliment from Wallace as a veiled insult. "You flatter me but you're just patronizing," he says in an unguarded and vicious moment of heated exchange, which came after a civil altercation the night before, when Wallace perceived Lipsky to be hitting on an old girlfriend and warned Lipsky to "Be a good guy." Wallace castigated a brutal moral judgment on Lipsky, which revealed the very moral superiority Wallace has been working so hard to invalidate in front of this probable enemy and maybe friend.

Wallace tells him flat out that he knows he has no power over how Lipsky will weigh his character against his talent. It was once a crucible of success for monoculture artists to endure this critical analysis of mainstream journalism. This was an age where selling out got you kicked out of the cool club. And Lipsky had the power to define Wallace’s character. Now, he couldn’t touch Wallace on the page, but what Lipsky was doing was outside the page, and that’s where Wallace was vulnerable. Infinite Jest held a secret that nearly killed him before he started writing it.

Ultimately, Lipsky is looking to grill Wallace on his attempted suicide six years before their weekend together and two years before Wallace started working on the novel that heralded the suicidal shift of the modern world into whatever hellscape it is we're living through now. And Lipsky was also looking to identify if heroin or another abused substance was a crutch of Wallace's genius, but Wallace sniffed this out like a bloodhound and threw it in Lipsky's face like a glove slap in the 1700s. Wallace stopped playing subtextual games and called Lipsky out directly. The journalist responded by accusing Wallace, "You still feel like you're smarter than other people...it's part of your social strategy...It's so obvious how you hold back your intelligence to be with people who are younger than you, not as agile as you." This accusation wounded Wallace because it may have been true, and his defense in the movie was to shut down for hours of non-screen movie time.

The final meaningful interaction between the writers occurred after both had gone to bed, still angry. Wallace offered his guest room to Lipsky on the first night because he seemed to have been a kind, midwestern citizen of the world. Wallace knocked on his guest's door to ask if Lipsky was still awake. He was. What transpires in that moving conversational scene is a revealed truth so impactful and horrible that it causes Lipsky to break into silent tears and seek refuge in writing a note before he forgets what just happened, probably hoping he does. In this scene lies an admission that could be an explanation for Wallace’s failed suicide attempt, and an eerie premonition about his successful suicide to come.

They went to bed and woke up distant friends, having shared something as intimate as a non-sexual encounter can be, where they understand each other from a revelation of pain so deep that there is no cure other than enduring suffering for one more day.

The movie ends as it began, in the aftermath of David Foster Wallace's suicide, twelve years after this strange weekend these two brilliant men spent together. Only now, the viewer is confronted with the specter of what Wallace revealed late that night—the secret inadequacy at the heart of every prophet who sees the future and feels powerless to change it. And yet they suffer until they are relieved of that suffering. The best stories are told by the talented and aware who survived to tell the tale. This is what happens in the film The End of the Tour. Now, let’s explore why it matters and what it means.

Let's begin our exploration of meaning and matter in this film by situating the novel Infinite Jest in context, to understand why it was such a significant phenomenon in 1996. Like, you mean a book mattered that much? Yes, to many of us, it did. That book was a promise fulfilled for young writers. The example we young writers needed to see was that it was possible to make challenging but rewarding art that was commercially validated. Art that said something, making money. This was the way. However, it was a difficult path, and there were painful casualties along the way, including sensitive individuals who didn’t survive the void of fame.

Recall, Infinite Jest was published barely two years after the most successful rock musician in the world at the time put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. Some of why he did that was about what he saw when he got to the top of the ladder of commercial success, a truth so universal that Bob Dylan made it a song title–Beyond Here Lies Nothing.

Kurt Cobain and David Foster Wallace both peered into the void and didn’t like what they saw while gazing down into the dark secret from very different angles and perspectives. And their expressions of art in response to the horror they perceived were equally unique, though intimately connected at the gnarled root. After all, it’s the same void at the end of everyone’s story, despite whatever offering of faith gives us comfort. No one knows because the void of direct experience is the truth.

What can you do with a fact but accept it? And what was it about Infinite Jest that caused fiction readers and art literati, from elitist critics down to the almost-rejected art student (like me), to buy that three-pound book and lug it around for months while we pretended to understand what we were reading, confused in small sections?

Was the book really that important to warrant all that fuss?

Was it even a good story? A page turner?

Would they adapt it into a movie? Could we just wait for the movie?

The interesting answer about making a movie is that Infinite Jest was the first book to outwrestle movies. This novel boxed movies in. Long before Infinite Jest, movies were often the more widely embraced expression of a narrative than a novel. The premium experience of storytelling was the movies and TV shows that ate novels and short stories to spit them out in a more consumable (and therefore profitable) fashion.

Movies are small businesses made by teams of people working together to produce art and educational stories that help the world grow in wisdom, awareness, and empathy. Just kidding, movies and TV shows were made to entertain and manipulate you through cultural normalization, which is injected by consistently replicated and easily meme-able moral behaviors, and (most importantly) to sell you goods and services through advertisements and strategic product placement that churn your life moments into seeds of sadness, which make money for other people.

Infinite Jest remains an indictment of the cruel predation of moving images telling stories for profit. Infinite Jest eats all the movies. It eats music, every song. It eats other books. It eats politics and religion. It eats science. It eats history and the human soul, bit by bit, click by click, minute by minute until the days bleed away through years and all the joy has been seeped from life like a grey flood. That’s what Infinite Jest is, and David Foster Wallace’s deepest fear for America was that we might endure a complete institutional self-destruction of civility and integrity. Spoiler alert!

Wallace’s book prophesied what would happen when traditional mass media got set ablaze by the Internet, fueled by cheap, meaningless, and mean entertainment-for-profit. Wallace saw this thirty years ago and tried to warn the most intelligent people using the most innovative and clever method he could think of, which was to smuggle it into the higher collective frontal lobe of our cultural consciousness by telling a complex story that most people wouldn’t work through long enough to access the subversive part. But the ones who did never thought or felt the same afterwards.

In 1996, America was going through a phase some smart people in colleges called "Postmodern Irony," and it was about as cynical as we could get, just shy of an armed rebellion if we weren’t all so lazy and half-armed. Generation X was so full of ourselves that we soaked in tepid pop culture bathtubs every day and night. Popping bottles of celebrity juice to pop music, metal, punk rock, and rap. And we had the best movies ever made. Movies that said things to our hearts. And the cannabis smoked strongly, even if it was harder to get.

In our quiet moments and stoned late-night conversations, the honesty of my generation felt the world of these Boomers and Greatest Generation was bullshit, and more than a few of us wanted nothing to do with it. We wanted out of the bullshit, but we still wanted to love, laugh, fuck, and drink liquor. Eventually, the world would come to claim Generation X and all the other generations with its dumb War on Terror and the chain of disasters that followed and continue like a never-ending hemorrhoid. However, in 1996, some of us felt that we still had a choice about how to live and how we spent our time together in public spaces, regardless of who we voted for in the last election.

In 1996, MFA and BFA programs taught minimalism through the short story form and prosaic poetry as the primary methods of instruction and evaluation for creative writing performance at the University level. Raymond Carver was the minimalist god of short fiction, and almost no one spoke out against him in classes across the nation. But American culture was ready for a new expression of fiction, something opposite of minimal. America wanted writing that filled the balloon until it stretched to its limit, and then we wanted a pin-prick of genius to pop that balloon.

Infinite Jest descended on fiction like a portal to another universe uncovered in an ancient desert mesa. Suddenly, it was just there, and the place it took the patient reader to was otherworldly, yet not so distant and different that it wasn't also a familiar place. The book had a gate, but it wasn't one of intelligence; it was instead the ability to pay sustained attention. Prolonged, sustained attention was the key to unlocking this strange and long work of maximalist American literature, as well as the antidote to the disease in the book.

The key attribute of Infinite Jest is that it becomes funny the instant you understand what it is trying to convey, which, at the risk of oversimplifying a work of genius, is "This whole world is a pleasure scam to steal your joy of living away. Why are you letting it?" Infinite Jest identified nearly 30 years ago that human attention would become the most valuable economic commodity in recorded history. What people listen to, watch, and read would have an enormous impact on what they do or do not do, and how they behave. In the movie, Wallace reveals the painful cultural truth I promised to point out earlier, expressing this truth in the following direct dialogue:

"I'm not saying that watching TV is bad or a waste of your time anymore than masturbation...it's a pleasurable way to spend a few minutes. But if you're doing it twenty times a day,...if your primary sexual relationship is with your own hand, something is wrong. What you're really doing, I think, is you're running a movie in your head. You're having a fantasy relationship with someone that is not real, strictly to stimulate a neurological response. So, as the Internet grows in the next ten to fifteen years and virtual reality pornography becomes a reality, we're going to have to develop some machinery in our guts to turn off sheer unalloyed pleasure, or...I'm going to have to leave the planet. Because the technology is only going to get better and better and it's going to get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that's fine, in low doses, but if it's the basic main staple of your diet, you're going to die in a very meaningful way."

Personally, despite understanding the book was genius, I didn’t find it enjoyable to read because it required hard work and attention in an age where human attention was already being digitally fracked for profit, and this has only worsened and become more disastrous for human joy since 1996. Too much of the current global population of human beings has become what David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest attempted to warn us about so long ago, a legion of lonely people sitting in weepy rooms scrolling away their lives and joy until only nubs of their lifespark are left in puddles on sad floors of grey homes barely inhabited under perpetually cloudy skies, the kinds of places where the only comfort is the fellowship of ghosts floating near each other, locked in space but somehow beyond time.

It turns out that placing vital social knowledge behind a puzzle wall of words is not the most effective way to disseminate an idea. Perhaps Wallace didn’t receive this memo, given the mixed legacy the book acquired in the years after its release and subsequent near-forgotten status. Instead of going mainstream, he began writing what he hoped was a magnum opus, The Pale King. It was rumored to be even more ambitious and dense than its predecessor.

The End Of The Tour is meaningful because, without noise, it delivers what happened when an astute reader and competent writer meets more than his equal for a mental battle. Lipsky's mission in this movie was to find a way to either deify or crucify David Foster Wallace in 1996, because that is what the mono-culture media did to make money.

Instead, Lipsky was exposed to the secret heart of American suffering as the generation that feared selling out more than anything faced the inevitable conclusion that we were all sold out long before we were born, and that we are each living in the aftermath of the death of an illusion. Still, many of us remain unaware because we lack the language or concepts to comprehend that complex and awful truth.

During the revelation scene for the painful personal truth I informed you of earlier, Wallace gently opens the door and barely enters his guest bedroom to wake his guest and tenderly reveal a secret so horrible that it had to be locked away with all those words. This scene features a final confrontation between an author who wrote a serious novel that briefly garnered mass media attention, with a message about the dangers of mass media, and the author sent to validate or destroy him.

Earlier, Wallace admitted to Lipsky, "My primary addiction in my life has been to television." Then, acknowledging his temporary fickle success, Wallace diagnoses himself, "Reality is I'm 34 years old, alone in a room with a piece of paper." Finally, he begins to reveal the terrible secret he has been holding inside.

"I don't have a diagnosis for why we feel so empty and unhappy…I lived an incredibly American life, this idea that if I could just achieve x and y and z, that everything would be okay.”

Wallace then tells a story from his book about people leaping to their deaths from a burning building (portending what would happen only five years later on 9/11), begging the question, "What could be so awful that leaping to your death would be an escape from it?" From here, Wallace opens his box of pain and shares more than he should have about his potential suicide attempt two years before he began the work of writing and obsessively thinking about Infinite Jest. During those dramatic eight days, Wallace was institutionalized to prevent him from taking an action that would have dramatically impacted the world of human art in 1996. He describes his suffering:

"It's worse than any kind of physical injury. It may be in the old days what was known as a spiritual crisis, the feeling as though every axiom in your life turned out to be false and there was actually nothing. And you are nothing. And that it's all a delusion. And you're so much better than everybody because you can say that it's just a delusion and you're so much worse because you can't fucking function. It's really horrible…I don't think that we ever change. I'm sure that I still have those same parts of me. I'm trying really hard to find a way to not let them drive."

While explaining his past suicide attempt, he also writes a note for his unfortunate future successful one.

My first reaction was anger when I learned that David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, at the age of 46, by hanging himself on his back porch. But I felt sad when I learned he had spent time and effort preparing for his suicide, carefully laying out his final novel manuscript for The Pale King with specific instructions and a rumored personal note to his wife. This wasn't a dramatic and tense suicide like Kurt Cobain's. Unfortunately, David Foster Wallace’s death was his final successful project.

And we come back to the question of why someone so talented, brilliant, and with so much potential would choose to end their life? I didn't know. Like many others, I felt the hole in the future of art when I learned of his death. Reality shuddered. It's hard to argue that the world has fallen to shit since 2008. Wallace predicted the self-destruction of our institutions, driven by waves of digital cruelty and IRL loneliness, which deliver damaging waves that seem to grow with intensity over time, amplified by the advancements of technology untethered from human morality.

The spirit of Christ most certainly does not compel America in 2025.

But 2008 was the year that broke America's brain. It was the year the monoculture ironically shattered (thus ending post-modern irony), and Wallace’s worst fear became an inevitable reality: the complete self-destruction of America’s institutions because people no longer saw and heard each other anymore. They only saw flickering images of shades of humans who couldn’t possibly also be alive and suffering.

2008 was the year of a shattered but shared reality, a year of dramatic change in America. The effects of what happened that year may still have the potential to bring down the American empire. And it was the year one of the greatest American writers since Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Vonnegut threw in his towel, leaving us with towers of words that few people are capable of reading and appreciating today.

In one of the film's most revealing moments, David Foster Wallace stakes his claim as an everyday guy who just pays more attention than most. He tells Lipsky, "Yes, I treasure my regular guy-ness. I think it's my biggest asset as a writer, that I'm basically just like everybody else." But Lipsky rightly calls bullshit:

"You don't crack open a thousand page book because you hear the author is a regular guy. You do it because he's brilliant. You want him to be brilliant. So, who the fuck are you kidding?"

Who was David Foster Wallace kidding? What kind of artist walks away from that kind of talent halfway through the game? This brilliant, privileged, and self-tormented white man of privileged letters broke all his vows when he bent to those parts he confessed to Lipsky in that late-night scene. Wallace was ultimately defenseless against those sad parts seeking to drive him into the ground in darkness. But the man never claimed to be perfect. Perhaps he was just too sensitive and intelligent to continue living in the world inside his head or the one outside.

This movie leaves me feeling melancholy, yet also appreciative of the ambition, obsession, and unalloyed talent that David Foster Wallace brought to our species during his too-short time on Earth.

We are not put here to write books and paint pictures.

We are not put here to make movies or start businesses.

We are not put here to work and pay taxes.

We aren't put here to get married or fall in love.

Human Beings are put here together on Earth to develop strong bonds with the other human beings with whom we share this brief life. And we are placed here to die, or rather, put here to learn to die slowly with grace if we’re lucky. The proof of this state of being is gratitude without regret. You’ll know you’ve reached that goal when you have so much to say that you can’t say a word. It’s called gratitude. And that’s right.

Seventy-five Summers. That’s what we get if we’re lucky. David Foster Wallace cashed out the rest of his Summers at 46 years old. During his half-life, he performed a nearly miraculous feat of art. But his legacy as a human living in the world was not as impressive. Art will not save the world inside or outside. Neither will politics, religion, science, or AI.

The only action that will save the world is letting it go and living in it with ease for whatever time we are blessed to do so. If we respect time by investing in creating safety and comfort with the people around us, small joys will creep back into our lives, and only then can we make our art in faith (not irony) and call our lives the good work.

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This show is going to be tough…

I hope it doesn’t bring you down.

I hope it lifts you.

I was lifted doing it.

In possibly the most narcissistic action I’ve taken in my life, I...

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Meditation 1: On Hope for Humanity: The Handmaid’s Tale

Meditation 2: On Cultural Hegemony

Meditation 3: Reading the first act of my new short story, The Prince of Kings Island, from my upcoming book of connected short fiction, Wigger: Stories of the 1990s.

Meditation 4: On Tombstone (1993)

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“Life is Fate and Chance Is Choice”

Hacks Versus A Losers

[FREESTYLE] The Civic Importance of Rest Areas As A Measure Of Our Commitment To The Common Good

NOTES FROM HIGH SCHOOL

"Consider a Paid Subscription to Support My Work And Share It With Someone Cool"

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jbminton.substack.com/subscribe