In Which We Explore The Archives Of David Foster Wallace

Holy Text 

by JESSE KLEIN

In March 2010, the University of Texas at Austin and the Harry Ransom Center acquired David Foster Wallace’s archives and later that year made them publicly available. Since then, professors, PhD students and journalists have come from around the world to sit with Wallace’s collected, unpublished writings. Since his suicide in September 2008, he has become something larger than he was in life, not just a seminal 20th century writer, a descendent of Pynchon and DeLillo. He has become a cultural, and, cult, figure of mythic status, a Kurt Cobain or Hunter Thompson. For someone who taught so many how to live, Wallace’s decision not to was and is met with confusion, debate, and sorrow.

Archives provide a fan with the opportunity to spend time with the author, with their private thoughts, with what they chose not to share. It gives the reader the chance to look at the raw data without a filter, the biographer. To sift through his archives, something I undertook over a weeklong span, is to celebrate the intentional fallacy, not to draw lines from work to person and back to work, but to better understand the person who created the work, out of curiosity and love for someone who put together strings of words, and webs from those strings, that mean so much to so many people, including myself.

There are thirty-four densely packed boxes. The Harry Ransom Center along with Wallace’s widow Karen Green and his family have kept everything: travel documents, college homework, early drafts of articles, essays, short stories and novels, drawings and poems from childhood. The idea was less to read everything, to engulf every snippet of information but more so to gain insight into who he was, why he was, until he stopped being. Suicide is a mode of death inherently linked to a person’s life, and in his writing, as well as his archives, it is ever-present.

BOX 26 is devoted to Wallace's posthumous novel, The Pale King, set for release this April. The box is made up of dozens, and dozens, of pages of handwritten prose, a handwriting that is not cursive nor print, that takes up one fifth of a line carefully lining the bottom, that leans slightly to the right, or, forward. The first section in the box is called "Fierce Infant", written in the 1st person, in a green, roller ball pen. At the top of the first page, written in caps is the word "FREEWRITING" and next to it an arrow pointing to "potential title for piece." Though, only two pages later, two brilliant pages later, the words "freewriting – means nothing" are written next to "dead prose" which are entombed in a box in the upper right hand corner. These self-denigrating quips are one of the few consistencies from a person with such varied interests, talents. He let himself go on for three more pages only to write "now what" at the end. It did not seem like he gave himself the space to write freely.

It’s been said that The Pale King will be about boredom and taxes. From 1998 onward, Wallace took undergraduate Accounting courses while teaching undergraduate English courses. In his notebooks for these Accounting classes, notebooks that were at once pristinely kept and littered with scattered thoughts, were questions like, "What is 'bypass trust'?" and "explain 'forensic accountant' – tracks money laundering". In BOX 26, there were three chockfull folders of accounting related documents i.e. his homework. On one loose sheet he wrote, "David Wallace (Patty – can I just see how I did? I won't normally ask you to grade me J)." He got 10/10 on the quiz. But you could see through this work that Wallace was not, and likely will not in his book, merely discuss the minutiae of the IRS, the aching tedium it entails. In one correspondence to an academic, he wondered,

Does the IRS or Treasury Dept. have any studies of just how much noncompliance the US Tax System could withstand? That is, have they done any studies of just how many taxpayers would have to refuse to pay before (a) there would be too many to prosecute, and (b) the government would be hurt by lack of income. (a kind of tipping point in other words.)

Wallace is getting at the human condition at its most primal, money/survival, albeit in an oblique, Kafkaesque way. He later asked, "what did hospitals have before ICU’s?" In asking so many questions he finally had to explain, "I have a vague, hard-to-explain interest in accounting and tax policy (utterly divorced from my own taxes, which I pay promptly and fully like an eagle scout)." Stephen Lacy, a CFO, enjoyed the correspondence, understood Wallace's aims, and so in turn offered this as the "most difficult sentence to understand in tax code":

For purposes of paragraph (3), an organization described in paragraph (2) shall be deemed to include an organization described in section 501(c)(4), (5), or (6) which would be described in paragraph (2) if it were an organization described in section 501(c)(3).

It's fun to imagine what Wallace might have done with this dizzying code. Statements like these are impossibly dense but through his translation, they become totally clear. This was one of Wallace’s gifts: he would discuss infinity, or fatalism, or the footnotes of footnotes of tax laws, but would do so with language that was plain, inviting. His use of "like" as written stutter, or of "stuff" in place of the appropriate noun, made Wallace an approachable giant, a Midwesterner, a guy.

(In his review of Siri Hustvedt’s novel The Blindfold, these were his opening remarks: "The point of this review is going to be that The Blindfold is a really good book. The first neat thing about it is that the jacket copy and blurbs are interesting." These statements would have lost marks on a freshman mid-term paper. At times he could be deliberately, though misleadingly, simple.)

Wallace is accessible in part because he’s funny. When he calls Sting "resoundingly unthespian" regarding Dune, that’s funny. When he calls Updike "heartbreakingly naïve" and guilty of a "radical self-absorption" when talking about his novel Toward the End of Time, that’s funny too. And when he wrote his magazine editors, with a conviction and ardor rarely seen from a person so polite, so docile, he’s frightening, and also funny. When Harper's published a section of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, he had this to say:

DAVE W'S CONDITIONS OF SUBMISSION:

(1) inform auth of Decision to Reject w/in 48 hrs of Decision;

(2) any/all rejected pieces are to be shredded, the shreds placed in a burn bag, then that bag emptied into a high wind at least ten (10) miles from any metropolitan area. we will be watching.

Maybe he was kidding, maybe not. He probably was and he wasn’t. For his Roger Federer article, he said that if they changed more than 100-200 words, he would happily take the "kill fee" and not publish it at all. And, again with Harper's, this time with his Kafka piece, he wrote, "I will find a way to harm you or cause you suffering if you fuck with the mechanics of the piece." Even here, he could not resist a footnote, it reads, "It may take years for the opportunity to arise. I'm very patient. Think of me as a spider with a phenomenal emotional memory. Ask Charis." The “Ask Charis" is chilling, proof that this has happened before. Just ask Charis.

But all this is gravy. All stuff that's preaching to the converted. People know who David Foster Wallace is because he wrote a big, hard, necessary book called Infinite Jest. Based on Wallace’s other writings, his readers know that this is the book he lived to write. All of his passions and preoccupations are there: addiction, tennis, terrorism, TV, prescription drug use, religion, depression. Wallace researched the material that populates the book for years, in a way, was always researching for it.

Wallace was a devoted Alcoholics Anonymous member, and much of Infinite Jest takes place within the sacred circle of AA meetings. Throughout the early 90s, he went to meetings in the Boston area and listened. And took notes. On a page titled "Heard At Meetings", in BOX 15, he transcribed things like, "If you’ve never considered suicide, stay sober for a while", and, "I shit myself every day for years", but also things like, "I see her spending a lot of time laughing", and, "They say it's good for the soul, but I feel nothing inside that you could call a soul." This last quote was recopied into an Infinite Jest notebook in December ’92.

The notebooks from that time, his "siege in the room", were about everything (like Infinite Jest), but from his giving, sad, man-who-knew-too-much vantage point. On high school politics: "the trick for being neither nerd nor quite jock — be no one." On the future of telecommunications: "Audio phone conversations both let you presume the other person was paying complete attention to you and let you not have to pay complete attention to them." Next to this statement is an arrow pointing to "Nixon/Kennedy debates of 1960." His brain was a supercomputer of pop culture. A line is drawn from phony phone conversations to the way television betrayed Nixon’s coolness thirty years before, commenting on Star Trek, predicting Skype.

But the underside, the darkness, everything else he always thought about, was never far, was probably always there. While going through a folder in BOX 15 a loose sheet from a yellow legal pad fell to the floor. It read, "I don’t think it’s an accident that people that shoot themselves shoot themselves in the head." No explanation, just those words in a sea of yellow indifference.

"Good Old Neon", a short story that appears in the 2004 collection Oblivion, is perhaps Wallace’s most deliberate, unadorned conversation with himself. I first read it in a car ride from Montreal to New York on a sunny, summer day. Through the Adirondacks, with my sister on my right and my parents in the front, I was totally destroyed and absolutely electrified. When I finished the story, I couldn’t speak, I just thought to myself remembering the time before I read the story, who I was then, a couple hours ago.

In it, a man sees a "therapist" (a word he later changed to "analyst"), finds it useless, and, without alternative, decides to kill himself. In BOX 24, at the top of the first page of this first handwritten draft is "FRAUD" followed by, "This is the bad part, the foggy part where there's way more than I can ever make you see." Wallace, and the reader, has no choice but to go on.

In different pen colors, blue to black to red to green, the story gets better, shorter, fuller. Where there was once an "analyst" with a "mustache", there is later an "analyst" with a "small ginger mustache", a mustache that is likely taken seriously by its owner and not by anyone else. In his revisions, Wallace would not only correct himself but comment, taunt. Unsatisfied with the first few pages, he wrote at the top of four above the first line, "(I know this part is boring and probably boring you, but it gets a lot more interesting after I kill myself)." This aside made it into the final version of the story. But even the thin sheen of self-defacing humor fades away: "Everything gets so abstract all this free-writing I can't be bothered to even type up. We tried to bombard our problems with will power instead of bringing it into alignment with God’s intention for us." Wallace did not write or talk in extremes, he lived in them.

"Good Old Neon" ends with an oracular exhale, a portion of prose that makes the reader at once alive, aware, terrified, and tired. After going over it for probably the hundredth time, he wrote in a tidy box, "incoherent, but moving." The story is dense, bleak, again necessary, but not incoherent. The last line on that page is also that, "[Ghosts talking to us all the time—but we think their voices are our own thoughts.]" It is no longer the "I" of the protagonist, or the writer, but a "we" that includes us in the nightmare, a self-imposed nightmare, though it feels inevitable.

At the start of the week, in BOX 31, I sifted through an assortment of Wallace gems. In a 70-page, one-subject notebook called "Midwesternisms", he wrote down verbal tics like "because you know why?" "I had a circumstance happen" and "Just let them get it under their belt and chew on it a while." Later, a list of "Good names", among them '1st name: Tova', 'Pat Rexroat' and 'Elpidia Carter.'" On college tests, professors cooed, "un plaisir, mon vieux" and "I am particularly impressed by your thoroughness." Then, amidst the praise was a page ripped from a spiral notebook with the date "7/31/96" in the top left-hand corner. July 1996 was six months after the release of Infinite Jest, at the height of its praise, a thousand page text that was being lauded as an Important Work, a Big Book. A time most would consider the culmination of a young writer's career. At that time he wrote, "The thing is I get scared it won’t come. I'm back to thinking IJ was a fluke." Then, "'Until there is commitment, there is only ineffectiveness, delay.' - Goethe How to make a commitment – to writing, to a somewhat healthy rltp, to myself."

At the end of this entry, in a journal he felt it was not fit for, was this:

What balance would look like

2-3 hours a day in writing

Up at 8-9

Only a couple late nights a week

Daily exercise

Minimum time spent teaching

2 nights/week spent w/other friends

5 AA/week Church

This was the balance he sought, the life he needed. But a towering intellect does not always come with a rock-hard disposition, a disposition to match a brain like Wallace's. In his writing, and in his archives, he was always battling himself, playing himself in a mental tennis match. His archives show that that match was exhausting, tragic, joyous, and now endless.

I visited my friend at Sarah Lawrence in October 2008 just weeks after Wallace’s death. Many on campus were still in mourning, talked about him as if he was a close friend they'd all lost. I knew who he was, had seen a big blue paperback of his on people’s shelves a few times before, had picked it up once to see how heavy it was. When I asked people why they were so upset they could only respond with their own question: "Have you read him?" I hadn't.

I then tried unsuccessfully to read that big blue book, Infinite Jest. I failed for the same reasons many people do: the footnotes were burdensome, the first 250 pages were dense and largely unconnected. Feeling defeated, I tried semi-successfully to read Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I finished it, engaged with it, though felt that there were long stretches where I would drift, where I felt I was being forced to endure linguistic acrobatics. It was his nonfiction — arguably his more accessible work — that was my entry point. I’ve since reread his fiction and cherish it all (including Infinite Jest) for its richness, its complexities, for the fact that his voice is at once ours and uniquely his. So, to explore his archives seemed the closest thing to spending time with a person you love and admire, though you don’t know, and never will.

Sitting there, in the Harry Ransom Center, felt like a religious experience. I had an HB pencil (no ink allowed), yellow computer paper, and those thirty-four boxes (though only one at a time). I could not decide if I wanted to listen to my iPod or not as I didn't want to taint his words, to change their meaning by mingling them with song lyrics. Many times, I had physical reactions to what I was reading. Goosebumps. Sweat. A heaviness in my legs. I would catch myself laughing aloud but only because three people were staring at me. It was embarrassing, having these personal responses among eighty year-old academics, chatty librarians, bored sophomores working the front desk. That week, there were so many of those moments where you see or hear something you know is vital, life giving, and say to yourself, "This is one of those." And all you can really say is thanks. Thanks so much.

Jesse Klein is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer and filmmaker living in Austin. He last wrote in these pages about Trent Reznor. You can find his previous work on This Recording here. He twitters here and tumbls here.

"Where You Are" - The Submarines (mp3)

"Birds" - The Submarines (mp3)

"A Satellite, Stars, and an Ocean Behind You" - The Submarines (mp3)

 

In Which I Was Feeling Some Feelings You Wouldn't Believe

The Deepest Shade of Mushroom Blue

by JESSE KLEIN

Listen to Nine Inch Nails for a week and see what happens. Only Nine Inch Nails. At first, everything becomes serious. The smallest slight feels like a slap in the face, another reminder that they just don’t understand you. Roommates, cashiers, people on bikes become enemies and you’re all, ‘I’d rather die than give you control’. Then the music just becomes silly, the lyrics too literal. You drift out of NIN World and back into the arch, cynical posture you’re used to adopting. If "God is dead" as is claimed in "Heresy", I’m not so sure I wouldn’t care, and I would definitely be upset if I were in hell, whether you were there or not. Then things become really serious. Once you "take the skin and peel it back", it does not make you feel better. Everything is so sad and mad and bad in NIN World. And what if Trent is right?

In 1989, Nine Inch Nails’ first album, Pretty Hate Machine, went three times platinum nationally and sixteen years later in 2005, his album With Teeth went gold. And of course there's The Downward Spiral and The Fragile in between going platinum a combined six times. He has just won a Golden Globe and very well might win the Oscar for Original Score for his work with Atticus Ross in The Social Network. So he must be right at least some of the time.

For someone who has based a career on being the outcast, Reznor is very good at being very popular. And therein lies the trick; everybody wants to be a member of the club that says that clubs are for losers, for everyone else. Reznor has done something if not impossible, then really really hard to do: he’s stayed culturally relevant for over twenty years. In an industry and a medium that change by the week, by the city, by the new mashed-up genre somebody just made up. As far as I can tell, he’s been able to do this for two reasons.

Trent Reznor (now) puts all of his crazy into his music, not his daily life. In the years following The Downward Spiral he suffered from depression and abused drugs but beat his depression and cleaned up. Since that period, he has the same adolescent rage in his music, but doesn’t need to live it to prove its validity.

By the late 90s, he shed his tattered, stringy hair for a more distinguished Goth look ("Perfect Drug"), then moved on to an even shorter haircut and no facial hair (With Teeth), and finally shaved his head altogether. If not for his fame, he could now easily be mistaken for a car mechanic or high school chemistry teacher. In other words, a far cry from the guy in the tights and the leather and the Industrial Tefillin who’s hanging out with Bob Flanagan. Or the dude with the Milli Vanilli haircut in 1989.

You can also take his music seriously and not seriously at the same time, listen to it literally and ironically in the same sitting. The lyrics are silly, but they’re kind of true. There’s a little bit of Nine Inch Nails in all of us. And like almost every white male in North America, I had a Nine Inch Nails phase. I started listening to NIN when I was eleven. My older brothers listened to them but talked about it in hushed tones; his satanic verses were not meant for kids. So, of course, I couldn’t not. I was drawn to all of it. The cover of The Downward Spiral looked like it was made by an agoraphobe in a barn in Iowa (it was made by Russell Mills at the Glasgow School of Art.) It was confusing but in a way that said that it didn’t matter that I didn’t understand; it could be someone’s back, it could be a wall, or neither. The fact that I was looking at it was enough.

Unlike most other bands, I could understand every word he said. He enunciated so well! I spent hours trying to decipher what Kurt Cobain was saying; for years I thought he was chanting a man’s name, "Robbie Naya", at the end of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." And best, I understood the lyrics. Gone were the vague allusions, the coded phrases, the metaphoric imagery. Nine Inch Nails spoke a language an eleven year old could understand. "Everyday is exactly the same." And "why do you get all the love in the world"? So, "I became less concerned about fitting into the world. Your world, that is." By fourteen, I was too cynical to listen to them anymore. What I once worshipped as naked emotion I coolly dismissed as sappy heart-on-your-sleavery. Too many years had passed, everyone sitting around waiting for The Fragile got bored and moved onto his perverted protégé, Marilyn Manson, or changed direction and got into Smashing Pumpkins or Phish.

Around ten years later, my brother and I started texting each other Nine Inch Nails lyrics. We didn’t have much to say to one another, and when we did it often was not simple. Instead of treading in these awkward waters we opted to make light of the situation, to send it up. He was in L.A., I was in Montreal and so we would spend around a buck a text to say things like "I am a big man yes I am/And I have a big gun" and "I was feeling some feelings you wouldn’t believe." But it allowed us to change the subject; to not like, to make fun of ourselves for ever liking, and really still like, his music.

And all this without mentioning the fact that he made one of the most important albums of the 80s and definitely of the 90s. Pretty Hate Machine was a revelation, a confessional voice but one packaged in a harsh exterior, a smiley face with crossbones. The album sounds dark from afar, but somewhere amidst the pain is pure pop. The convincing whine, the needy screaming, the pouting silence—every teenager you’ve ever met. It wasn’t all darkness like other industrial music; there was a lot of light that peeked through.

I went to one Nine Inch Nails show, it was during the With Teeth tour in 2006. I hadn’t purchased tickets, didn’t even know there was a show until that night. A friend of mine called and asked if I wanted to go. With nineteen dollars and nothing else to do, I went to the show at the Bell Centre, the biggest venue in town. Filling nearly half the arena, Reznor and his road band thrashed through songs, new and old, the old better received than the new. At the encore’s close, Reznor sat down at the keyboard and played the first few notes of "Hurt." Ten seconds and ten thousand lighters later, the room was silent. "I ran away to this song," a girl behind me told her date. "I know exactly what you mean," he answered back. My friend and I pinched our noses to not laugh out loud. But, I guess, we laughed because we knew it was true. We were uncomfortable with her sincerity. She did run away to that song. So did Johnny Cash. I run away to "Hurt". Everybody does.

Jesse Klein is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer and filmmaker living in Austin. He twitters here and tumbls here.

"Cars" - Nine Inch Nails ft. Gary Numan (mp3)

"Closer (live)" - MGMT (mp3)

"Wish (live)" - Linkin Park (mp3)

In Which The Parody Predates The Thing Itself

La Folle Histoire de l'Espace

by JESSE KLEIN

So I was having a conversation with no one. This was at age three, riding in the backseat of a brand new, baby blue Dodge Caravan in Montreal, Quebec. I was talking on an old, broken rotary telephone to no one in particular. Not myself, not my imaginary friend (I could never relate to kids with one of those; not that I really "related’"to anything at three), not to my mom who was two feet in front of me, driving. "Blah ba buh buh blah," I rambled on, bopping my head, feigning interest as I had seen my parents and other adults do when they used the telephone. Then, my mood suddenly changed, I politely put the phone down and muttered under my breath, "Shithead." "Jess, where did you learn that word?" My mom assumed one of my siblings had whispered swear words into my ear when I was asleep, or I had picked up one of the terms my father employed when describing people that weren't himself. "Thas what they say in Spaceballzss," I answered.

I was quoting Mel Brooks, obviously. After a tedious phone call with someone he thanks "for not reversing the charges," President Skroob (Brooks) mutters the aforementioned expletive under his breath. This is not to be confused with the scene on Spaceball One wherein Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) haplessly wonders, "How many assholes we got on this ship anyhow?" only to receive the dutiful response ‘Yo’ from two dozen men. No. When I was three, it was about shitheads, not assholes.

Spaceballs, written, produced, directed and starring Mel Brooks was my introduction to movies. Also to comedy, romance, family, violence and most crucially, sarcasm. The film parodies, most explicitly, Star Wars, though Star Trek and Alien play a supporting role; it refers to everything/anything as many times per minute as possible, as crudely as each reference could possibly be articulated. No pun too low, no gibe too obvious, in Spaceballs, Brooks pushes his comedic vision, and the genre, to its logical conclusion: a parody of not only the film, but of the filmmaking process too. It’s a post-modern, self-reflexive meditation on Hollywood, consumerism and media consumption. It's also blisteringly smart, and an amazingly entertaining film. And it was the first film I ever saw.

Cult classics now have Quote-A-Longs. Heathers, Reality Bites and Napoleon Dynamite, among many others, incite people not only to watch them again and again at home, but now to return to the theatre after a decade or longer to sing "My Sharona" in unison or trace over Napoleon’s "liger" in their mind’s eye. Maybe in ten years we’ll all pay for a ticket to collectively squeal, "You know what’s cooler than a million dollars…"

Spaceballs is a quote the size of the spaceship from Alien that it mocks. The film is meant to be quoted, exists only insofar as it’s repeated, in or out of context. Often better out of context. When running late, I as often as possible exclaim, "The ship is too big, if I walk, the movie’ll be over." Blank stares more often than not followed by dirty looks. When waiting in line at the grocery store, I ask the old woman in front of me, "When will then be now?" She asks if I’m OK. I say, I'm fine thanks, you? She says she’s well. I say I was looking for the retort "Soon." She turns around and counts her coupons for the third time in two minutes. I assume she’s seen Spaceballs as many times as I have and can’t remember it because she’s old.

At three, Mel Brooks said everything I wanted to hear. Bad things could happen, really bad things. Like a planet losing all of its air (What? Is that possible!?!), or being abandoned by someone you loved. But through hard work, a keen sense of comic timing and being born lucky (like, say, a prince), there was every chance you’d come out on top. By the time I reached double digits, I had watched Spaceballs around thirty times. I’d wake up at five-thirty, six if I was feeling luxurious, and creep downstairs into the basement, wearing my favorite ensemble of super-cool spandex matched with kind-of-cool spandex. I would put the tape in, then sprawl out on the couch, waiting for my favorite parts, reciting the movie as it went along. Is that what a king looks like? A prince? A mawg (half-man half-dog)? Who were those tiny brown people and why did Yogurt (also Brooks) look like my Grandma? (I recently realized that Brooks, as Yogurt, performed on his knees, that’s why he wears a muumuu.)

I assume everyone’s seen Spaceballs, but just in case: Princess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga) leaves a man she doesn’t love at the altar and escapes her home planet, Druidia. President Skroob and Dark Helmet attempt to kidnap her in order to blackmail the King to give up the country’s air supply, but Lone Star (Bill Pullman) and his sidekick Barf (John Candy) rescue her in the nick of time. Stuff happens. All very funny. Ninety minutes later, Lone Star rescues her again, this the third time, they marry and then those fun credits with the signature moments of the famous actors, and not the randoms, begin to come up.

As you can see, Spaceballs is no Feminist treatise. Not the intergalactic version of that Sally Field movie that people only remember because of her Oscar's speech. Yet, it does lampoon — and thus take sides — the archetypes that define the science-Fiction/adventure genre. Late in the film, Princess Vespa, a helpless captive, sits in a cell in Spaceball One with Dot Matrix (Joan Rivers) and sings "Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen." The very existence of the song in this film is absurd; a Spiritual sung by a White Princess in a world without Black history — or any history, or planet Earth. When Barf hears her, he can’t help remarking, "She’s a bass." It’s a decidedly unfeminine act, sharing her booming voice with anyone who will listen to her blues. This deepens her character; it makes her, and the film, self-knowing, in on the joke.

Like any good parody, Vespa (and Lone Star and Skroob and Barf and…) is everything that came before her and in its amalgamation becomes something else entirely. With even the smallest amount of probing we see Brooks’ nods and winks, we see that he’s talking about everything, that it’s all there. George Lucas had to go to a galaxy far far away to talk about good and evil (and incest). Brooks brings it back to reality, stunt doubles and all.

The Megamaid of meta-ness is at about the midway point of the movie. Dark Helmet and Colonel Sandurz (George Wyner) cannot find the Princess, so, naturally, Sandurz has the idea to watch the movie — the one they’re in — and fast-forward to find the answer. "How can there be a cassette of Spaceballs the movie, we’re still in the middle of making it!" Dark Helmet (or Moranis?) asks. They fast-forward through the embarrassing moments until Sandurz stops the tape. At the exact moment they’re in. What follows is straight out of Abbott and Costello, but tinged with the absurdity and wordplay of Vladimir and Estragon. Sandurz explains, "Everything that’s happening now is happening now" and "We’re at now now." This all plays out on our screen and theirs, we watch them watch themselves. The screens could continue forever, (actors playing characters watching actors playing characters watching…) creating as many mirrors as Brooks would like. But two is enough; we already feel as if we’ve gone to plaid.

Growing up, Spaceballs was a metaphor for what it was like to be alive. My siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins all used lines from the film as shorthand for how they felt. When pleased, my Dad would put his hand out and say "Gimme paw!" and then I would sigh, and give him "paw." When trying to make light of a bad situation, my eldest brother would groan, "F-, even in the future nothing works." And it was not until age twelve that I understood what my brothers meant when they whispered, "I bet she gives great helmet." The film made everyone I knew sillier, happier. I admired Brooks/Skroob/Yogurt for that. It made me want to do it too. I didn’t want to be Lone Star, or the handsome guy who played him; I wanted to be the one who made people laugh like that, the one who dreamed the whole thing up.



I saw Spaceballs nearly a decade before I saw Star Wars. I knew what Star Wars was, as you would anything that is such a huge part of your culture. Though, when I finally saw it/them, I could only see it through Spaceballs-colored glasses. It all seemed so innocent, so obvious. My older brothers — and everyone born before 1980 — watched them in the proper order, the original followed by its sardonic twin. When I watched Spaceballs, I didn’t even know Star Wars existed.

Maybe that was a first. Maybe, at that point, the culture was becoming so accelerated, the intellectual turnover so quick, that you could see the parody before the original. Before, readers and viewers knew the source material and then saw its ironic counterpart; you would see a John Ford film before you saw Blazing Saddles. But those born after, say, 1980, would have every chance of seeing the parody before, and not because of, the work it sent up. Today, a fourteen-year-old probably knows about the next Not Another film and not what it is parodying, where it originated. They’re partially aware of the primary content like I was of Star Wars; it’s there, but only insofar as it spawned its cooler, more cynical offspring. Bad thing?

Jesse Klein is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Austin. He last wrote in these pages about the film Ex-Drummer.

"The Hands of Angels" - Elton John & Leon Russell (mp3)

"Never Too Old (To Hold Somebody)" - Elton John & Leon Russell (mp3)

"A Dream Come True" - Elton John & Leon Russell (mp3)