Listen to What David Foster Wallace Learned from ‘Blue Velvet’

Have you ever felt like your creative work wasn’t being understood? In this video essay, author David Foster Wallace discusses his experience in graduate school where he felt his professors rejected his avant-garde writing.

If you didn’t know, Wallace was a celebrated American novelist, essayist, and short story writer known for his innovative and experimental style. His most famous work, the 1996 novel Infinite Jest, is considered a landmark of postmodern literature and explores themes of addiction, entertainment, and American culture.

But Wallace wasn’t one of the greatest writers immediately. In fact, he didn’t even know what his voice was. He then describes watching the movie Blue Velvet by David Lynch and how it completely changed his perspective on art.

Check out this video from Iconoclast Writing and let’s talk after.

David Foster Wallace: On Being Entirely Yourself

The video starts with Wallace talking about his journey in graduate school, where he was writing avant garde stuff, that was actually pretty bad, but he didn’t know it yet.

Then, in 1986, Wallace sees the movie Blue Velvet by David Lynch. The movie is a new and original kind of surrealism and it has a profound impact on Wallace. He realizes that the point of art is not to follow a tradition but to be entirely yourself. True artists have their own vision and way of seeing the world.

They are entirely themselves.

If their work is authentic, it will resonate with the audience. That’s what true art is.

Wallace talks about how Blue Velvet helped him break out of his narrow view of what art could be, and helped him find his authentic voice. He acknowledges that film and literature are different mediums, but this experience with a movie helped him as a writer.

That leads us to one of my favorite Wallace quotes. He says, “What the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves. They’ve got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and then if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”

I think that is directly applicable to what artists think and feel today.

Let me know what you think in the comments.