What did you think? What sentences jumped out at you? What questions stuck with you? (Starts on p. 177 of the new collection of David Foster Wallace's essays, Both Flesh and Not.)

Makes me think about the big, mastodont-movies like Ben Hur and Cleopatra. Wonder if the same equation would fit into those movies. Overly expensive, and more money was put in the scenery thanin the script...? Altough, I hold the story in Ben Hur a lot better than T2.

Also interesting to read about DFW thoughts on Titanic before it launched... Would you say it proved his thesis, or disproved it?

This essay is interesting for me in terms of the collection as a whole, in part because I think that its mere existence is a repudiation of some of the smugness that comes out in moments of "Fictional Futures," and so we can see a development, maybe even a populist one, but anyway certainly a move away from overtly academic language and theoretical problems in Wallace's writing over time. I'm also thinking about the way he deals with language in The Empty Plenum and then later in Politics and the English Language.

Josh, I think you're absolutely right. A full decade passed between "Fictional Futures" and "The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2." You can start to see DFW vary his sentence structure more deliberately and choose his words less painstakingly (but just as carefully). In general, he's more at ease.

My favorite moment in the piece was when DFW declares:

"There is no quicker or more efficient way to kill what is interesting and original about an interesting, original young director than to give that director a huge budget and lavish F/X resources."

I think the same could be said of many fields, though most fields just don't have enough money to possibly sustain the absurdity (still) in evidence in Hollywood. Blow the possibilities wide open too early and all the useful "impediments to passion" (to borrow a phrase from "Back in New Fire") vanish.

It makes me wonder, though: is it ever safe to give a creator unlimited resources? What would they have to prove in order for this to be a worthwhile bet?

There has to be some kind of sweet spot, don't you think?