"It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies...in be[ing] willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this. And the effort to actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don't seem to have yet." (David Foster Wallace, quoted by D.T. Max in "The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace's struggle to surpass Infinite Jest")

[Spoiler Warning: This piece may reveal certain plot elements of Two Lovers. I don't think this would in any way affect a first-time viewing of the film, but consider this a heads-up anyway.]

I'm not going to impress anyone by arguing that we live in a post-modern society. We are aware, perhaps now more than ever before, of not just popular culture but of the mechanisms and processes behind popular culture. It's not a new phenomenon for works of art to reference other works of art, of course, but only fairly recently has reference in and of itself become culture. What do you say about the style of a director paying homage to, say, Wes Anderson, when Anderson himself is already paying homage to Francois Truffaut, who himself was already paying homage to his own heroes? This type of influence-citing can of course be meaningful and worthwhile, openly honoring the history of one's predecessors while applying their styles to expressive new forms of discourse; I love Anderson (both Wes and P.T.) and Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers (and so on) and begrudge none their quotations. But it's harder, if not impossible, to seriously defend Epic Movie and its ilk, or the disingenuous condescension of VH1's I Love the... series, or a self-consuming celebrity culture in which one can be famous simply for being famous.

Given this, it is easy for ironic detachment to become our dominant attitude. When we've become so consciously aware of how our culture functions, it's tempting not to take any of it seriously. David Foster Wallace wrote and spoke frequently about the difficulty of producing sincere art in such an environment. How to create "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" (as he wrote in an exceptional essay on Dostoyevsky collected in Wallace's Consider the Lobster) when anything really emotionally open and direct tends to be rejected as embarrassing or cliché or, even worse, uncool?

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