David Foster Wallace: The first teacher Paul Thomas Anderson “fell in love with”
Director Paul Thomas Anderson has created some of the greatest films of the 21st Century. Amongst his ever-growing oeuvre are masterpieces, including There Will Be Blood, The Master, Phantom Thread and Magnolia. Quite simply, Anderson is one of the most talented filmmakers alive.
Anderson was a once student at Emerson College for two semesters, where he studied English, and his teacher was the famed American author David Foster Wallace. Anderson later claimed that Wallace was, in fact, the “first teacher [he] fell in love with,” making the comments on the WTF podcast with Marc Maron.
“When I was at Emerson for that year, David Foster Wallace, who was a great writer who was not known then, was my teacher, Anderson told Maron. “[He] was the first teacher I fell in love with. I’d never found anybody else like that at any of the other schools I’d been to.”
Anderson went on to explain how Wallace had helped him with a paper on Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, a text of which Wallace was in personal admiration. “I called him once. He was very generous with his phone number,” Anderson continued. “He said, ‘Call me if you got any questions’, and I called him a couple of times. I ran a few ideas by him about this paper that I was writing.”
“I was writing a paper on Don DeLillo’s White Noise,” Anderson added. “I’d come up with a couple of crazy ideas, and I don’t remember the conversation well, but I just remember him being real generous at, like, you know, midnight the night before it was due … I’d love to go back and read White Noise again.”
Wallace was best known for his mammoth 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which explored themes of addiction, consumerism, the media and self-actualisation. He wrote several excellent collections of short stories, including Oblivion and Girl with Curious Hair, but tragically took his own life in 2008 while still working on his novel The Pale King, which was posthumously released in 2011.
Anderson has also mentioned Wallace in a Reddit AMA session, in which he was asked what his favourite memory of the writer is. He replied, “He turned me onto Don DeLillo. And he looked at us like we were all failing him… sweetly.” Noah Baumbach has recently directed an awful version of DeLillo’s White Noise; how wonderful it might have been with Anderson at the helm.
