Paragraph of the Week

From Kathleen Fitzpatrick's "Infinite Summer: Reading in the Social Network," via Howling Fantods:

What made Wallace’s work so phenomenally powerful for so many readers, I would argue, has to do with its ability to connect three consistent impulses in contemporary fiction in a way that no other writer has managed quite so well. In Wallace’s work, we repeatedly see wed high-modern/postmodern experimental pyrotechnics not only with an incisive cultural critique but also with a deeply personal concern for quotidian human suffering. That is to say that Wallace’s fiction combines rich investments in form, in ideas, and in emotion. Any number of writers of the last fifty years can be read as bringing together two of these strains in contemporary fiction, but hardly anyone else has managed all three in a way that feels to the reader not simply sincere but unflinchingly honest. And it’s these three factors together, I would argue, that have something to do with the degree of connection that readers have felt with Wallace’s writing: not only is that writing serious enough to make the reader work non-trivially in its apprehension, and not only does the writing cause the reader to think seriously about the world in which she lives, but it also helps the reader, on some too often devalued level, to understand herself within that world.

Paragraph of the Week

From "Mikan and Modernity," an essay in FreeDarko's The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History:

When [George] Mikan joined the pros as a member of the NBL's Chicago American Gears, the challenges posed by the 6'10" star were undeniable. No longer was an irregularity of space something that could be corrected through a strong governing body. It now arose not from the field of play, but from the differences between the players on it. Mikan led the NBL in scoring for six straight seasons; basketball's best player was also its most unique.

For more on the geometry of sports, see Infinite Jest.

Paragraph of the Week

Lorin Stein, writing on the excellent The Paris Review Daily blog:

The best thing that ever happened to me as a would-be writer was reading Infinite Jest. I was also twenty-four and spent my days sitting in front of an empty screen, full of a sense of duty and despair. That book cured me. It said all the things I'd have wanted my novel to say—things I'd never have dreamt up on my own in a million years. Keep reading and you will find the book that lets you off the hook. The world doesn't need your fiction. The question is whether you need it, and over time that question will answer itself without interference from you.

Helplessness of the Self: James Wood on David Foster Wallace

It was my true pleasure to spend a portion of this evening listening to James Wood talk about David Foster Wallace's short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, part of The Critic's Voice series at the 92Y. The idea behind this series is to have Wood read a book for the first time before sharing his thoughts with an audience. It's important to keep this basic format in mind, because Wood was very much not presenting a unified reading of Brief Interviews. That wasn't his goal. Instead, it seems that he wanted to think aloud about the book, throwing out his initial reactions as a reader.

This was a wholly worthwhile experience mostly because Wood is an incredibly astute reader. This should come as no surprise to people familiar with his writing, but part of the joy of the talk was to hear how a great reader approaches some really good fiction. And Wood, in fact, started off the talk by reading several passages of exceptional writing, including such gems as "Whereas but your basic smoothie" (p. 31) and "Trim and good and good legs--she'd had a kid but wasn't all blown out and veiny and sagged" (p. 27). Wood referred to these examples of speech--repellent and  horrible as they are--as the local pleasures of the book, noting that there is a good American tradition of capturing speech and consciousness.

From there, Wood proceeded to address what he identified as the major theme of the collection: the helplessness of the self, and the trouble of escaping from the self. This is a well-trod trope to those familiar with Wallace's body of work, and Wood did a nice job of demonstrating how this happens throughout a selection of the stories, performing, in one particularly nice segment, a fairly close read of "The Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)," in which the narrator has a recurring nightmare of being blind. Wood called this a typical Wallace modulation; even this 1.5 page story which may at first glance appear to be a straightforward account of a person putting his feet in someone else's shoes becomes overwhelmingly solipsistic. The narrator doesn't devote any thought to how blind people cope with reality. Instead, the story occurs in his head, a solipsistic recounting of the hardships of the day after the night in which he dreamed that he was blind. It's a story that looks like it's all about empathy, but which, in the end, describes the self-centered experience of one person. The same is true, Wood claimed, of "The Depressed Person." Wood read an extended excerpt beginning with the last sentence of p. 67 through most of p. 68. For me, one of the key phrases which demonstrates the essential solipsism of the depressed person occurs at the very end of p. 67: "and here the depressed person waited patiently for an episode of retching in the especially available trusted friend to pass so that she could take the risk of sharing this with her." Remember that this particular trusted friend had been diagnosed with cancer. I especially love the emphasis on taking the risk of sharing. The depressed person truly cannot escape from her own self.

The last major topic Wood covered was the amount of information granted to--or withheld from--the reader. In certain cases, Wood argued, Wallace withholds exactly the information that the reader is most interested in knowing. "Adult World," "Think," and"Signifying Nothing" all hinge on repressing the flow of information to the reader. Wood's main critique, in fact, is that Wallace repeatedly reveals too much, playing his hand too heavily. In Brief Interview #46--the one which mentions Victor Frankl, beginning on p. 116--the hideous man displays an intimacy with the aftereffects of rape that could only come, Wood claimed, from a victim; in Wood's opinion, Wallace should have left it to the reader to figure that out without the explicit explanation at the end of that interview. Maybe the most interesting analysis of the evening came on this exact point regarding Brief Interview #20 (the very last interview in the book). Here too, Wood believes that the hideous man too openly identifies himself with the rapist of the story, most damningly at the very end of that section, when he says: "can you see why there's no way I could let her just go away after this?" (I'll admit that I hadn't thought that this line, along with certain other details--mostly surrounding the vividness of the hideous man's description of the scene occurring on the gravel--implicated the hideous man as the rapist himself, but I am now eager to reread that story.)

From there, Wood took several questions from the audience. I won't touch on all of them, but I do want to mention one question in particular, because it's tied up with Wood's reading of Brief Interview #20. One gentleman asked whether Wood thinks Wallace relies too heavily on "tricks," in particular the footnotes and the brackets, and whether this detracts attention from the empathy and emotional depth of the fiction. Wood responded that in certain ways, it feels like Wallace is performing, and that he would prefer to have seen Wallace perform less. On the other hand, Wood argued, Wallace can often be too much of a realist. This is a point Wood made in How Fiction Works, but, he said, even though Wallace has very good reasons--most of which have to do with recreating the experiences described in the story--to extend "The Depressed Person" past 30 pages, it can sometimes become unreadable. (While I thought "The Depressed Person" was readable, I couldn't help but think of the infamous "Wardine" section of Infinite Jest.) One of the nice things about literary conventions is that we recognize that the whole story can't be told and that sometimes it's worth forgoing some realism for a more concise and concentrated reading experience. (I find this point really fascinating in light of this article comparing Infinite Jest and Wikipedia. Is there really a need for limits?) And, on the third hand, Wood said that he wasn't so thrilled by the prospect of more empathy because it sometimes devolved into sentimentality. Zadie Smith is so concerned with upholding the emotional depth of these stories--as outlined in Changing My Mind--that she, Wood said, fails to appreciate the complexity of the collection. Brief Interview #20 is not a straightforward story of a formerly hideous man learning a valuable lesson from the woman on the blanket. Even if you don't go so far as to identify the hideous man as the rapist, Wood said that it's crucial to recognize that the story, as we saw earlier, is complex.

There were a few additional questions asked--several of them were really good--but it's getting late and my notes aren't as solid on those points. This summary is based on the quick notes I was able to take during the proceedings, so if anyone wants to fill in missing details or to correct mistaken information, please shoot me an email or leave them in the comments.

OK GO's Endlessly Fascinating New Video

So here's the hottest thing on the internet today:



And here's the best thing said about this video today, from Ken Tremendous's Twitter: "I might just keep watching this, over and over, until I die. This may be J.O.I.'s 'The Entertainment.'"

DFW and the Village Chorus

I just finished James Wood's excellent How Fiction Works. This is a longish quote, but it's excellent. Wood has just described how authors utilize what he calls free indirect style, whereby the character being described affects the perspective, diction, and style of even a third-person narrator. He continues with the following short chapter on DFW and his use of this technique:

A contemporary writer like David Foster Wallace wants to push this tension to the limit. He writes from his characters' voices and simultaneously over them, obliterating them in order to explore larger, if more abstract, questions of language. In this passage from his story "The Suffering Channel," he evokes the ruined argot of Manhattan media-speak:

The other Style piece the associate editor had referred to concerned The Suffering Channel, a wide grid cable venture that Atwater had gotten Laurel Manderley to do an end run and pitch directly to the editor's head intern for WHAT IN THE WORLD. Atwater was one of three full time salarymen tasked to the WITW feature, which received .75 editorial pages per week, and was the closest any of the BSG weeklies got to freakshow or tabloid, and was a bone of contention at the very highest levels of Style. The staff size and large font space meant that Skip Atwater was officially contracted for one 400 word piece every three weeks, except the juniormost of the WITW salarymen had been on half time ever since Eckleschafft-Böd had forced Mrs. Anger to cut the editorial budget for everything except celebrity news, so in reality it was more like three finished pieces every weeks.

Here is another example of what I called "unidentified free indirect style." As in the Chekhov story, the language hovers around the viewpoint of the character (the journalist Atwater), but really emanates from a kind of "village chorus"--it is an amalgam of the kind of language we might expect this particular community to speak if they were telling the story.

And later: "In Wallace's case, the language of his unidentified narration is fairly ugly, and a bit painful for more than a page or two." Even later-er: "Wallace pushes to parodic extremes his full-immersion method: he does not flinch at narrating twenty or thirty pages in the style quoted above."

Anyone who's slogged through the Wardine section of Infinite Jest is here nodding in agreement.

Paragraph of the Week

From "Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning," by Donald Barthelme:

For Poulet, it is not enough to speak of seizing the moment. It is rather a question of, and I quote, 'recognizing in the instant which lives and dies, which surges out of nothingness and which ends in dream, an intensity and depth of significance which ordinarily attaches only to the whole of existence.'

I usually refrain from commenting on these paragraphs, but this idea seems especially interesting in comparison to Don Gately's approach to suffering in Infinite Jest: in brief, that great suffering can be overcome by recognizing that each individual moment is tolerable.

NY Jets fans are either bad spellers, or are offering up some tribute to Infinite Jest

Jets fans don't always strike me as the brightest, more civilized bunch of people though, so I'd have to guess: A) Bad spellers.

This is the biggest case of false advertising since The Neverending Story

One of the sad things about reading is that it always ends. Usually that's to be expected, but it's still sad.

I just finished reading Infinite Jest, DFW's 1,100 page novel. The thing took me 2.5 months to read. That's a full quarter of a year, if the year only had ten months. Point is, I spent a long time reading this book, and I spent many hours with these characters. The characters became my friends, but not in the creepy way. (I promise, not in the creepy way.) But one of the really nice things about literature is that I get an inside look into the thoughts of a whole range of characters. In real life, I am privy only to my own thoughts, and I only understand my own motivations and goals. But, for example, at the end of Moby Dick, I felt disappointed that they failed in their quest because I'd been along for the ride, and I invested a whole lot of myself into the reading process. And, similarly, I have always thought of Ishmael as the most relatable character in literature because he interprets his world very much through his own eyes, very much like how I interpret my own world. We may have lost track of the point here, which was: it's sad when literature ends.

The really important French thinker named Jean-François Lyotard set out to define postmodernism, and he went about doing that through a pretty cool understanding of language. He wrote this book, upon the request of the Canadian government, called The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. He argues that each community—no matter how small—develops a language to suit its needs. A language community may consist of all speakers of a given language, or all those familiar with a certain dialect. On a smaller scale, academics follow certain rules in the language they utilize, as do doctors, lawyers, movie producers and football coaches. It is this recognition of language as a highly developed game subject to certain unnamed rules, Lyotard argues, that allows for the reexamination of art and literature, for, if the rules are constructed and not natural, they may be safely ignored. What happens to the game when people stop playing by the rules?

This critical inspection of art and literature was propelled forward by important technological advances:

The greatest challenge lay in the fact that photographic and cinematic processes could accomplish better and faster—and with a diffusion a hundred thousand times greater than was possible for pictorial and narrative realism—the task that academism had assigned to realism: protecting consciousness from doubt. Industrial photography and cinema always have the edge over painting and the novel when it is a matter of stabilizing the referent, of ordering it from a point of view that would give it recognizable meaning…since the structures in these images and sequences form a code of communication among them all. So effects of reality—or the phantasms of realism, if you prefer—are multiplied.

It is this stark realization of the limits of their chosen medium which led painters and novelists to “question the rules of the art of painting and narration as learned and received from their predecessors. They soon find that such rules are so many methods of deception, seduction and reassurance that make it impossible to be ‘truthful.’” Those “artists and writers who agree to question the rules of the plastic and narrative arts” are faced with a blank canvass of possibility. Their art may consist of anything and everything, even a urinal. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain may be the most obvious outcome of a lawless art community, and Lyotard, makes use of this example: “The Duchampian readymade does no more than signify, actively and parodically, this continual process of the dispossession of the painter’s craft, and even the artist’s.” What, then, is the purpose of art, if mechanical processes can produce more striking and realistic reproductions and if the rules governing art are recognized for their artifice? Quite simply, “the question of modern aesthetics is not ‘What is beautiful?’ but ‘What is art to be (and what is literature to be)?’”

In the realm of literature, postmodern writers have, in large measure, adopted this question as their own, as they have devoted countless novels to stretching and defining the boundaries of what a novel may be. The meaning of literature can never be divorced from the form it takes, and it is therefore no surprise that writers have examined the limits of the novel through the very medium which they are investigating.

Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” is formatted in an interesting yet ultimately conventional way. The story is framed as a historical document from the personal collection of Dr. Yu Tsun, a protagonist in the events which caused a delay of nearly two weeks of the Allied offensive against the Serb-Montauban Line during the First World War. Borges breaks free from the constraints of literature entirely through the content of his narrative. Borges, in this story, describes the Labyrinth of Ts’ui Pen. Ts’ui Pen, it is related, constructed both a labyrinth and a book, and it took more than one hundred years after his death for Dr. Stephen Albert to discover that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same. Albert believed, also, that Ts’ui Pen “had intended to construct a labyrinth which was truly infinite.” Until the research of Albert, the book had been regarded as a “contradictory jumble of irresolute drafts,” for, “in the third chapter the hero dies, yet in the fourth he is alive again.”

Albert, before landing on the correct understanding of Ts’ui Pen’s truly infinite book, proposed several theories:

The only way I could surmise was that it be a cyclical, or circular, volume, a volume whose last page would be identical to the first, so that one might go on indefinitely. I also recalled that at the centre of the 1000 Nights, when the queen Scheherazade (through some magical distractedness on the part of the copyist) begins to retell, verbatim, the story of the 1001 Nights, with the risk of returning once again to the night on which she is telling it—and so on, ad infinitum. I also pictured to myself a platonic, hereditary sort of work, passed down from father to son, in which each new individual would add a chapter or with reverent care correct his elders’ pages.

Albert, however, was not satisfied with these theories, for they failed to align, he believed, with a discovered letter fragment written by Ts’ui Pen, which states: “I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.” This letter propelled Albert to the authentic understanding of a novel which is truly infinite:

Almost instantly, I saw it—the garden of forking paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase ‘several futures (not all)’ suggested to me the image of a forking in time, rather than in space…In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible-to-disentangle Ts’ui Pen, the character chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, thereby, ‘several futures,’ several times, which themselves proliferate and fork. That is the explanation for the novel’s contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger knocks at his door; Fang decides to kill him. Naturally, there are various possible outcomes—Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they can both live, they can both be killed, and so on. In Ts’ui Pen’s novel, all the outcomes in fact occur; each is the starting point for future bifurcations.

Novels which conform to the rules of their genre—and to the rules of literature, in general—are finite. Borges, in the course of one short story, introduces four variations of an infinite novel. Although he does not compose an infinite novel utilizing any of the options outlined in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” innovative novels—which expand the horizons of what literature may be—form the heart of this work of fiction.

One of the really cool things about Infinite Jest is that you can't really understand the first chapter until you've read the rest of the book. It's a nice little cyclical move that keeps the book alive and almost got me to start rereading the book. Maybe—like Borges’s story—literature doesn't have to end.

If there's one thing that we as a band want to deal with, it's the issues.

I spent this past shabbat in Denver, sharing the guest spotlight with a rabbi and the about six dudes who comprise the YU Summer Kollel being hosted--for the second consecutive year!--in Denver. One of these dudes gave a shiur which I attended, the main thesis of which was that everyone should listen to rabbis. The visiting rabbi spoke during the prayer service and his main thesis was that everyone should learn the Torah, trust God and love God. I don't object to the concepts of learning the Torah, trusting God, loving God, and listening to rabbis (OK, maybe I object to that last one just a little), but at what point have we created a situation in which no one actually learns the Torah because rabbis are too busy spending all the available Torah-learning time telling everyone to, for example, learn the Torah. We're already there, willing to learn. Teach us something.

It's not just rabbis, though, who behave in this manner. The thing that really bothers me about politics is that the media seems incapable of talking about the important parts of it, i.e., policies and stuff like that. It seems like all political analysis these days is focused on how well each candidate plays the game of politics. Monday's NYT provides a good example, with a front-page headline of "McCain Assails Obama Over Foreign Tour." The focus of the article is about possibly the least important aspect of the 2008 Presidential campaign: what McCain thought of Obama's trip abroad. Of course McCain isn't going to be super-enthusiastic about his rival's foreign policy; he's trying to convince the country (or more like Ohio, Florida and those like three other states that aren't already decided three months--or years--in advance) that the other guy shouldn't be president. This is inherently a non-story which NYT makes into one by placing it on the front page.

Infinite Jest is set in a bunch of different places, but one of the key settings is this halfway house for recovering alcoholics. Numerous AA meetings are recorded, and the whole concept makes me terrified of alcoholism. But these meetings also spend what seems to one of the book's characters an inordinate amount of time convincing the participants to keep coming back for more meetings. This makes sense in the context of AA, which is all about keeping sober for just one day at a time. But in other instances can we all just agree to quit playing around and try dealing for a change with issues of substance?

Art Controls Your Brain

Oscar Wilde's wonderful essay "The Decay of Lying" takes a really interesting look at the importance and functions of art. It's a short piece, and certainly well worth reading. Wilde understands that art, in its truest sense, occurs in the theater of the mind. My favorite line, oft-selected as my google-message for the world to see, goes a little something like this:

Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.

There are a bunch of different ways to think about this sentence but probably my favorite is the direction Wilde takes later in the essay, as he explains that, sure, the clouds over the Thames in London existed well before the painters started depicting this cloud/river scheme. But this landscape was perceived by people (and remember, Things are because we see them) in a very different way after it was painted. The scene itself had maybe little to do with the paintings, but what people thought about after seeing the paintings was changed possibly forever.

I don't think this is an isolated example. Just today for instance, I was cruising around town with a few Publishing School classmates and someone mentioned that the song playing on the radio (which I can't for the life of me remember what it was) always reminded her of Animal House. Perhaps even more poignantly, a few minutes later some song called Windy started playing. I had never heard this song before but I immediately recognized it as the basis for Schlock Rock's Rashi song. Schlock Rock's version of the song is so ingrained in my brain that I am unable to hear any other rendition without thinking of Rashi.

There are tons more instances I can think of: I never liked sweet potatoes until I read The Power of One, in which the main character goes into these like long discourses about the delicious steam of a hot sweet potato rising off the plate on a cold day. Infinite Jest is set in this tripartite schematic, one portion of which occurs in junior tennis academy. I'm awful at tennis, but that doesn't keep me from desperately wanting to play every time I walk by the tennis courts on the way to publishing class. There's this car-stereo star near my house called Illusions. Every time I drive by that place I deepen my voice, say the name of the store and add a ", Michael. A trick is something a whore does for money."

These may seem like pretty insubstantial examples, but controlling what I think is pretty damn powerful.

What art has influenced the way you think? (The comments would be an excellent place for this discussion.)

Laugh Tracks, Lazy Writing, and Respecting the Audience

My 17 day excursion to Europe was marked by the usual lacks. Clean clothing. Internet. Kosher food. To that list I wish to add: quality reading. I was limited to one issue of New York Magazine purchased in Newark Airport (I was curious what it's got that so tempted Leitch), a copy of The Elements of Style, and, as part of a homework assignment for publishing school, a manuscript of a book by some dude named Jonathan Green, titled K Blows Top, detailing Khrushchev's various visits to the US. These pickings seemed especially slim because Ryanair's luggage-weight restrictions convinced me to leave DFW's Infinite Jest at home, even though I was 276 pages in (only 705 to go! Not including endnotes.) upon departure.

Back in the States, I've been carrying IJ with me pretty much everywhere. A friend asked me--probably upon some unsolicited singing of the book's praise on my part--why I liked this book so much, and I repeated something that Dave Eggers mentioned in the foreword to the tenth anniversary edition, that the book is over 1,000 pages long, and there is not one lazy sentence. Then some nine-year old came over and started crying about something, so I didn't get a chance to elaborate on why I would like a book just because there are no lazy sentences. And, thinking about it now, it's not so much that each sentence says what it wants to say in an interesting/non-cliche/unlazy way, but that the book is tight. In the 276 pages that I've read so far, there aren't wasted sentences. Each chapter and paragraph and sentence adds something. IJ is--if such a thing is possible in a phonebook sized novel--concise. It's free of redundancies. This is accomplished, I believe, because DFW respects the reader. Not everything is immediately obvious, but the reader who pays attention will make connections, notice trends, and, eventually, figure out what the hell is meant by all those obscure and invented acronyms. The experimentation that is pulled off here just wouldn't be possible if the author felt compelled to perform the literary equivalent of ruining a joke by explaining how and why it's funny.

It's for this reason that I stopped watching TV which doesn't respect me enough to allow me to decide if something is funny. It's not just that the laugh track on shows is insulting/distracting; it's also that these shows are written for the laugh track, instead of for the audience. I'll let this guy explain, in a post helpfully titled "Laugh Tracks Suck":

Writers avoid surprising or challenging the live audience, because if they're not following along, then the laugh track suffers. So they stick to tired, conventional setups and interchangeable jokes along the same lines (setup/punch line, pratfall, sight gag) we've seen a million times.

I think this problem extends beyond TV, though. There's writing which feels like it's written with a laugh track. The joke is made so obvious that it seems like the author thinks that letting the reader know that that last line was supposed to be funny becomes more important that actually just writing something creatively funny: Oh, that was a joke: I better laugh now. Rick Reilly here comes to mind.

On the other hand, I never get the sense that David Foster Wallace writes with a laugh track.

This is the part of the post where I start wondering about the effect of the author's audience. I don't think it's a coincidence that Leitch, one of the writers who most consistently respects his readers, has repeatedly made clear how he writes for himself and those people who choose to read his work. He's not trying to please everyone, because he knows that's not possible, and--even if it was--it wouldn't be any fun. But maybe even more importantly, the format he uses allows for immediate feedback and criticism. If he writes a post that's meandering and repetitive and boring, he's going to hear about it from a demanding set of readers and commenters. The writing isn't lazy because it can't afford to be. Leitch needs to respect his readers because they'll give him hell if he doesn't.

These last few paragraphs may have been a little bit vague, so let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. (If I realize that the last few paragraphs aren't the clearest they could possibly be, is it laziness that causes me to acknowledge vagueness without, you know, revising and rewriting? Perhaps. But this is just a blog that no one reads. It's probably supposed to be a little lazy.) Last week I saw Will Smith's new movie, Hancock. There are two aspects of this movie which immediately struck me as lazy. The first half of the movie is this repetitive stream of one joke: Hancock is a superhero, but he's mean to people. The director thought it necessary to devote about eight different scenes to hammering home this one point. Hey look, Hancock is being mean to that kid. Ooh, now he's damaging public property. And now he's mean to this other kid. Once this basic premise is established (which happens within like the first eight minutes of the film) the rest of the first half of the movie doesn't add anything. It detracts. These scenes are nothing more than filler in a movie which, even with these scenes included, clocks in at only 92 minutes. This, to me, represents a lack of respect for the audience. Director Peter Berg apparently never considered the possibility that the audience would either notice or care that the first half of the movie is just one gag, played over again without innovation or development.

Once the director (finally) tires of this prank, the film shifts gears and begins focusing on Hancock and his search for his own identity. This is all well and good, but the film never bothers to answer any of the questions it raises. The brief explanations of this superhero's background are beyond vague: he is a god or an angel. That's it. No elaboration is provided, because, for some reason, Berg couldn't imagine that his audience would be interested in learning about this character that maybe he, the director, would have good reason for the audience to care about . More important to him is the climatic fight scene. The film just flat out ignores any story which it could possibly tell. Which is misguided, because the best part about superhero movies is the creation of the hero's universe. I want to know origin stories, history, and secret weaknesses. I don't need a superhero movie that's only one long string of action sequences. We already have Rambo for that.

That's not to say that no information can be withheld. DFW does that all over the place in IJ (for example, with the nature of the book's eponymous film). But he always does it to arrange suspense and an eventual revelation. Hancock somehow ends without filling in any of the obvious lacunae. Are they waiting for a sequel to explain the first movie? I, for one, will pass on the inevitable sequel. You, Mr. Berg, already had a chance to explain yourself, your movie, and your title character, and you decided that I wouldn't be interested.