An Excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s “Big Red Son” (1998)

This essay was an excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s book Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005) entitled “The Big Red Son,” which recounts Wallace’s visit to the 1998 Adult Video News (AVN) Awards – the Oscars of porn. An article at the Observer tells the story:

“The following summer Spin Magazine happened to ask Wallace to write a piece on that very topic, offering to send him to the 15th Annual Adult Video News (AVN) Awards in Las Vegas so he could do to whatever he found there what he’d done to the Illinois State Fair for Harper’s a few years earlier.

The trouble was, Wallace had decided not to take any magazine assignments for a while so that he could work on other things. Plus, he felt like he if he wrote about the AVN Awards, it should be for Premiere [Magazine]. So he called. . . and asked if [they’d] let him do the piece under a pseudonym” [1].

The writers who accompanied Wallace described his behavior:

“We’d be on the floor at the Sands Convention Center during this whole porno expo, of which the AVN Awards were the ostensible climax. All these boobs and porno stars giving autographs, this whole sub-Fellini spectacle.

He walked around with me and Evan on the show floor, and he’d do that for about a half-hour and then he’d go outside, out into the hall, and sit up against a wall and write in his legal pad for about 45 minutes. … Of course this was all filtered through his imagination, because there were huge substantial bits of the AVN story that are fictionalized.” [2]

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David Foster Wallace:

“All five marginal and male print journalists assigned to cover the 1998 AVN Awards concur. [E]ven just watching the dozen or so big or high profile adult releases of the past year – Bad Wives, Zazel, A Week and a Half in the Life of a Prostitute, Miscreants, New Wave Hookers V, Seduce and Destroy, Buttman in Barcelona, Gluteus to the Maximus – fried everyone’s glandular circuit board.

By the end of the awards. . . none of us were even having normal, biological, first-thing-in-the-morning or jouncy bus ride between hotel’s erections. And when approached even innocently by members of the opposite sex, we all now recoiled as from a hot flame – which made our party a kind of strange and challenging breakfast gig, according to our Sunday morning waitress.

[Still quoting here], By comparison, last year there were approximately 375 films that were eligible for the academy awards that these voters – meaning, different voters from the AVN voters, presumably – were required to see. AVN had to watch more than ten times the amount of releases in order to develop these nominations.

Usage and repetition here are verbatim again, “4,000 divided by 375 is indeed, over 10.” From the acceptance speech of Mr. Tom Byron – Saturday, January 10th, 1998, Caesar’s Forum Ballroom, Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Casino Complex, Las Vegas, Nevada – upon winning AVN’s 1998 “Male Performer of the Year Award,” and with no little feeling, quote,

“I want to thank every beautiful woman I ever put my co** inside.”

Laughter. Cheers. Ovation. From the acceptance speech of Ms. Jeanna Fine (ibid), upon winning AVN’s 1998 “Best Supporting Actress Award” for her role in Rob Black’s Miscreants, “Jesus, which one is this for, Miscreants? Jesus, that’s another one where I read the script and said ‘Oh shit, I am going to go to hell.'”

Laughter. Cheers.

“But that’s okay, because all my friends will be there too.” Huge wave of laughter. Cheers. Applause. From the inter-award banter of Mr. Bobby Slayton, professional comedian and Master of Ceremonies for the 1997 AVNA’s, “I know I’m looking good though, I mean younger. I’ve been using a new Grecian formula; every time I see a gray hair, I fu** my wife in the ass.”

No laughter. Scattered groans. “Fu** you, that’s a great joke.” Bobby Slayton. . . who kept introducing every female performer as “the woman I’m going to cut my dick off for,” and astounded every journalist in attendance both with his unfunniness and his resemblance to every apartment complex coke dealer we had ever met. He was mercifully absent from the 1998 Awards Gala.

The 98’ MC is one Robert Schimmel – alumni of Living Color and a Howard Stern regular. Schimmel. . . is no less coarse than Bobby Slayton, but a lot better. He does a piano mime of someone attempting intercourse with a love doll, he’s been too lazy to blow up all the way. . .

All of 1998’s marginal print journalists are together at table 189 at the very back of the Ball Room. Most of these reporters are from the sorts of Men’s Magazines that sit shrink-wrapped behind the cash registers of convenience stores. And they are a worldly and jaded crew indeed. . .

The adult industry is vulgar; would anyone disagree? One of the AVN Awards categories is Best Anal-Themed Feature. Another is Best Overall Marketing Campaign, Company Image. Irresistible, a 1983 winner in several categories, has been misspelled “Irresistable” for 15 straight years.

The industry is not just vulgar, its predictably vulgar. All the cliches are true. The typical porn producer really is the ugliest little man with a bad toupee and the pinky ring the size of a Rolaids. The typical porn director really is the guy who uses the word “class” as a noun that means “refinement.”

The typical porn starlet really is the lady in likre evening wear with tattoos all down her arms, whose both smoking and chewing gum while telling journalists how grateful she is to [some company]. . . for footing her breast enlargement bill – and meaning it.

The whole AVN weekend comprises what Mr. Dick Filth calls an “irony free zone.” But of course, we should keep in mind that the word “vulgar” has many different dictionary definitions and that only a couple of these have to do with “lewdness” or “bad taste.”

At root, “vulgar” just means popular on a mass scale; it is the semantic opposite of “pretentious” or “snobby.” It is humility with a comb over. . . It is big, big business.

 

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Sources:

1. Leon Neyfakh, “Premiere Editor Glen Kenny Remembers David,” The Observer. September 8, 2008. Link provided here.
2. Ibid.
3. This excerpt was personally written down by me from an audio reading of Foster Wallace’s essay in a YouTube video.

 

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Mentionables:

1. The featured image to this article was taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_R%C3%AAve_(Picasso)
2. The featured image to this article is Pablo Picasso’s The Dream (Le Reve), 1932.