SINCERITY

He closes the hood. Group moves across to other car.

JUDY and PLATO. The other kids are behind them. JUDY looks to see that their attention isn't on her, then speaks quietly to PLATO.

 JUDY

 Is he your friend?

 PLATO

 Yes. My Best Friend.

 JUDY

 What's he like?

 PLATO

 Oh, I don't know. 

You have to get to know him. 
He doesn't say much but when he does you know he means it. 

He's sincere.

JUDY

 Well, that's The Main Thing--

Don't you think so?

PLATO

 Maybe next summer he's going to take me hunting with him--and fishing. 
I want him to teach me how and I bet he won't get mad if I

 goof. 
His name's Jim. It's really James but he likes Jim more.

 (laughing)

 People he really likes--he lets call him "Jamie."

JUDY

 Want to finish my hamburger? I only took a bite.

 PLATO

 Okay.

Full shot. Guarded cars. 

JIM is close in f.g. at wheel of his car.BUZZ is beyond, at wheel of his. Both boys are gunning their engines, listening critically. JIM lets his idle.

JUDY, GOON and group. 

They watch in silent anticipation.

PLATO starts away from them.

Traveling shot. PLATO hurrying away from the group. 

He stops, looking off.

JIM and BUZZ. 

PLATO in distance.

 BUZZ

 Better try the doors. Jump out.

JIM opens his door.

BUZZ

 No--quick, man! You got to break quick.

JIM shuts his door and tries again. So does BUZZ. Then both boys walk forward to The Edge. Neither says a word.

BUZZ puts his hand on JIM's shoulder.

High angle. The edge of the bluff (process). JIM and BUZZ are directly below us. Under them the plateau falls steeply away in a sheer drop of a hundred feet to the ocean below.

Two shot. JIM and BUZZ. JIM is staring below. He is beginning to perspire. He lights a cigarette. Without taking his hand from JIM's shoulder, BUZZ borrows the cigarette from his lips, takes a drag and hands it back.

JIM takes another puff then tosses it into The Abyss.

 BUZZ

 (quietly)

 This is The Edge, boy. 
This is The End.

JIM

Yeah.

BUZZ

 I like you, you know?

JIM

 Buzz? What are we doing this for?

BUZZ 
(still quiet)

 We got to do something. 
Don't we?

David Foster Wallace - The Problem with Irony 

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal”. To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

This was further examined on the blog Fiction Advocate by Mike Moats:

The theory is this: Infinite Jest is Wallace’s attempt to both manifest and dramatize a revolutionary fiction style that he called for in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” The style is one in which a new sincerity will overturn the ironic detachment that hollowed out contemporary fiction towards the end of the 20th century. Wallace was trying to write an antidote to the cynicism that had pervaded and saddened so much of American culture in his lifetime. He was trying to create an entertainment that would get us talking again.

"Cultural critics love hypothesizing about hipsters. And certainly hipsters make for useful lab rats if you're interested in the culture of young, gentrifying, trendy, affluent, and white college graduates. But it's easy to let this hypothesizing go too far, and you get into trouble when you try to charge hipsters with representing the "ethos of our age." They're just kids making their way from young adulthood to the rest of their lives.

Yet that's exactly what Princeton professor Christy Wampole does in her recent New York Times op-ed, titled "How to Live Without Irony." She tells us, with disconcerting certitude, that irony is the ethos of our era, and she knows because, I mean, just look at those hipsters with their ironic mustaches, record players, and trombones, right?

If hipsters aren't convincing enough, Wampole offers a second proof that we live in the "age of Deep Irony": advertisements. Not a specific advertisement, mind you, but, she writes, "an ad that calls itself an ad, makes fun of its own format, and attempts to lure its target market to laugh at and with it." You know, that one. That's irony, she says, and because she's raised the specter of an unidentified advertisement, along with the unidentified hipsters, we're supposed to believe that the overwhelming ethos of our time is irony.

But you can't determine the ethos of an entire age by looking at a sub-sub-sub-sub-culture."

“ What is The New Sincerity? 

Think of it as irony and sincerity combined like Voltron, to form a new movement of astonishing power. 

Or think of it as the absence of irony and sincerity, where less is (obviously) more. 

If those strain the brain, just think of Evel Knievel. Let’s be frank. 

There’s no way to appreciate Evel Knievel literally. 

Evel is the kind of man who defies even fiction, because the reality is too over the top. 

Here is a man in a red-white-and-blue leather jumpsuit, driving some kind of rocket car. 

A man who achieved fame and fortune jumping over things. 

Here is a real man who feels at home as Spidey on the cover of a comic book. 

Simply put, Evel Knievel boggles the mind. 

But by the same token, he isn’t to be taken ironically, either. 

The fact of the matter is that Evel is, in a word, awesome. ... 

Our greeting: 

A double thumbs-up. 

Our credo: 

“Be More Awesome”. 

Our lifestyle: 

“Maximum Fun”. 

Throw caution to the wind, friend, and live The New Sincerity.

Lord — These Affairs are Hard on The Heart

“Yes, You Buy Me Many Things.  Thank You.”

The evening before the test, someone recalled “the frogs had gathered in a little pond by the camp and copulated and squawked all night long.” 

Oppenheimer chain smoked nervously and sat quietly reading the French poet Baudelaire:

Seductive twilight, the criminal’s friend Silent like a wolf

The sky is closing down

A dark cloth drawn across an alcove

Where the impatient man changes into a beast of prey

At 5:10, the countdown began at zero minus twenty minutes. 

As loudspeakers ticked off the time at five minute intervals, Oppenheimer wandered in and out of the control bunker, glancing up at the sky. 

At the two minute mark, he was heard to say to himself,

“Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.” 

Minus one minute... Minus fifty-five seconds...

Ella Oppenheimer was “very delicate,” a friend remembered, with an air of sadness about her. 

Robert was precociously brilliant, and both parents were protective of his uncommon gifts. 

Frail, frequently sick, 

he was attended to by servants, driven everywhere. 

He rarely played with other children.

Priscilla McMillan, writer: 

He wasn’t mischievous. 

He was too brilliant to be just one of the children. 

But his parents treasured him; 

treated him like a little jewel. 

And he just skipped Being a Boy.

“My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that The World

 is full of cruel and bitter things,”

 Oppenheimer said. 

“It gave me no normal, healthy way to be a bastard.” 

Sometime around the age of five, Robert’s grandfather gave him a small collection of minerals. 

“From then on,” he said, 

“I became, in a completely childish way, an ardent mineral collector. 

But it began to be also a bit of a Scientist’s interest, a fascination with crystals.”

Martin Sherwin,

Historian: 

He wrote to the New York Mineralogical Society on a typewriter. 

They were so impressed with what he had to say that, of course, thinking he was an adult, they invited him to give a lecture, and little Robert, at age 10 or 11, shows up at the New York Mineralogical Society, and has to stand on a box in order to see over the lectern to give this lecture. 

That is NOT a normal, 

average childhood.

Narrator: 

Eight years separated Robert from his brother Frank, 

too many for companionship. 

Robert was a loner. 

And at New York’s Ethical Culture school, he inhabited his own rarefied world, more comfortable with his teachers than with the other students, who nicknamed him “Booby” Oppenheimer. 

To protect himself, he relied on his preternatural brilliance and grew aloof and arrogant.

 Priscilla McMillan, writer: He didn’t grow up. He studied a great deal, which shielded him from the world. 

And the emotional side of him didn’t catch up until much later.

Narrator: 

Oppenheimer graduated high school valedictorian 

and then conquered Harvard. 

He studied chemistry, physics, calculus; English and French literature; Western, Chinese and Hindu philosophy; 

He even found time to write stories and poems.

Richard Rhodes, writer: 

He described it as being like The Huns invading Rome, 

by which he meant he was going to swallow up 

Every bit of Culture and Art and Science 

that he could possibly do.

Martin Sherwin, Historian: 

Harvard’s an environment in which 

The Intellectual Life is a rich feast, 

But the Social Life is a desert.

Narrator: 

In all his years at Harvard, 

he never had a date. 

He remained immature, uncertain, 

easily bewildered in social situations. 

One friend remembered 

“bouts of melancholy, 

and deep, deep depressions.” 

"In the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence," he said later, 

“I hardly took an action, hardly did anything that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong. 

My feeling about myself was always one of extreme discontent.” 

His doubts about himself came clear in his poems:

The dawn invests our substance

With desire

And the slow light betrays us,

And our wistfulness...

We find ourselves again 

Each in his separate prison 

Ready, hopeless

For negotiation 

With other men.