Infinite jest scene,reborn as a rock video

That fixation never fully subsided,and Schur has recently been reimmersing himself in Infinite Jest,Wallace’s 1996 opus about a near future of alienation,drug rehabilitation and calendar years sponsored by corporations. His literary mania has been put to productive use in a new music video that Schur directed for the Decemberists,a rock band,set to its track Calamity Song.

It is a project that combines Schur’s favourite book and favourite band. The video,which made its online debut on Monday,depicts the playing of Eschaton ,a game invented by Wallace that he describes about 325 pages into Infinite Jest. Adolescents from a New England tennis academy are seen ritualistically serving balls on a court onto which a map of the world has been superimposed. The balls,which represent five-megaton nuclear warheads,are aimed at objects labelled as military targets—power plants,missile installations—while a lone child oversees the game from a nearby computer terminal.

Colin Meloy,the Decemberists’ frontman,who after reading Infinite Jest,was drawn to the Eschaton sequence as he thought of a video concept. Yet when he pitched the idea to his executives at Capitol Records and prospective directors,Meloy said,“A lot of people were like,‘I have no idea how you could turn this into a music video.’” Enter Schur,35,who had never directed a music video before,but attended Harvard with the brother of Meloy’s band’s manager and had more than a little familiarity with the author (who hanged himself three years ago at 46). Not long after the publication of Infinite Jest,Schur persuaded the attention-shy Wallace to come to Cambridge and receive an award from The Harvard Lampoon,the collegiate humour magazine.

To create the Calamity Song video,which was filmed over a rainy July weekend in Portland before the heavy lifting began on the new Parks and Recreation season,Schur drew upon the volunteer support of his TV colleagues,including his show’s costumes,props and graphics departments.

Seeing even a portion of the beloved novel brought to life was “like a weird dream fugue,” he said,though he reluctantly accepted that his video could not end as the passage from Infinite Jest does,with a child’s having his head crashed into a computer monitor. “They’re all flat screens now,and you can’t put your head through a flat screen,” he said.