Grotesques as figurants; violence that means something — the anti-spectacle aesthetic

echoes

Early text: "the regular deployment of grotesques as figurants" [sec. 10]; "Lynch’s violence always tries to mean something" [sec. 9], against Hollywood violence that has "lost the ability to refer to anything but itself" [sec. 9]; "Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear." [sec. 9a — the first 9a, "a better way to put what i just tried to say"].
IJ echo: IJ's figurant-design motif — the background/figurant people who populate a scene without mattering (Hal's fear of being a figurant; the television-set figurant riff). Wallace names the exact device ("grotesques as figurants") as a Lynch signature. And the meaning-over-spectacle ethic — violence/image that refers vs. self-referential spectacle-detritus — is the novel's own anti-entertainment aesthetic (the samizdat as pure affect that refers to nothing but its own pleasure; JOI's anti-confluential films that resist consumption).
Weight: shared-preoccupation