Pleasure used as a drug that numbs and reduces the self — the Entertainment's anesthetic function

echoes

Early text: (DFW quoting David Mura, endorsed) "At the essence of pornography is the image of flesh used as a drug, a way of numbing psychic pain"; "The addict to pornography desires to be blinded, to live in a dream"; "In engaging in such elimination the viewer reduces himself. He becomes stupid."; ratified by DFW's own observation of "the eerie similarity between the eyes of males in strip clubs or stroke parlors and the eyes of people in their fifth hour of pumping silver dollars into the slot machines" (the raw continues: "of the Sands’ casino"). [the Mura/"masculists" passage] [e-text]
IJ echo: The samizdat/Entertainment as the limit-case — an engineered pleasure so total it blinds, stupefies, and dissolves the will of its viewer (the catatonic watchers, the Medical Attaché, the entertainment-casualties). The porn essay states, as consumer-culture reportage, the anesthetic function IJ's film performs literally and lethally: pleasure as a drug that numbs psychic pain until the viewer "reduces himself."
Weight: restatement (oeuvre-scoped)