entertainment as isolated "sensuous payoff" strung on "flat, dead" narrative — the mechanism the Entertainment…
echoes
From: F/X Porn
- Early text: The spectacle film is "half a dozen or so isolated,
spectacular scenes" of "riveting, sensuous payoff" "strung together via another
sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative";
its effects must be "stunning enough to distract us from the formulaic void at
the story's center". [¶2, ¶3, ¶12] The porn analogy makes the point: entertainment
reduced to pure repeatable stimulus. [¶2]
- IJ echo: The samizdat / the Entertainment as pure lethal pleasure — a
cartridge whose viewers want only the payoff, over and over, unto death (the
medical attaché's fatal viewing, scene 007, 029). Wallace's porn-spectacle
model is the real-cinema asymptote the novel pushes past into lethality.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation