The Failed Entertainments

essay

The eight-page hoax

Endnote 24 is a complete works catalogue for a filmmaker who never lived, written by archivists who never existed, about films that — in the cases that matter most — were never finished or never seen. It runs some four and a half thousand words in the back of the book, styled without a wink as a piece of dry reference scholarship: an anonymous compiling "we", a stated ordering principle, release states in small caps for almost every title, and a short bibliography of invented film journals in its own sub-footnotes. The apparatus opens by apologizing for its own incompleteness — "The following listing is as complete as we are able to make it" (scene n024) — and closes the preamble by conceding that "the list's order and completeness are, at this point in time, not definitive" (scene n024). Between those two hedges it does the impossible thing a real filmography cannot: it manufactures the very uncertainty it pretends to be reducing.

The form is the first joke. James Incandenza's output is sorted into a taxonomy so exhaustive it collapses into nonsense — "industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic noncommercial" and on through "nondramatic commercial" and "dramatic commercial works" (scene n024) — and the catalogue supplies a legend for its own abbreviations, having first filed among its "archival challenges" the fact that "for conceptual reasons, Incandenza eschewed both L. of C. registration and formal dating until the advent of Subsidized Time" (scene n024). The sub-footnotes cite a fake secondary literature that is funnier than the films: a seventy-four-page journal study of "Exemplary Works of the Anticonfluential Après Garde" (scene n024), and, best of all, a hostile essay whose title is the whole critical case against Incandenza compressed to one exasperated question — "Has James O. Incandenza Ever Even Once Produced One Genuinely Original or Unappropriated or Nonderivative Thing?" (scene n024). The apparatus even makes a running joke of its own scholarship, gravely reporting that "[w]ith the possible exception of Cage III—Free Show, Incandenza's Cage series bears no discernible relation to Sidney Peterson's 1947 classic" (scene n024) — a denial that concedes its exception up front and plants the very connection it denies (the real Peterson film, and the whole optics-and-cages reading, belong to film-optics). That the most argued-over object in the novel arrives dressed as a reference desk is the point the-endnotes takes up as apparatus; this essay reads the catalogue itself — the career it narrates, and the way that career is the novel in miniature.

A taxonomy of refusals

Read in order, the filmography is less a body of work than a catalogue of ways for a film to refuse the person watching it. Incandenza's designation UNRELEASED — reserved, the preamble says, "for those works which never saw distribution and are now publicly unavailable or lost" (scene n024) — recurs until it reads as an aesthetic rather than an accident. The refusals are systematic, and they escalate.

The mildest is anti-realism: the earliest Cage is a thirty-second "Soliloquized parody" of a shampoo ad "utilizing four convex mirrors, two planar mirrors, and one actress" (scene n024), a film that turns its whole apparatus on the viewer's eye. From there the hostility organizes into a movement. Incandenza's "anti-confluential" period — the school the novel glosses as a stubborn refusal of narrative lines to converge (endnote 61) — produces films that punish attention as a method, literalizing the artist's love-hate hostility to an audience Wallace was diagnosing in himself while he drafted the book (mccaffery-1993-interview, via film-optics). The Joke films its own audience with two cameras and projects the result back, "the theater audience watching itself watch itself get the obvious 'joke' and become increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable and hostile" (scene n024), a work one fictional critic credits with "unwittingly sounding the death-knell of post-poststructural film in terms of sheer annoyance" (scene n024). Cage III—Free Show literalizes the same transaction as horror: at a carnival sideshow the spectators watch degradations so compelling that "the spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs" (scene n024). The Medusa v. the Odalisque stages it as petrifaction — "Mobile holograms of two visually lethal mythologic females duel with reflective surfaces on-stage while a live crowd of spectators turns to stone" (scene n024). A film that turns its audience to stone, a film that turns its audience to eyeballs, a film that shows its audience only itself: the catalogue is rehearsing, over and over, the fantasy of a work that captures the eye completely.

The purest refusal has no film at all. The Found Drama entries appear as bare titles followed by the deadpan verdict "conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED" (scene n024) — art defined so that it can never be made, only described. This is the same high-conceptual practice the preamble flags in its own fine print: certain projects, it notes, "required that they be titled and subjected to critique but never filmed, making their status as film subject to controversy" (scene n024). The catalogue thus contains works that exist only as their own listing — objects whose sole material trace is the archival document you are reading. The refusal of the audience has become a refusal of the medium, and the endnote is the only place the "film" was ever going to live.

Every film a rehearsal

Set the audience-capture films beside the domestic ones and the filmography starts to read as a single obsessive project approached from forty angles. Three figures recur until they fuse. The first is the immobilized watcher — the eyeball-spectators, the petrified crowd, the audience that cannot look away — who is the lethal cartridge's victim before the lethal cartridge is made. The second is Death as a beautiful woman: Möbius Strips has a physicist who "conceives of Death as a lethally beautiful woman" (scene n024); in Low-Temperature Civics a CEO father "has an ecstatic encounter with Death" and "becomes irreversibly catatonic" (scene n024) — Death played by "Madame Psychosis", the credit that will sit atop the last film's entry; and the sideshow of Cage III is presided over by "The figure of Death (Heath)" (scene n024). That this Death is also a mother is testimony from elsewhere in the novel (scene 159), not the catalogue's own text; the catalogue's counterweight is Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell, whose "alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman" (scene n024) is obsessed with Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa — the one image in the whole oeuvre where the optics open outward into self-forgetting rather than inward into capture (the Bernini reading is film-optics's). The woman the last film is said to assemble from these pieces — beautiful, lethal, maternal, inclined over a crib's-eye lens — is an account given elsewhere (scene 159, scene 178); what the catalogue shows is every part machined years early.

The third recurring figure is a father who cannot reach a son, and the filmography is thick with him. Widower sends "a cocaine-addicted father (Watt)" leading "his son (Reat) around their desert property immolating poisonous spiders" (scene n024) — the Tucson boyhood restaged as parody. As of Yore is the same wound without the comedy: "A middle-aged tennis instructor, preparing to instruct his son in tennis, becomes intoxicated in the family's garage and subjects his son to a rambling monologue while the son weeps and perspires" (scene n024). And It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him fictionalizes the exact scene the novel gives us straight, a father who "poses as a 'professional conversationalist' in order to draw the boy out" (scene n024) from a son he believes is pretending to be mute. These are the same silences that run through the Incandenza line — the fathers who cannot hear their sons, worked out in fathers-sons. The catalogue lets Incandenza film his own family repeatedly, always as someone else's; it is the coded-autobiography question (film-optics owns the friction) with its evidence spread across thirty titles.

Under all of it runs the figurant — the silent background player the novel makes its emblem of the unwatched life. The films that hand their extras real voices, and the wraith's later theory of why that mattered, are entertainment-and-the-self's and ghosts-wraiths's to develop; what the filmography adds is that the concern was operational long before it was confessed, encoded in the crowds and background figures of film after film. Even the incidental entries carry the freight: Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat, in which "a harried commuter is mistaken for Christ by a child he knocks over" (scene n024), is a small parable of a man taken for something he is not by a child he has hurt — which is, at a slant, the whole father-and-son plot of the book.

The one that works

The filmography's cruelty makes its one exception legible. The ONANtiad is listed as a failure in its maker's own preferred idiom — an "Oblique, obsessive, and not very funny claymation love triangle" (scene n024) played against the birth of the continent's reconfiguration. In the body of the novel that same unwatchable political parody becomes the raw material for Mario's puppet film, a homemade entertainment that the school actually gathers to love (scene 081). Mario remakes his father's refusal as a gift — the noncommercial, communal work the criticism reads as the novel's single successful entertainment, the counter to the whole audience-hostile oeuvre (dfw-in-context-cambridge-2022, via film-optics; the brothers are hal-mario). Entertainment that connects without capturing turns out to be possible; it is simply not something the father could make.

Incandenza knew it, and filmed that too. Insubstantial Country stars his recurring lead as "An unpopular après-garde filmmaker (Watt)" who "either suffers a temporal lobe seizure and becomes mute or else is the victim of everyone else's delusion" (scene n024) that he has gone mute — the auteur's self-portrait as the one figure in his own films who has become a figurant, silenced or imagined silent, indistinguishable from the son he cannot reach. The maker's diagnosis and the son's affliction have collapsed into one entry.

The last film

Threaded through the catalogue, easy to miss on a first pass, is a second filmography inside it: five works all titled Infinite Jest, numbered I through V, marking the maker's entire career as a single unfinished attempt. The first is "Incandenza's unfinished and unseen first attempt at commercial entertainment" (scene n024); the middle entries are remakes of remakes; the fourth is an "Unfinished, unseen attempt at completion of Infinite Jest (III)." (scene n024). The refrain — unfinished, unseen — follows the title through the catalogue, and by the fifth entry it has become the subject. The title's own franchise is a record of a man trying and failing to make one entertaining thing, five times, across the length of his life.

The last entry is where the scholarly form and the plot's central hole become the same object. Infinite Jest (V?) — the question mark is the apparatus's own — is described as "Incandenza's last film, Incandenza's death occurring during its post-production. Most archival authorities list as unfinished, unseen." (scene n024). The document then stages a controversy among its own invented scholars: two essays call the film "extraordinary" and "far and away" its maker's "most entertaining and compelling work" (scene n024); West Coast archivists, lacking a copy, infer its very film gauge from allusions to "radical experiments in viewers' optical perspective and context" (scene n024); and the whole entry ends in bibliographic vapor, its "Master cartridge either destroyed or vaulted sui testator" (scene n024). The most consequential film in the novel — the one whose existence the entire back half hunts — is here, and it is nothing but an argument between archivists about whether it can be said to exist.

That vapor is engineered, and it repays careful weighing. The reading that the filmography is Incandenza's coded autobiography aimed at his family is held strained — there is no page where anyone composes the encoding or decodes it — while the plainer fact that the catalogue is a composed self-reference, a life told in film titles, stands open, anchored in exactly these entries: the five Infinite Jests, Widower, the terminal Madame Psychosis credit (film-optics carries the fuller case). The last film fractures the same way. The novel offers three irreconcilable accounts of what Infinite Jest (V?) was — an ironic joke that was never lethal, a verifiably lethal weapon, and a dying father's last attempt to reach the son he saw as mute and be forgiven — and never squares them against each other on the page; the maker's suicide motive is left affirmatively open, its best-anchored candidate (the film as a failed father-son channel) graded open and the die-to-return-as-a-wraith version strained (ghosts-wraiths, the-ending). What the archive will commit to is narrow and telling: as a matter of purpose, the reading that the film was made first to communicate — a message before a weapon — is favored, its deployment as a weapon read as a downstream hijack by other hands (the lethality itself was in the design from the start). The deferral is not a gap in the record; it is the record's design, which is aesthetics-of-withholding's subject.

So the filmography is the novel in miniature not by analogy but by construction. It is a difficult object bound into the back of a difficult book; it makes the reader do archival work for a payoff kept permanently uncertain; it is a father's attempt to say everything about himself in a form his family will have to decode; and at its center sits an entertainment that may be a masterpiece, a murder weapon, or a wish, listed as unfinished, unseen. Endnote 24 is the book's apology, its confession, and its central withheld object, filed under the one heading that fits all of Incandenza's real work and the novel that contains it: a failed entertainment.

Sources

The filmography itself — endnote 24 (scene n024): the taxonomy and archival preamble, the anticonfluential and Found Drama refusals, the Cage / Joke / Medusa / Cage III audience-capture films, the paternal films (Widower, As of Yore, It Was a Great Marvel), Wave Bye-Bye, the Death films (Möbius Strips, Low-Temperature Civics, Cage III), Pre-Nuptial Agreement, Insubstantial Country, The ONANtiad, and the five Infinite Jest entries. Every quotation above is from this endnote.
film-optics — sibling essay owning film, lenses, and optics as theme: the anticonfluential aesthetic, the Bernini self-forgetting shot, the coded-autobiography friction, the samizdat's optical mechanics, the real Peterson Cage, and the wraith-as-camera.
the-endnotes — the apparatus argument: the filmography as skeleton key and the flipping that makes the reader enact the book's subject.
entertainment-and-the-self — the samizdat as diagnosis made literal; the figurant as the emblem of passive spectation.
ghosts-wraiths — the dead father who reaches his son only after death; the figurant / radical-realism confession behind the last film.
aesthetics-of-withholding — the deferral of the Entertainment's contents as designed hole, not defect.
fathers-sons / hal-mario — the Incandenza silences the paternal films restage; Mario's puppet film as the entertainment that connects.
dfw-in-context-cambridge-2022 — the gift-versus-weapon reading and Mario's O.N.A.N.tiad puppet show as the novel's one successful entertainment.
mccaffery-1993-interview — Wallace's pre-novel account of art-as-seduction and the artist's love-hate hostility to an audience; the pressure behind the audience-hostile films.