Pages 140–142
Another document: a seventh-grade essay by Hal, reproduced whole under an all-caps editorial headnote — "HAL INCANDENZA'S FIRST EXTANT WRITTEN COMMENT ON ANYTHING EVEN REMOTELY FILMIC," submitted for Mr. Ogilvie's required Introduction to Entertainment Studies at E.T.A., dated 21 February in the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken. The essay compares two real American cop shows and their two kinds of hero. The headnote is the scene's only narrator; everything else is the twelve-year-old's own prose.
Terms, in order of appearance
- "Hawaii Five-0" / Chief Steve McGarrett (p. 140) — real CBS police drama, 1968–80; Jack Lord's jut-jawed lead.
- "Hill Street Blues" / Captain Frank Furillo (p. 140) — real NBC ensemble precinct drama of the 1980s.
- B.S. 1970s (p. 140) — the pre-subsidized dating again; endnote 33 decoded the abbreviation back on p. 81.
- Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken (p. 140) — a new subsidized year; Perdue is the real poultry giant.
- Viz. (p. 141) — Latin videlicet: namely.
- Mirandized (p. 141) — read one's Miranda rights on arrest.
- retrograde amines (p. 142) — amines: the molecule class many neurotransmitters belong to; the phrase is sincere seventh-grade bravado with real chemistry inside.
After you read: three things
1. The headnote carries two clocks and a grade — take all three. The essay is dated "@ four years after the demise of broadcast television" (so that's when TV died) and "one year after Dr. James O. Incandenza passed from this life" — the plainest dating of the father's death the book has yet given. And it "receiv[ed] just a B/B+" because the concluding paragraph was, per Ogilvie, neither set up by the essay's body nor supported "by anything more than subjective intuition and rhetorical flourish." The book hands you the grading rubric before you read the conclusion; decide for yourself.
2. The argument itself is genuinely good — and it's optics. Hero of action: one case, camera never off him, "there is no mystery, there is only Steve McGarrett." Hero of reaction: eleven cluttered cases, "a virtuoso of triage and compromise and administration," lonely inside the herd, "his lonely face as placid under pressure as a cow's face." The proof runs through camera grammar — steady tripodic close-up "reminiscent of romantic portraiture" versus the frenetic moving pan. A twelve-year-old thinking in lens terms, one year after his optics-scientist father's death.
3. Then the graded-down paragraph. "We await, I predict, the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras." Hold that against what you've already read: the book opened (pp. 3–17) with this same author, years older, sitting rigid and silent in an admissions office until strong men carry him away — and you've watched a roomful of viewers sit "very still and attentive" in front of a cartridge (p. 87). The essay's flourish sounds a lot like both; the essay, of course, knows neither.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.