Pages 395–399
Still Interdependence Day, still the gala: Hal in his stern preacher's hat, mouth full of baklava, watching Mario's film — but these pages happen inside his head, a free-indirect drift through his late father's "audience-obsessed" middle period. Two films get full retellings: The Medusa v. The Odalisque, a filmed fake stage-duel between two beings lethal to look at, and The Joke, the most hated Incandenza film, in which theater patrons pay to watch only themselves. Nothing moves in the room; everything moves in the filmography.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Kodiak Wintergreen / Spiru-Tein (p. 395) — real dip brand and real protein-shake powder; Hal's spittoon rig.
- Bob Hope (p. 395) — the running slang for marijuana, in play since the pp. 49–54 section; hence "the Hope-smoker's ever-beckoning siren," sucrose.
- the "carnival of eyeballs" one (p. 396) — endnote 154 names the film Hal can't bear to think about; Joelle's thoughts reached for the same title on p. 222.
- Medusa (p. 396) — real myth: the Gorgon whose direct sight petrifies; Perseus managed her by mirror.
- odalisque (p. 396) — real word: a harem concubine, a classic subject of French painting.
- Ford's Theatre (p. 396) — the real Washington playhouse where Lincoln was shot; the playlet's fake venue.
After you read: three things
1. The opener is clinical, and it's about Hal. "Like most young people genetically hard-wired for a secret drug problem, Hal Incandenza also has severe compulsion-issues around nicotine and sugar" (p. 395) — plus the new datum that sugar beyond a certain dose now brings "odd and unpleasant emotional states." A day after he smoked in public without deciding to (p. 332), the narrator is quietly filing him under a category.
2. Every film described is about watching being fatal. The Odalisque is beauty so total that sight of her turns viewers to gems — lethal beauty again, the same force p. 290 called the Actaeon Complex — and the playlet's on-stage audience petrifies row by row into "an audience of varicolored stone" (p. 397), while The Joke's patrons rage at screens showing "row after row of itself staring back at it" (p. 398). You have spent a night on a Tucson ledge hearing what this man's alleged last film does to its viewers; here he is, years earlier, circling that exact idea as farce. The scene never says so; the rhyme is yours.
3. The father arrives only by relay. JOI's one aesthetic confession — that he loved The Joke being "so publicly static and simple-minded and dumb," the defending critics "dead wrong, as usual" (p. 399) — reaches Hal as Mario said Lyle said Incandenza had confessed. Three links of chain to touch his own father's mind; and the reverie dead-ends at Found Drama, the genre audiences never even got to hate, "for a-priori reasons" — closing the loop with pp. 375–76.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.