Lenses, cameras & being-watched

This motif holds JOI's optics and the book's spectation economy — who watches, through what glass, at what cost. It runs from the attaché serial's lethal viewing "configured for a recursive loop" through the arc of Incandenza's career (weapons lenses to fusion to cinema) and his stated filmic credo, "it's a lot easier to fix something if you can see it" (p. 54) — a faith the unseeable Entertainment inverts. Optics keep leaking into perception: rain that "blurs things like Jim had designed his neonatal lens to blur things," snowfall likened to "the lens Jim used to film Infinite Jest," Jim watching Mario's birth "in a light like he was Vermeer." The economy of being-watched returns as the R.A.S.U. and the serve "isolated into frames like a film," the "Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear" gambit, and finally the film's own grammar — "the crib's-eye wobble, the leaning mother" (pp. 938-940). The lens is never neutral here: to be filmed is to be endangered.