Smiley faces & forced smiles
The have-a-nice-day face is the novel's tracer dye for lethal Entertainment — a cheerful rictus that keeps turning up as a warning. It is present in the very first pages as a "fixed smile"... "with teeth," and it brands the deadly cartridge, whose case carries a "HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!" smiley and a second embossed smiley "where registration codes should be." From there the emblem migrates onto Happy Slippers, onto the "smily-face-masked Sergeant at Arms" and the "black and yellow smily-face" projected on Joelle's veil ("and Joelle is in that film"), and onto the A.F.R. raiders' loot. The image also names the horror of the fixed grin: the attaché's wife finds "the rictus of a face... very positive, ecstatic, even," Pat's stroke-rictus is "analogous to the smiley face on the Infinite Jest cartridges," and Gately's warning skull "looks more like a plain old smiley-face," making Demerol-refusal an Entertainment-refusal. Wherever the samizdat surfaces, the smiley follows — the danger sign that looks like happiness.
Echoes
- Scene 001: hal admissions interview
- Scene 007: attache receives cartridge
- Scene 019: face in the floor nightmare
- Scene 024: kate gompert psych ward
- Scene 025: attache wife watches
- Scene 027: tiny ewell to ennet
- Scene 039: lyle weight room guru
- Scene 057: dmz show and tell
- Scene 059: subsidized time chronology
- Scene 071: mario birth defects
- Scene 074: white flag aa meeting
- Scene 091: fresno quik subsidized time
- Scene 095: gately staff the removal
- Scene 097: aventura antitoi afr raid
- Scene 104: gately joelle veil uhid
- Scene 113: orin swiss hand model
- Scene 120: gately shot nucks
- Scene 128: steeply bain correspondence
- Scene 145: afr antitoi search
- Scene 157: hal confession mario
- Scene 169: gately dream md temptation