screaming for help and heard as a showtune — "To be screaming that I’m screaming…" · S1
To be screaming that I’m screaming for help instead of singing a show-tune and to have the wardens and doctors gathered around snapping their fingers and tapping their feet.
Context
Hal's DMZ nightmare is the theme's purest single image: an all-out cry for help received by everyone as a jaunty performance, the wardens snapping along to what is in fact a person screaming that he is screaming for help. It is the admissions-room grimace (001) and the drowning-goat similes (003) refined to their essence — output so completely inverted en route that agony arrives as entertainment — and the recursion ("screaming that I'm screaming for help") is the trap sprung twice: even the meta-plea to be understood as pleading is metabolized as more of the show.