Rodney Tine's samizdat dossier (pp. 549–550)
the thing apparently opens with an engaging and high-quality cinematic shot of a veiled woman going through a large building’s revolving doors and catching a glimpse of someone else in the revolving doors, somebody the sight of whom makes her veil billow, before the subject’s mental and spiritual energies abruptly declined to a point where even near-lethal voltages through the electrodes couldn’t divert his attention from the Entertainment.
Context
The only glimpse we get of the samizdat's actual content, wrung from a sociopath under electrodes before he too is lost. The Entertainment opens on a veiled woman in revolving doors — Joelle, its star — catching sight of someone whose face makes her veil billow, and that is as far as any test subject gets before "even near-lethal voltages through the electrodes couldn't divert his attention." The mundane content (a woman, a doorway) against the total capture is the mystery the book preserves: whatever the lethal charm is, it isn't spectacle in the ordinary sense, not violence or shock, but something in the quality of the looking itself. And the revolving door — the perpetual return, entrance-that-is-exit — is the visual rhyme for the recursion the thing induces, the viewer caught going around and around, unable to step out.