Steeply's father and M*A*S*H (pp. 640–641)
Thursdays the jokes and cuteness stopped—him all hunched in front of the set, barely even eating from his tray. And every night late at night, for the nightly hour, the old man too wide awake, and hunched over weirdly, head out, as if pulled toward the screen.
Context
The posture is the diagnosis. What begins as a cute habit becomes a body bent toward a screen "as if pulled," head thrust out, barely eating, the man drawn physically forward into the light the way iron leans toward a magnet — and Marathe answers, "I too have seen this posture of viewing," recognizing it across cultures and technologies. It is pleasure-death made visible as a shape the spine assumes: the viewer stops feeding himself because the screen has become the feed. The Entertainment's victims will end in the same attitude, only faster and without the tray.