the Blood Sister communal viewing
All the littler kids are consummate spectators and are sucked immediately into Blood Sister’s unfolding narrative, and the older females seem to take some kind of psychic cue from the little boys and subside, too, and watch, until after a while Hal’s the only person in the room who isn’t 100% absorbed.
Context
The room performs the theme in miniature. The little kids are "consummate spectators," sucked in the instant the narrative starts; the older girls catch the cue and "subside" into watching too; within minutes the whole gathered room is 100% absorbed — a communal surrender to the screen, spectation spreading through a crowd like a settling. Only Hal, the maker's son, half-withdrawn over his spit-cup, stays outside the absorption, watching the watchers instead of the film. The set-piece is the audience shown as an organism that collectively goes under, and the single unabsorbed figure is what makes the going-under visible.