Joelle cleans, remembers the Work (pp. 742–743)

On the fifth or sixth reviewing of the four-minute Bernini shot, Joelle uncovers JOI's covert, almost moral thesis: the whole film is trapped inside one alcoholic's swelling head until the statue of the orgasmic nun fills the screen and lets him, for four minutes, escape himself. "Self-forgetting as the Grail," she calls it — the transcendence of the cage of one's own point of view, offered by art rather than by the bottle (which only swells the head further). This is the anti-Entertainment's positive pole, and it's the seam where JOI's art and his lethal cartridge meet: both promise release from the unbearable self, but the film aims for a mediated, moral self-forgetting through beauty, while the Entertainment will deliver the same escape as a fatal short-circuit. The Grail and the poison are the same wish, sought two ways.